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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Dragon + Mac Pro

Frank Glencairn said:
Not much reason for someone with a fullsize mid2010 or mid2012 MacPro to buy a new 6 core MacPro IMHO
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My 2010 6-core Mac Pro has a few internal bays, but that's it.

It's restricted to 3Gb/s over internal SATA and has USB2 for connectivity. Graphics is ATI 5870 with 1GB.

I could pimp it to internal RAID SSDs over PCIe and get up to 1700 MB/s speeds, but that will cost me. I can throw in another card for USB3 and look at 3rd party graphics, including NVIDA Titan. It's all possible, but it's not cheap.

Once you go above a few thousand, it makes more sense to me to invest in new technology.
 
Frank Glencairn said:
ProRes will be pretty fluid as long as you don't go with full resolution (r3d),
Premiere not so much, the AMD support isn't there for now, but that may change with future updates.
When it comes to rendering out files from Premiere, a fullsize 2010 MacPro is still 25% faster than the new $8000 MacPro
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Yes, exactly. For most people, the fastest mac you can get for doing stuff this afternoon would probably be a 2012 mac pro maxed out. The trashcan is an expensive lateral step for most people and most software that exists as of today. OSX and Final Cut are leading the charge on using the hardware in the trashcan for obvious reasons, but it's a train that everyone will be on eventually. I don't know what the roadmap is for Premiere (Adobe took literally years to move Photoshop off of Carbon, so who knows), but there is no technical reason Premiere couldn't be just as finely tuned as Final Cut is today.

Again, in 6 months to a year, the trashcan will be an entirely new machine, even if Apple doesn't change the hardware at all.

-n
 
AndreeMarkefors said:
Once you go above a few thousand, it makes more sense to me to invest in new technology.
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And than you have to buy all those external boxes, a external SSD RAID, an external I/O card andwhatnot.

But to each his own.
 
Frank Glencairn said:
And than you have to buy all those external boxes, a external SSD RAID, an external I/O card andwhatnot.

But to each his own.
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Some might have to, yes. In my case, internal 1TB will be good for two simultaneous projects. That would be the work drive. Then I'd pick up a RAID5 shell and dump my current "legacy" drives into that.

But it's like you say: everyone decides based on their own needs.

I think Mac Pro 2013 will be fine. Both OS X and FCPX (if we're discussing video) are up to date, if not ahead of the hardware curve. Blackmagic is onboard last I heard. Dual D700 will push Resolve in the right direction once it's optimized.
 
We have this discussion every time something new from Apple comes out.

Gets really boring and the same conversation pops up.

It just came out.

Just like most new tech, give it time itll find traction and most of us will find a use for it :)
 
AndreeMarkefors said:
S.. In my case, internal 1TB will be good for two simultaneous projects. That would be the work drive.
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What? You are hosting your material on the system drive? And 1 TB is good for two projects + the System files?

Okay,I understand.
Looks like we are working with very different material on very different projects.
Just one of our typical projects can easily get over 4 TB.

And yeah, call me paranoid, but working from a system drive is a huge no-go here.
We have RAIDs just for source material, RAIDS to render to, drives for audio, stills, graphics andwahtnot and a SSD for cache.
Plus a ton of drives and mobile RAIDS for backups.
 
At $300 I think people bought FCPX just to test and then years later it's finally in a decent spot (it's arguably the fastest to work with, making it great for smaller projects, but still missing things that higher end projects would need).
 
roryhinds said:
With all the talk on Final Cut, I guess Apple have succeeded.

Who uses Final Cut anymore?
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i don't think fcpx got a fair treatment when it came out...and it makes no sense to discuss it's pros and cons....but with literally 100s mill of people using imovie on iOs and osX and kids growing up on it....and apple lowering the price to 300 (i would not be surprised to see that drop to 99 in the future) it will be the step up software for a LOT of people....most of them probably not pros but that is not the point....
adobe going the other route and driving people away and not really even making pros happy with the subscription based system...i don't see that user base widening....
fcpx was faster, leaner and much easier and just got a lot faster (or made a lot of machines a LOT faster...for free)....and apple is working hard to bring pros back...and from what i can tell it is working....
 
Are there any tests online comparing speed on the old and new Mac Pro using R3Ds?

Phil Holland said:
This is a question that doesn't have an answer that works for everybody in reality because of one major flaw.

Basic answer.

Is the new Mac Pro faster than previous Mac Pros? Yep.

Is it going to transcode faster or on par than a system equipped with a Red Rocket-X? Nope.


However, I'll play devil's advocate. Depending on your specific workflow and needs it might be all you desire or want. It also might not.
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Phil Holland said:
This is a question that doesn't have an answer that works for everybody in reality because of one major flaw.

Basic answer.

Is the new Mac Pro faster than previous Mac Pros? Yep.

Is it going to transcode faster or on par than a system equipped with a Red Rocket-X? Nope.


