If the iomega hard drive doesn't seem good enough (even though it has FW800) and im not going to spend 500 for TB...what r my options?
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Should I replace iMac with Mac Pro as high schooler?
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I would recommend that you don't get the Iomega drive as your main scratch. Again go on Creative Cow, where there are people who edit on a daily basis.
The cheapest solution "good" solution would probably be a 1TB OWC. It's Firewire 800 and 7200 rpm and many "pros" on the cow say they use em. Maybe even cheaper are those WD Studio drives... but that's if you really need something super duper cheap. Just make sure it's Firewire 800 and 7200rpm. On the other hand if you can afford a little more go for a 1tb G-tech or Lacie. Here's my personal experience with some of these drives I've mentioned...
- Lacie D2 Quadra: I think they had issues with the power supply back in the day and that's why some in the industry have less confidence in them. I bought one when I first started out as freelance editor because it's usually the cheapest one out of the drives created specifically with video editing in mind. It has worked for me for a year and still has not failed. I've cut several music videos, shorts and many many corporate videos on it. I've had many days when I've cut on it 8 or 10 hours straight and it's held up beautifully.
- G-Tech G-Drive and G-Raid: One client had several of these drives. They worked great with all the stuff I had to cut for him.
- OWC Elite Pro: Same client had a bunch of these. Worked great as well.
- WD Studio: Was "forced" to cut a couple of things on this including a short. It held up okay. I'm still not convinced that it could hold up for the long haul though...
- Caldigit AV drive 2TB: My newest scratch drive since the Lacie is filled with current projects and aren't ready for archive yet. I've cut some stuff with it and now starting to do a short. It works amazing. It has a fan which seems loud if you're use to heatsink fanless drives. But now I don't really notice it.
Remember all drives will eventually fail. It's not a matter of IF but WHEN. Even the most expensive enterprise drives will eventually go down. That's why you have to protect yourself from this...
Buy the cheapest 1tb drive you can find (it can be USB) for the purpose of backing up the scratch drive. I use Carbon Copy Cloner for this. It's free! I've been lucky enough to not have a drive fail on me but I always back everything up...
And one person said iMacs are only for hobbyist and if you you want to make a living off of it to get a pro. That's not totally true. As I said in my previous post, I would love to have a current pro because it is a better system for editing all around. But I currently use a base 2010 iMac to make a living... as in I pay my rent and bills with only money made from that Mac and FCP... so it can be done.
Good luck.
The cheapest solution "good" solution would probably be a 1TB OWC. It's Firewire 800 and 7200 rpm and many "pros" on the cow say they use em. Maybe even cheaper are those WD Studio drives... but that's if you really need something super duper cheap. Just make sure it's Firewire 800 and 7200rpm. On the other hand if you can afford a little more go for a 1tb G-tech or Lacie. Here's my personal experience with some of these drives I've mentioned...
- Lacie D2 Quadra: I think they had issues with the power supply back in the day and that's why some in the industry have less confidence in them. I bought one when I first started out as freelance editor because it's usually the cheapest one out of the drives created specifically with video editing in mind. It has worked for me for a year and still has not failed. I've cut several music videos, shorts and many many corporate videos on it. I've had many days when I've cut on it 8 or 10 hours straight and it's held up beautifully.
- G-Tech G-Drive and G-Raid: One client had several of these drives. They worked great with all the stuff I had to cut for him.
- OWC Elite Pro: Same client had a bunch of these. Worked great as well.
- WD Studio: Was "forced" to cut a couple of things on this including a short. It held up okay. I'm still not convinced that it could hold up for the long haul though...
- Caldigit AV drive 2TB: My newest scratch drive since the Lacie is filled with current projects and aren't ready for archive yet. I've cut some stuff with it and now starting to do a short. It works amazing. It has a fan which seems loud if you're use to heatsink fanless drives. But now I don't really notice it.
Remember all drives will eventually fail. It's not a matter of IF but WHEN. Even the most expensive enterprise drives will eventually go down. That's why you have to protect yourself from this...
Buy the cheapest 1tb drive you can find (it can be USB) for the purpose of backing up the scratch drive. I use Carbon Copy Cloner for this. It's free! I've been lucky enough to not have a drive fail on me but I always back everything up...
And one person said iMacs are only for hobbyist and if you you want to make a living off of it to get a pro. That's not totally true. As I said in my previous post, I would love to have a current pro because it is a better system for editing all around. But I currently use a base 2010 iMac to make a living... as in I pay my rent and bills with only money made from that Mac and FCP... so it can be done.
Good luck.
