[Paul Terry]

Well, I dunno if you still are looking for answers …

But, I am one who picked up a new iMac specifically for production use even after reading all the doom re: io on the iMac.

Whether you’d be happy i think depends …

So far I’m very happy, especially when it comes to looking at my wallet. I’m in the middle of posting a project shot on 1080i hdv and transcoded to 24p Pro Res. No hitches so far.

The rendering speed is great. The screen is great. The keyboard’s a little funky (the small one) but I’m getting used to it. The magic mouse is much better than I expected and I’m actually using it.

I ordered it with 8gig ram in the 2gb chip config, bc I figured it was insane to pay Apple what they wanted for 4gb modules. 8 seems fine, though the plan is to pickup 16gb shortly.

The trick I think is to know what you need for your workflow. I’m sure that a tricked out MacPro with cards and raids and tigers and bears would be a faster rendering machine. Like so many have pointed out.

But, I don’t cut with a stopwatch-wielding-charged-by-the-hour-producer on my shoulder.

Least not anymore. If it’s not my own work I’m cutting, then I’m working on a project basis. So the occasional short render wait is no problem.

Also, while I’ve seen mention of the ethernet ext. hd solutions, and which I’m on the lookout for, as of right now, everything’s humming along with an ext. fw drive.

The reality is, it’s a great machine. But, since it’s also got a high “toy value”, for some, it’s hard to take seriously. I used to be of a similar mind regarding gear. And way back when, the attitude made sense. That absolutely there was a huge difference in quality of video produced per dollar spent. Back when a cheap time base corrector meant your were really just getting a half resolution frame-synch that chewed the video together and spit it out in glorious red smeared mud.

But now? Not so. You can create whatever you can concept. And within some reasonable limits, no one could tell that you posted on a toy. Certainly no one is going to be able to tell that it was cut on an iMac instead of a Mac Pro. And, while a tricked out Mac Pro might’ve rendered it faster, as Albert E said time is relative. And the iMac is relatively fast enough for the differences to not matter.

If you have control of your own projects and workflow.

Reasonably, I’m not sure if I’d want to be editing by the hour with it. But, on the other hand, any of the desktop systems tend to eventually run into issues with “real-time”. That’s what keeps Aja making cards.

Truly, I think many of the naysayers re: the iMac are overly-inflating what are valid but not necessarily fatal “flaws” about the machine.

In my world, I’m working above the line as well as below. I take the project from the start, and mostly post it myself except for specialized tasks such as graphics that require a real artist.

So, to spend the extra thousands of dollars just so the machine can finish a bit faster doesn’t make sense to me. The iMac is plenty fast.

Orders of magnitude faster than my g5’s that’ve been kicking out b’cast spots for the last 5 years.

And a tricked out Mac Pro is dog-slow next to a CMX 1″.

Of course the speed all evaporates anyway once you start choking the new machine by cranking up the res and framerate. But what’s a new machine for if not to see how much it can eat before it chokes, eh?

Not sure if this ramble helps or not. But I’ve read a lot of posts from non-owners. So I thought I’d chime in as one who’s actually earning a living with one.

Also it keeps me from slogging, er logging all the footage I’m supposed to be doing. And, btw, that job is definitely no faster on a Mac Pro. Who cares about rendering, I want to log faster!!!

cheers,

pt

[Paul Terry]

[Norman Willis] “I had it on my wish-list to purchase Instant HD Advanced before Magic Bullet, so you just saved me from an unnecessary purchase!”

Well, I don’t want to steer you wrong. Instant HD is IN the Magic Bullet Suite, but I believe it’s available separately as well. Magic Bullet – the product – is now named “Frames” and is available separately as well as in the Magic Bullet Suite.

If you go to the Red Giant site … don’t remember the url offhand, just google Red Giant Magic Bullet … it might help clear things up.

The Magic Bullet products, except for Instant HD, were put together by some guys who jumped ship from Industrial Light and Magic, and formed The Orphanage with the main objective to produce feature-film-ish quality from small format digital video.

cheers,

PT

[Paul Terry]

Norman said: “Just to be clear, you like Instant HD and Instant HD Advanced more than you like Magic Bullet, and Topaz Enhance?

And if you get Instant HD Advanced, do you still need Instant HD, and/or Magic Bullet?”

Hi Norman, just ran across this, and well …

Instant HD and Instant HD Advanced part of the Magig Bullet Suite. Magic Bullet is also the name of a plugin which is now called Frames that deinterlaces DV footage and makes it more “film-like”. I have no experience with Topaz.

But, as Steve said, try out some tutorials, download the trials from Red Giant (the company that distributes Magic Bullet products).

Also, a good thing to do is to scratch your head a bit about your reasons for uprezzing footage. And whether you can’t shoot HD in the beginning.

Obviously I’m coming in late, so if I missed all the discussion about shooting in HD vs uprezzing … sorry.

I have used Instant HD, which I must say is a good product, produces good results fairly quickly. (Although “quickly” is a relative term, especially when discussing rendering times. 5 hours is “quick” compared to 2 days. 😉 )

Another aproach which I have used is to render out an image sequence of the footage you want to blow-up. Then run it through Photoshop in batch mode and use either the builtin image size functions, or use a plugin called Photozoom Pro. IMHO, the Photoshop method can produce superior results with a couple caveats. The render time is likely to run considerably longer, and sometimes when you process footage a frame at a time as a sequence, the images can change too much between frames and get rather busy.

Also, in all of this discussion about plugins and such, don’t forget to have fun while your head explodes. I remember walking into an edit suite right out of college, an analog-linear-tape online suite and was almost frozen between the desire to jump in an do something and the fear that I didn’t have any idea what “all those buttons did.”

Luckily, my add kicked in and I learned that if there’s a button, push it and find out.

Happy 09.

PT