However, I'll play devil's advocate. Depending on your specific workflow and needs it might be all you desire or want. It also might not.
Click to expand...

This at least gives life to the idea of just adding a RR-X to your "older" 2012 Mac Pro tower.

Meaning, the older towers aren't necessarily obsolete yet, and can still play a meaningful role in Dragon workflow.
 
Frank Glencairn said:
What? You are hosting your material on the system drive? And 1 TB is good for two projects + the System files?

And yeah, call me paranoid, but working from a system drive is a huge no-go here.
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I guess it's the nature of the beast Frank: cameras can be used for many things. I mostly do scripted doc work that results in films shorter than 10 minutes.

Surely it would be a shame, now that Apple has made an effort to design a 1200MB/s system drive, to only host documents on it? I put my MacBook Pro to good use too, and that also only has a single drive. No problem at all.

My current Mac Pro has data distributed over several drives, but that is more load splitting over several SATA channels since the performance isn't there. I do agree that it has some management/organizational benefits.

As for working from a system drive... well this is a Mac, not a PC after all... =) Just joking.. Don't we all welcome system crashes? Those are the opportune moments to do a fresh install, including housekeeping, from a backup. That said, I have never had a computer crash on me (self built PC, or Mac)...

Anyway… for work I think a Mac Pro with 1TB and a Pegasus2 RAID would work well. The Pegasus also reaches 1200MB/s over Thunderbolt 2 with SSD. I'd use normal hard drives though.
 
AndreeMarkefors said:
Anyway… for work I think a Mac Pro with 1TB and a Pegasus2 RAID would work well. The Pegasus also reaches 1200MB/s over Thunderbolt 2 with SSD. .
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Back in the early 90es I melted out some of the dividers of my Power Macintosh 8100, with a red hot glowing screwdriver to accommodate additional drives (the chassis was plastic back than, and so tight you could not get there with a saw or Dremel.

We than wrote some code to strip the extra drives to a RAID 0.
I think we where some of the first guys in Germany, that where able to play out full PAL at 25p, with the Radius VideoVision I/O card, instead of having a script, that records a frame a time on the Betacam recorder, which took forever and was killing the Betacam mechanics every 2 months.

Back than we where happy to get something like 10 MB/sec out of our self striped RAID, no you get 1200MB/s out of the box - amazing times.
 
Frank Glencairn said:
Back in the early 90es…
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Those were the days.

I don't remember ever having to put a glowing screwdriver through anything, but I've built my fair share of PCs through the years. Since the days of the Voodoo 3dfx 3D-accelerator through the last water cooled, over clocked construction that had a CPU that was sanded down by hand to be absolutely flat for better cooling.... =)

Sure was a lot of fun, but in retrospect it was more about the technology and computers themselves than the stuff I wanted to create WITH the computers. Once I reached the turning point and focused more on output was about the time when Macs were a viable option. Made the switch with the first MacBook Air (kept PC as workstation), and I've never looked back since.

I totally understand people who build PCs though.
 
cut my first video on premier on a quattro 660av (that thing had video inputs on the front!) in 92....HD was 240mb....it was magical...
 
I found myself not updating too much in any of the professionally used boxes I bought in dozens for the various post facilities I worked for.
When a machine is outdated, it is. There is not much to do. Occasionally we swapped CPUs, some NICs or HBAs, but overall this was way under 10%.
Get it when you need it, use it.
When it is outdated, it does' matter if it was a PC or a Mac.

Brian Merlen said:
the technology will march on and what looks like a great machine today will one day be a circa 2008 clunker equivalent, the way she goes.
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Phil Holland said:
However, straying away from standards in this particular case with things like USB 3.1 and Sata 3.2 mother boards and devices on the somewhat soon-ish horizon is only going to repeat the history of the previous Mac Pro. You can't easily upgrade or swap out components. It's just as simple as that. New processors are also part of this equation.
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It's a shame apple doesn't even sell new 2012 mac pro's anymore.
I'd get a 2012 mac pro, but not having thunderbolt add-on is a problem to me, due to investing in thunderbolt external hard drives. It seems silly to me to get the new mac pro, and have everything externally, seems like you'll end up with a bigger desk, plus the mess of cables and enclosures.
My main problem is that I love OS X, but it seems like I can't buy anything that just works the way I want it. Mac Pro 2012 doesn't have TB, Mac pro 2014 can't Pcie, and hackintosh's, well, those are very risky, with lots of troubleshoots.
I really don't want to get windows..

If i end up needing to get a hackintosh, what Cpu and Gpu would you guys recommend? The Titan seems to work great with Dragon R3D's from the tests I've seen.
 
With the new Mac Pro, can you monitor in 4K out of the box?
I mean with a Mac Pro, its HDMI ports and a 4K TV, can you watch your footage out of Resolve or FCP X on your Ultra HD consumer TV?
 
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