If he were starting from scratch, and had sufficient funding, fine. But I don't have that impression, given the $200 budget listed previously.
Consider this: even if he were able to get a used MP for what he sells the existing iMac for, the remaining upgrades necessary to do what he's after will exceed that $200 budget (RAM <we're talking DDR2 FB-DIMM's, not DDR3>, likely need a newer GPU, and storage to bring it to a reasonable level of usability without going insane on costs).
That's been the reasoning behind my position if you go back and look.
See above.
It's more to do with the budget/funding than technical capabilities of the equipment in this case (need more than selling price of the iMac + $200 to get a MP and add upgrades in order to bring performance to a reasonable level for the usage, as base models in either system still have bottlenecks, primarily storage throughput).
There's no real need to install an eSATA port. There was a post on here a week or two ago about that voiding someone's warranty and OWC having to pick up the bill for a replacement logic board. I think Sonnet may have a thunderbolt to eSATA adapter. That could be worth researching depending on price. My experience with Sonnet has been okay, but they have had some firmware/driver bugs at times. I still would not go for an older mac pro. If something dies in it, you will not be able to afford a repair. Trading in a newer machine for a machine several years older is never really a good idea in general. Even if you were set on doing so, I wouldn't go older than a 2009 as people on here have successfully upgraded them to 6 core machines.
The imac can go to 32GB. It's probably not worth it for you. Ram requirements aren't always easy to determine. If you're getting pageouts that's an obvious sign, but given your financial situation, I'd just say 8GB of third party ram + whatever it came with, giving you a total of 12 without spending much. You're just editing footage from one of canon's consumer lines.
Just to clarify I dislike the serviceability and lack of options. The speed itself is decent. I just hate the idea of a machine where if a hard drive crashes, I can't simply pop in another and restore from my backup. The other thing that annoys me is how display problems or logic board replacement can pretty much mean a new machine, given their repair cost (keep in mind the normal warranty for separate displays is 3-4 years baseline, as in without purchasing an extended warranty).
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Or he can use Thunderbolt. This is really his best option for what he's trying to do. He'll have 10Gb/s on an external drive which will, in theory, be as fast if not faster than his internal drive.
USB 3 means nothing as his system doesn't utilize it and I don't know that he can get a card for it for the Mac Pro. Plus, it's not as fast as Thunderbolt. Not by a long shot. TB will get much quicker over time with an expected top speed of up to 100Gb/s.
Spends the $$$ on an external TB drive and find a better video editor that's less wonky. Adobe doesn't sink crap into their software development or at least not on a scale they should. Find better options - ones that will use the 4 cores you have instead of getting another 4 cores so 6 can be ignored.
If i have a 500 gb hard drive with about 350gb used up why wouldnt i just buy a 5400rpm firewire800 2tb hard drive and transfer over 200gb of videos im not using and just keep em there for permanent storage while I used another part of the HDD for time machine and my internal HDD will have like 400gb free. Would it be faster to have a second drive running firewire800 at 7200rpm?
In my personal opinion, if you won't lose any money on it and will have a faster and all around better system, why not? I don't think age really plays a role in this. If you can get a better system without spending any extra money, what's there to lose?
You need to look at real numbers, not theoretical bandwidth. You can expect up to about 650 MB/s assuming a capable enclosure like the promise raid. According to articles involving Intel, this won't change much per channel until 2013 or later. Adobe is a very annoying company. They're looking at a subscription model and further culling upgrade paths because so many of their customers skipped many releases due to a lack of changes. The thing is as much as this annoys me, Adobe isn't anywhere near the only one who does it. With Apple the general thing has been irritation on the direction of development. With many of the other large software companies it's slowed development as some of these programs become self perpetuating standards (photoshop for example, it seems like everyone uses it on some level).
By the way, splitting up on the fly functions to many cores isn't as simple as it sounds.
Video Editing 101: Do not have your project files and scratch disk on the same drive.
I get the feeling that your budget is on the smaller side. I'm not bashing you, but trying to put the best solution for you within your budget. This is what I would do if I were in your position...
1. Buy this Firewire 800, 2TB, 7200 rpm OWC drive. Cost: $230
2. Buy this Seagate 2TB USB drive to backup the OWC drive. Cost: $135
*Please note that on the website Slick Deals, through a little bit of work to get around $50 off this drive. Here is the link.
Total Cost: $365
Now transfer all of your Editing media that is currently on your internal to the OWC external and your internal is essentially freed up and you have a TON of space on your OWC external still.
If this is still too expensive for you... you're going to have to compromise with storage size and drive quality.
