Peter Dearmond
Forum Replies Created
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Thanks for the link. Very effective articles for Apple.
Of particular interest was the gear list for each of the companies: @radical.media just has “Mac,” which I assume means Mac Pro (tower). Electric Entertainment lists “iMac and MacBook Pro.” Knute Hake has a “27-inch iMac.” I wonder if this is another way Apple is getting our minds ready for end of the Mac Pro.
By the way, I’m a first-time poster on this forum, learning FCPX and liking it so far.
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Hi Matt,
I haven’t heard any official word, but I’ve been using Suite 2.1 with OS 10.7.3 with zero problems.
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It’s by far the easiest system to learn, IMHO. Download the free trial from Media 100’s website. There are tutorials there to help get you started.
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I’ve been running Suite 2.1 under OS 10.7.3 with no problems so far. But I agree with the other comments; it’s usually wise to wait for the official blessing from Media 100 before upgrading the OS. I’ve simply never had problems with previous upgrades, so I figured I’d go for it.
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Rest assured that many more are reading this thread with interest. I love my Media 100 and will continue using it, but like others I have concerns about both marketing and product development. Is this even a 64-bit app? Has it been rebuilt with Cocoa? Of greater concern is the dearth of plug-in development for Media 100. Look at ToolFarm, FXFactory and others (Boris!!!), and you’ll find nothing for Media 100 — it’s as if my favorite video program doesn’t exist. Yes, I know we have Red, but… no outside vendors apparently see a profit motive to develop plugins for Media 100. These are serious concerns. I would feel better if we could hear about future development plans from Boris.
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I forgot to add that with a Mac Pro tower you can have 64 GB of RAM.
But getting back to your question, Media 100 is software based, so you can do anything that the software allows you to do whether it’s on an iMac, a tower or a laptop. The difference is in speed and processing — in what hardware you buy and how you configure it.
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Technically, yes, in one of the available PCI-e slots of a Mac Pro tower you can install a GPU, a card dedicated to graphics processing that is particularly useful if you’re doing a lot of After Effects or 3D work. Thunderbolt is limited to four lanes of PCI-e bandwidth. A GPU will use all 16 lanes available in the PCI-e slot — again, this is for high-end, multiple-layered HD and 3D stuff.
The practical answer (I think) is that the current version of Thunderbolt can easily handle your RAID I/O needs as well as additional monitors. I would think that a future version of Thunderbolt will have increased “bandwidth” to handle high-end GPU needs as well.
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Hi Spencer,
Yes, the laptop is certainly powerful enough to run Media 100 Suite 2.1 (which you will love using). But unless your need is to do a lot of “in-the-field” editing, I would recommend an iMac over a MacBook pro. (Well, actually, I’d recommend a Mac Pro tower, but it sounds like you need a less expensive solution). Both the laptop and the iMac have Thunderbolt, but the advantage of the iMac is the much larger display than the laptop, and you can max out the RAM to 16 GB, whereas the laptop max is 8 GB. And yes, 8 GB is plenty, but that’s just me — I like to install as much RAM as I can. In either case I’d recommend the optional 7200 rpm internal drive over the 5400.
There are plenty of hardware enabled Thunderbolt RAID solutions out there.
As you may have heard, there’s a lot of speculation and rumor that Apple will discontinue their Mac Pro towers. I would hate to see this happen, but with Thunderbolt you can still put together a nice, usable system.
Sounds like you need to accommodate SD legacy stuff for a while, but you’ll love it when you finally go all digital. Good luck!
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I believe this problem was reported in April. Media 100 issued a 2.0.1 update and that seemed to fix it –at least, it fixed it for me. It’s on their download page: https://media100.com/support/downloads.php
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I’ve always used Keylight in AfterEffects and the results were very good. However, as an experiment I tried the new keyer in Motion 5, and found it to be much improved over Motion 4. The reason I mention it is that Motion 5 is just $49. So for chromakey work, I don’t think you’d have to pay the $$ for AE when you have options with Boris and, as of now, with Motion 5.