Mac Pro HD footage?

[CJGillies]

Ok so firstly would like to state that im not only new to these forums but in the near future i hope to be new to Mac platforms

At the moment im running a 3.4 Ghz AMD Phenom (black Ed) cpu with 16GB RAM and plenty HDD space and a 1GB Ati Radeon 5770 Graphics card.

Now i know that next year the MacPro will see a new model being released but i wont be able to wait for the beast to be unleashed unfortunately due to work coming in now that i think requires a MacPro in its current state over an iMac.

Now, my PC at the moment cannot run multicam with HD footage (Adobe Premiere Pro) without being very choppy/jumpy and was wondering if anyone new how a Mac Pro (12core version) would handle this?

the reason i decided on MacPro and not iMac was because i also need to render from Adobe After Effects with very labour intensive projects that strain the CPU and i was told that iMac cant handle 3D as well as a MacPro will be able to (open for discussion also )

Any advice/tips and knowledge on the way forward would be greatly received,

Thanks
CJ

 

[aarond12]

If you're going to use Adobe Premiere on the Mac, it will likely still be a poor experience. Now, if you go "all in" and use Final Cut Pro X, you're going to have a smooth-as-butter experience on even the iMac.

The Mac Pro is going to give you better overall rendering performance over an iMac, but there are two things to really consider: Price and the current Mac Pro is old technology. If price is an issue, the iMac Core i7 is a BEAST. Unless you're on the tightest of deadlines, most people will be able to use the iMac for 3D rendering.

The advantage of the Mac Pro is the easy ability to create RAID 0 volumes internally. This is nearly required when editing multicamera HD footage. (How many camera angles are we talking about?) I've done 4 (barely) on an iMac Core i7. The hard drive throughput was the limiting factor.

 

[CJGillies]

If you're going to use Adobe Premiere on the Mac, it will likely still be a poor experience. Now, if you go "all in" and use Final Cut Pro X, you're going to have a smooth-as-butter experience on even the iMac.

The Mac Pro is going to give you better overall rendering performance over an iMac, but there are two things to really consider: Price and the current Mac Pro is old technology. If price is an issue, the iMac Core i7 is a BEAST. Unless you're on the tightest of deadlines, most people will be able to use the iMac for 3D rendering.

The advantage of the Mac Pro is the easy ability to create RAID 0 volumes internally. This is nearly required when editing multicamera HD footage. (How many camera angles are we talking about?) I've done 4 (barely) on an iMac Core i7. The hard drive throughput was the limiting factor.

Reasoning for using Premiere was i need After Effects, Illustrator and Photoshop anyway plus im used to premiere, but wouldnt be objective to learning final cut.

Camera angles at the moment are usually 2/3 max, (dance shows, wedding videos etc). So going iMac Core i7 with thunderbolt HDD connection would that help the process? Money shouldn't be a huge issue as im researching all this before i get a max £5k loan from a business startup company. I'm just trying to get as much knowledge as possible before i buy so i dont buy with the wrong knowledge its alot of money to spend and find you have picked the wrong thing lol and as said before was told MacPro because of the 3D renders.

The overall plan was to purchase the MacPro as it is at the moment then after WWDC to sell the old and purchase the new model...

Quite fast rendering would be very handy for turn around speed for clients of course so if anyone has first hand knowledge of that as well that would be ideal.

but aarond you say that the Raid is nearly required? could you explain that to me please? just so i can get a full grasp on what you mean for editing the HD multicam

 

[phoenixsan]

Maybe.....

you find this link helpful:

http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/3/900110

And by experience/work a Mac Pro will handle very well render tasks.

 

[DJenkins]

100% go for the mac pro. If it's for work it's a no brainer - it sounds like you will make your money back on it pretty quick.

A twelve core machine cranking an after effects render will blow any imac out of the water by far. Not sure if you are using other software for 3D renders but this will also be the case.

When playing back HD footage and multicam, the speed of the HDD will be the bottleneck. As mentioned by others a raid will be necessary. If you were to get an imac and thunderbolt drive as mentioned, it would need to be a 4bay raid connected by thunderbolt. This will probably cost as much as an imac itself!

Even though they sell single thunderbolt drive enclosures, and technically the interface is capable of high speeds, the single HDD inside there still won't deliver your data fast enough. The rule here is the more drives the faster and better!

Calculate the data rate of your footage and find a raid setup that fits.

 

[Inconsequential]

If money is an issue, buy a 2009/2010 Mac Pro with a 2.66/2.8ghz CPU and put a W3680 in it. 3.33ghz with 3.46ghz turbo and six cores flies.

Then add 24/32GB RAM and a SSD as a boot disk.

Could also add a GTX570 if adobe takes advantage of CUDA (which I think it does).

Lovely!

 

[aarond12]

With the Mac Pro, there are four drive slots available. The first one is typically used as the operating system and applications. For your video work, I would personally get two more large drives and have the OS create a RAID 0 (striped) array out of the two drives. This nearly doubles what one drive could do. If you need even more performance, add three drives. In my experience, though, two drives is usually enough. (No expensive external drives needed!)

Just remember that a two-drive RAID 0 array doubles the possibility of drive failure. A three-drive array triples that risk. If you're concerned about reliability, consider a hardware RAID card with a RAID 5 array.

Premiere on the Mac is okay, but it's just not as polished as Final Cut Pro. This is coming from a long-time Premiere user (version 4.2 on Windows 3.1!). That being said, there is a learning curve going from a standard NLE like Premiere to a next-gen NLE like FCP.