1. Buy this cheap 1tb WD Firewire drive. Cost: $130
Hell, go ahead and buy the Iomega drive you mentioned earlier if you want...
2. Buy the cheapest 1tb drive you can. Interface doesn't matter since you will just be cloning your scratch drive and you can do that when you go to sleep or something. So throughput doesn't matter. SO USB IS OKAY and CHEAPER. Here is one. Cost: $90
Total Cost: $220
Now if this is still too expensive for you...
1. Just get the cheapest 1tb or 2tb Firewire 800 drive you can find and edit off that and just go without a backup. Maybe the 1TB WD one I mentioned earlier or the 2tb Iomega one you mentioned. This method is the most cost effective but most dangerous as you don't have an extra copy of your work. Total Cost: ~$100 for 1tb or ~$180 for 2tb
Like I said man, I had to face similar decisions when I was starting out with freelance editing. I've given this stuff a lot of thought before... Being on a budget sucks but you have to get the bare minimums.
I get the feeling that your budget is on the smaller side. I'm not bashing you, but trying to put the best solution for you within your budget. This is what I would do if I were in your position...
1. Buy this Firewire 800, 2TB, 7200 rpm OWC drive. Cost: $230
2. Buy this Seagate 2TB USB drive to backup the OWC drive. Cost: $135
*Please note that on the website Slick Deals, through a little bit of work to get around $50 off this drive. Here is the link.
Total Cost: $365
Now transfer all of your Editing media that is currently on your internal to the OWC external and your internal is essentially freed up and you have a TON of space on your OWC external still.
If this is still too expensive for you... you're going to have to compromise with storage size and drive quality.
1. Buy this cheap 1tb WD Firewire drive. Cost: $130
Hell, go ahead and buy the Iomega drive you mentioned earlier if you want...
2. Buy the cheapest 1tb drive you can. Interface doesn't matter since you will just be cloning your scratch drive and you can do that when you go to sleep or something. So throughput doesn't matter. SO USB IS OKAY and CHEAPER. Here is one. Cost: $90
Total Cost: $220
Now if this is still too expensive for you...
1. Just get the cheapest 1tb or 2tb Firewire 800 drive you can find and edit off that and just go without a backup. Maybe the 1TB WD one I mentioned earlier or the 2tb Iomega one you mentioned. This method is the most cost effective but most dangerous as you don't have an extra copy of your work. Total Cost: ~$100 for 1tb or ~$180 for 2tb
Like I said man, I had to face similar decisions when I was starting out with freelance editing. I've given this stuff a lot of thought before... Being on a budget sucks but you have to get the bare minimums.
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Unfortunately, they don't as of yet.
I recall somewhere they claimed they managed ~ 800MB/s out of it (which is Intel's official numbers), and somewhere else that the limit on TB has been seen at ~850MB/s (bit higher than Intel claims in the specifications).
That said, the Promise boxes are out of the OP's budget by quite a bit (start at $1150 for the 4TB Pegasus R4). It won't be as safe as other configurations due to consumer grade drives either (they're using Hitachi Deathstars).
Exactly.
The budget is too limiting a factor for much to be done with the current setup (given the mention of $200), let alone swapping the iMac out for a used MP that would almost certainly need upgrades exceeding $200.
Just keep what you have. your only editing 1080p and some of these people here are people in huge rendering farms rendering far more complex things. For what you do you'll be fine. And quite frankly, the mac pros don't even have a sandy bridge based cpu yet (still nehelam) so they are about 15-30% behind in instructions per core. They really need that mid tower to fill in the viod where the powermac g4's used to sit. A 2500k with a 2600k-2700k option would be excellent.
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when i was in HS, i used a power mac 7500/132 beige box then upgraded to a Power Mac G3 266 beige box
Are those real numbers, and when you say per core are you assuming comparable clock speeds? The imac went up in clock speed over the previous generation, which was part of the speed gain. What impresses me is the speed of intel's laptop cpus these days. The mac pro update isn't claiming to be an enormous boost in speed over the current imac, but rather just a few percentage points at the quad for quad level if the rumors are true. The mac pro really deserves better guts at the low end, as it's not intended to be a low end machine.
when i was in HS, i used a power mac 7500/132 beige box then upgraded to a Power Mac G3 266 beige box
I recall the G3 was considered a pretty big step up. I didn't own one until the early G4s though.
Unfortunately, they don't as of yet.
I recall somewhere they claimed they managed ~ 800MB/s out of it (which is Intel's official numbers), and somewhere else that the limit on TB has been seen at ~850MB/s (bit higher than Intel claims in the specifications).
