Help choosing my first external drive

[Carl Epstein]

Hello, I am new and have a Scarlet w on the way. I have a new iMac 27 inch 5 K monitor with an i7 and 32 gig ram. 2TB hard drive. AMD radeon graphics with 2 gig gddr5.
So the question is here I sit with my imac and a red reader with a full card in it. What now. This is just for hobby work so no major speed requirements. Just play.

FCPX
Free version Davinci reslove free lite, I know I will have to buy the $1000 version if Davinci that works with 4 k.
Will that do 5 k also?

Will FCPX do 5 k?

1 I will shoot in 5 k so the monitor will show resolution.

2 What is an inexpensive option for an external drive to use with thunder bolt?

3 Do I hook up the card reader directly to the thunderbolt external drive and control the transfer via the imac?

4 The red rocket is out of the price range for now and I dont have a bay for it anyway.

5 When working with 5 k files do you like to bring it into fcpx and edit then xml to davinci for color then back to fcpx?

6 Does anyone know where to get some R3D files to download to practice with until I actually get the Scarlet w?

Thanks in advance for any replies

 

[Alexander Thomson]

Good news! As of 2014 DaVinci Resolve Lite will export up to UHD 4K (3840x2160)

1) Yes, the iMac monitor will show the 5K resolution.

2) At the entry-level, you could go with a G-Tech Thunderbolt raid, or a G-Tech Dock ev. With the Dock ev, you can buy one of their RED MINI-MAG readers (which Jarred has said is better than RED's own reader) and be able to dock it in the unit, or pop it out and take it with you.

3) A mag reader will function similar to a CF or SD card reader---just drag and drop.

4) A Red Rocket X is nice, but not completely necessary if you set FCPX to "Better Performance" when editing. That will set playback quality at 1/4th and paused quality at Full. The "Better Quality" setting will playback at Full debayer.

5) That's exactly what I do. FCPX is good for quick and dirty grades but now that Resolve Lite can do UHD exports I've been making the round trip.

6) Thread search. In the meantime I'll search around for some DSMC2 Dragon files and I'll edit this post if/when I find any.


Hope this helps.

Alex

 

[Carl Epstein]

Thank you for the reply, At this early stage in my knowledge all info in very helpful.

 

[Marc Wielage]

I don't think an iMac is ideal for color correction -- especially 4K -- mainly because you can't easily calibrate the monitor. You're better off with an external display. You can technically edit & color-correct in HD and then deliver in 4K, but it will be slow. And the GPUs in the iMacs are puny (for which I blame Apple).

What BMD officially says in Resolve's config specs is:

With both models, UHD timelines are practical with some performance limitations, especially when using optical flow speed changes, temporal processing, and noise reduction.

The new 27” mid-2015 Retina 5K iMac with 2GB GPU RAM and many of the older model iMacs with 2GB of GPU memory will reach these GPU limits at lower resolutions and with fewer editing tracks or color grading nodes. Very limited performance is possible on the 2010 and 2011 top of the line iMacs and these systems will not be suitable for any temporal processing, NR, or images greater than HD resolution.

Real-world, you will hit the wall fairly early if you do any complex processing. I think they will work OK for dailies and transcodes, but I routinely see much beefier Mac Pros struggle with 4K-5K-6K material, and they've got D700 GPUs with 6GB of RAM each. Getting real-time performance out of really large files is a big challenge.

 

[Carl Epstein]

Thank you for the reply.

 

[Carl Epstein]

Would this config hold up to 5 k edit or should it have more cores.
[h=2]Summary[/h]Mac Pro

• 3.5GHz 6-core with 12MB of L3 cache
• 64GB (4x16GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC
• 1TB PCIe-based flash storage
• Dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM each

 

[AndreeMarkefors]

Carl,

For personal needs, or commercial work like corporate, non profits and helping out friends a fully loaded 5k iMac will do fine.

FCPX has supported 4k since day one and you can import native .R3D into that as well. I'm not sure when it got implemented (maybe also day one) but FCPX supports 5K-6K too.

If you do want to use DaVinci Resolve a beefier system is recommended.

You say above that it's for hobby, so I'm not sure how much money you want to throw at it on day one?

 

[Carsten Schuffert]

Hi Carl.

I use LaCie d2 Thunderbolt which is available from 3-6 TB and quick, solid, good.
[h=2][/h]