That said, the Promise boxes are out of the OP's budget by quite a bit (start at $1150 for the 4TB Pegasus R4). It won't be as safe as other configurations due to consumer grade drives either (they're using Hitachi Deathstars).
Exactly.
The budget is too limiting a factor for much to be done with the current setup (given the mention of $200), let alone swapping the iMac out for a used MP that would almost certainly need upgrades exceeding $200.
Thanks Nano. I didn't know about the use of Hitachi drives. I'm not actually a fan of the Promise enclosure. I mentioned it only because of the lack of other comparable devices. I definitely don't agree with trading in a newer computer for an older computer. You still always seem to be more up to date than me on exact specs though. Damn you!
>Hey everyone this is my first post and I wanted to get some opinions.
>Currently I'm 16 years old and I have a 2011 base iMac with 12gb ram that i
>purchased a few months ago.
Sorry for hijacking the thread but I just had to comment:
Sometimes I wish I was born 16 years ago not 50 years ago. When I was 16 I have to work all summer holidays to earn £200 to buy my first computer. It was a Nascom I and you had to solder all the components on the PCB yourself. You had to source a monitor, and build you own power supply, and case to put is all in. You had 1k of RAM and 1k of Video RAM and you had to program it in Z80 machine code. You could write you programs to cassette tape.
What has happened in the world of "home" computing in the subsequent 35 years is simply jaw dropping.
>Currently I'm 16 years old and I have a 2011 base iMac with 12gb ram that i
>purchased a few months ago.
Sorry for hijacking the thread but I just had to comment:
Sometimes I wish I was born 16 years ago not 50 years ago. When I was 16 I have to work all summer holidays to earn £200 to buy my first computer. It was a Nascom I and you had to solder all the components on the PCB yourself. You had to source a monitor, and build you own power supply, and case to put is all in. You had 1k of RAM and 1k of Video RAM and you had to program it in Z80 machine code. You could write you programs to cassette tape.
What has happened in the world of "home" computing in the subsequent 35 years is simply jaw dropping.
Do you have the crash logs? "My computer crashes" isn't very helpful
Also, if you make money off YT why don't you just save up and buy a nice TB set up? It won't take you that long.
Also, if you make money off YT why don't you just save up and buy a nice TB set up? It won't take you that long.
If he were starting from scratch, and had sufficient funding, fine. But I don't have that impression, given the $200 budget listed previously.
Consider this: even if he were able to get a used MP for what he sells the existing iMac for, the remaining upgrades necessary to do what he's after will exceed that $200 budget (RAM <we're talking DDR2 FB-DIMM's, not DDR3>, likely need a newer GPU, and storage to bring it to a reasonable level of usability without going insane on costs).
That's been the reasoning behind my position if you go back and look.
Again, I dunno about that. I had a Pro tower and later a maxed out TiBook G4. I did this because I used those machines to make money writing software. Like the OP, I didn't make a huge amount of money, but having a high end computer to play with interested me. Having those higher end computers also allowed me to do work in 3D graphics development which got me ahead of my peers... Which is something I may not have been able to discover on lower end hardware. I also got to play with higher end software, like the initial versions of Final Cut Pro.
Sure, my budget was always a little tight, but I was in high school living with my parents. It wasn't like if I spent that extra money for a nicer computer I was going to starve. Heck, it's a good time to actually make that investment before bills and rent come along. I know things for me got a little leaner once I started college, and the computer investments I made held me through most of that.
This is not 1998 anymore. Old habits I guess. There is very little penalty these days if the project is relatively small. Obviously if you are maxing bandwidth anyway... You could easily do it on an SSD or a faster HDD. Video guys come out of school being told this and are militant about it. Cool, their teacher learned FCP 3.x this way. The project doesn't care, only if the performance if the drive is saturated. I guess you could also add "Macs are good for graphics" and "Photoshop needs a separate scratch disk". Just not very relevant these days.
Hey man. I'm a high-schooler. What do I do?
Trust me...by the time you're 20...you'll see. Just keep your iMac.
By the way, punctuation marks always go inside the quotations.
"scratch disk".
should be
"scratch disk."
At least you're smarter than most of the other moron high-schoolers I see.
Trust me...by the time you're 20...you'll see. Just keep your iMac.
By the way, punctuation marks always go inside the quotations.
"scratch disk".
should be
"scratch disk."
At least you're smarter than most of the other moron high-schoolers I see.
I've both a personal and financial interest in keeping up with new products that come to market.I didn't know about the use of Hitachi drives. I'm not actually a fan of the Promise enclosure. I mentioned it only because of the lack of other comparable devices. I definitely don't agree with trading in a newer computer for an older computer. You still always seem to be more up to date than me on exact specs though. Damn you!
And was that hardware capable of this as you got it?
I ask, as it appears that the OP would need to add upgrades (FB-DIMM's + GPU + storage) with a used 2008 system, and doesn't have sufficient funds to supply them ATM. Or a new machine, since it will be financed with the sale of the iMac.
I just don't see a base model 2008 being as good as what he has right now. Yes, it would be upgradeable over time, but I'd think it better to keep what he has, and continue to save funds earned with it for a newer system (i.e. buy a new tower when starting college).
I don't disagree with it being easier while still living at home, but it would be a better idea to put the necessary funds together for the upgrades before buying the 2008.
Then considering that it's only a couple of years until the start of college, it would be better to save until that point and use the funds for a new tower (or newer than 2008 at least).
Just seems a better use of funds by putting it off IMO, particularly when I think of student loans and the potential hardships they can pose (longer-term view of getting the OP through college with sufficient equipment).
One aspect of a new iMac vs the 2008 Mac Pro that has not come up yet.... AppleCare.
I would stay away from the 2008 simply because of the cost to repair the beast. It seems the OP is working with a limited budget with no much of the way in reserves to cushion any bad luck. Since this system is going to be used to earn an income, then being able to rely on a system to get contracted projects out the door is very important. A client is not going to be happy with "My computer crashed, and I can't afford to fix it." Bad for the reputation.
So - go with something under warranty, and extend it. The peace of mind is worth the extra cost...
I would stay away from the 2008 simply because of the cost to repair the beast. It seems the OP is working with a limited budget with no much of the way in reserves to cushion any bad luck. Since this system is going to be used to earn an income, then being able to rely on a system to get contracted projects out the door is very important. A client is not going to be happy with "My computer crashed, and I can't afford to fix it." Bad for the reputation.
So - go with something under warranty, and extend it. The peace of mind is worth the extra cost...
Well the seller of the mac pro 2008 does have 2 year apple care on it, but that's beside the point since I think I will stick with my iMac but simply get an external drive...So if I edit on premiere pro and it runs pretty smoothly, why would I even need to worry about have project files and scratch disk on different hard drives? I mainly just want storage to keep files Im not using, but if it will speed up the editing process even further, that would be great
I don't know if anyone has asked this of you yet, but where do you store the backups of your projects and files?
One of the things I see my students forgetting often is where they backup files they may be using for their demo reels and archives.
For you, right now in HS your best bet (as you've mentioned) is to stick with the iMac and get the other items that enhance not only the shooting and editing of your craft, but the back end as well. Get your scratch disk, make it as fast as possible and get a backup solution NOW.
After that, you really should work on your T3i, what kind of lens are you using now? What about your tripod and stability options?
Video production is a good deal more than just the edit. But don't worry about all that too much, you've got time to learn. Get those disks in the meantime.
One of the things I see my students forgetting often is where they backup files they may be using for their demo reels and archives.
For you, right now in HS your best bet (as you've mentioned) is to stick with the iMac and get the other items that enhance not only the shooting and editing of your craft, but the back end as well. Get your scratch disk, make it as fast as possible and get a backup solution NOW.
After that, you really should work on your T3i, what kind of lens are you using now? What about your tripod and stability options?
Video production is a good deal more than just the edit. But don't worry about all that too much, you've got time to learn. Get those disks in the meantime.
You might want to think about moving some of your older projects to inexpensive USB disks. That could free up a lot of primary storage inside your iMac and enable to wait on any expensive upgrades for the time being. Also, when you can afford it you probably should max the ram on your iMac, but I wouldn't be in a rush to do that.
- On the Creative Cow forums search this particular topic and you'll find threads on the issue, even some very recent ones helping out young editors. General consensus (including "professionals" in the industry) is that your scratch should always be on a different drive than your boot.
- Read this article by Larry Jordan, probably the most well known "expert"/lecturer of Final Cut.
link
- For 6 months last year I interned for a post house that handled a lot of the promotional content for Disney Channel among other things. Some of the editors were using the extra slots in the Pro as their scratch. Most of them were hooked up to some shared XSAN network using fiber channel. This included just promoted-editors who were working on short spots consisting of only a couple media assets to higher ups working on features. No documentation, but I guess you gotta take my word for it!
- Lastly google Final Cut's user manual and read the sections on "Working on Scratch disks and hard drives" and "Choosing a hard disks."
So it is still recommended that you set your scratch disk to a different drive than your boot os. They tell you that in college... in the post house I worked at... final cut's user manual... and industry experts/pros tell you that too.