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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 :)

Laptop Or Tower?

If you're really serious about saving money, then you'd get something other than a Macintosh. Mac's are usually priced higher than other computers of similar performance.

To really save money, you may want to go with a Debian Linux machine. Debian Linux is free, and there's a video editing program available for it called Cinelerra that is also free. I've never used Cinelerra, so I don't know whether it would be adequate for efficient video editing, but I hope to test it soon. I'm going to build a new Windows machine next month, and am planning to dual boot Debian Linux with it. If Cinelerra works, then I don't see any reason to give my money to Adobe or Sony or any of the other NLE companies.

If Cinelerra doesn't do the job, then I might try to code my own NLE (if Red provides an API or command-line program for their codec). But I'm working in VB.NET these days, so my app wouldn't run except on Windows machines (possibly Linux in the very distant future). Maybe I'll try to learn C# and then port through Mono to make something that'll run in Linux. Hmm, sounds like too much work.
 
I don't agree with that at all. I know there are endless Mac vs. PC debates, but for my money Macs are a more powerful machine and they are worth the extra money, when applicable, although they have done many price comparisons between Dells and Macs of similar performance levels and actually the Mac always came out cheaper. The only part of a Mac that is usually overpriced is the RAM. Otherwise, it's a myth that you can get a PC as good as a Mac for a similar price.

I was a PC user for about 13 years, and I've been a Mac user for 2. I would never go back to those miserable virus-laden machines. My friend is a die-hard PC user so more power to him, but I don't use Winblows and I certainly don't deal with computers that crash that often and have so many problems, bad operating systems consistently, and that never innovate, always follow. Not for me.
 
JonathanLB said:
I don't agree with that at all. I know there are endless Mac vs. PC debates, but for my money Macs are a more powerful machine and they are worth the extra money, when applicable, although they have done many price comparisons between Dells and Macs of similar performance levels and actually the Mac always came out cheaper. The only part of a Mac that is usually overpriced is the RAM. Otherwise, it's a myth that you can get a PC as good as a Mac for a similar price.

I was a PC user for about 13 years, and I've been a Mac user for 2. I would never go back to those miserable virus-laden machines. My friend is a die-hard PC user so more power to him, but I don't use Winblows and I certainly don't deal with computers that crash that often and have so many problems, bad operating systems consistently, and that never innovate, always follow. Not for me.
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Dell overprices their computers, as does Gateway. They're affordable if you get corporate discounts, otherwise you've got to avoid the big name companies if you're going to get a machine that's value priced. If you check local computer stores you'll likely find a custom built computer that will perform better for less money. With a little effort, you can even build your own machine and that will make things cheaper still. Plus, if you're not happy with the Windows operating system, you can download the Debian Linux operating system for free... once again, saving money.

The PC is about getting work done, cheaply. It's less about white plastic fancy cases and more about an open hardware environment where you can swap components created by 3rd party companies in a competitive marketplace. Besides, innovation isn't such a big thing in the Mac world either... you guys just recently got multi-button mice, right? PC users have had that for a few decades now.
 
It's not so much a question of hardware than it is software when discussing apple vs pc on a forum such as this. Apple are doing more to support Red currently and the price of FCS2 is vastly lower than similar PC software. Of course if I could have Mac's OS running on a machine I'd created from scratch I'd be far happier but it simply isn't an option.
 
If you're intending to do much post-production visual stuff (after effects, color etc...) then go with the Mac Pro.

I'm not a massive cheapskate, but I am a miserly student (which works out to roughly the same thing). And I've researched this to death - what you'll want to get is this:

Mac Pro: Quad-Core 2.66GHz, with the ATI x1900xt.

Apart from the x1900xt (which you'll need for AE) leave it bog standard, don't upgrade your RAM or Hard Disk space from apple (it's a rip-off anyway).

Then go to www.otherworldcomputing.com (OWC) and buy yourself two 2Gb (4Gb total) of Mac Pro RAM - OWC are both affordable and high quality in my experience. Then go to your local computer shop and pick up a couple of regular hard drives (320Gb are pretty cheap at the moment). Either use the monitors you already have are pick up a fresh one (Dell are good I hear).

And VIOLA! You have the most affordably powerful Mac you can get! Enjoy!
 
Graeme & Rob -

We'll be initially running REDCINE on both a tower (8-core MacPro w/Nvidia 4500) in our facility, as well as an "on set" laptop - 17" 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo w/NVIDIA 8600M GT -

How much RAM is "too much" RAM for REDCINE as much of the processing is on the GPU?? -

For Offhollywood, most likely, the most common transcode will be from REDCODE RAW 4K to 2K and HD PRORES as our SCRATCH system can work directly with the REDCODE RAW files and therefore our Scratch workstation will be doing the render from 4K Redcode Raw to DPX for us.

I was thinking 2G in the laptop for on set (mostly just checking media and looking at exposures, etc.) and 4G on the workstation - unless you think more than 4G will do something for me ...?
 
Curran Giddens said:
With RED there is no capturing necessary. You could (later this year) plug your RED-DRIVE (or other recording media) directly into your laptop, and drop files directly from mounted drive into FCP timeline and start editing if you wanted to.
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Again, there is NO NEED of FCS for that, any software that support Quick Time codec will be able to import directly 4k REDCODE RAW and edit them.
Rememeber Crossing the Line was cut on FCP 5.1...

antoine.
 
Also I cannot figure how you will use 8 cores and 16 gig of RAM while editing? Can someone enlight me?!

As I am Windows/Linux user, can someone confirm FCS is 32 bit applications and therefore better suite for 32 bit OS, which will have difficulty to use 16 gig of RAM...


I have just build one more Windows/Linux box, only for 3D work using blender. When you look to blender benchmark, Mac Pro 8 cores do the job in 15 sec (nothing tells you it is the true, but let say we trust the people), the dual E4300 (lightly overclock) running Windows XP that I just build, do the job in 45 sec, so 3 times more, but it costs about 500$ to build it :-))) I can build 7-10 of them for the price of one Mac Pro....

In conclusion I think you need to know what applications you want to use, if FCS, then not much choice on the computer. For editing, I suggest to go for a Mac Pro 4 cores AND a Mac Book Pro

antoine.
 
offhollywood said:
How much RAM is "too much" RAM for REDCINE as much of the processing is on the GPU??

...

I was thinking 2G in the laptop for on set (mostly just checking media and looking at exposures, etc.) and 4G on the workstation - unless you think more than 4G will do something for me ...?
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Just fired up REDCINE here and it was using about 1 GB of (virtual) memory.

GPU power and CPU power (modern Intel CPU with SSE2 preferred) with the more cores the better helps more than memory (unless you have 256 MB of memory or something silly, of course).

2 for a laptop and 4 for a tower sounds fine. Unless other software can really benefit from more memory (like render to memory etc.)
 
laboprod said:
Also I cannot figure how you will use 8 cores and 16 gig of RAM while editing? Can someone enlight me?!
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Normal 32-bit applications can only use 3 - 4 GB of memory. However, modern (32-bit) OS'es support more than 4 GB and can use that to give 3 - 4 GB to multiple applications.

For REDCODE (in general, whether as the QuickTime codec or in REDCINE) benefits from multiple cores. As with anything multi-threading it does not scale linearly, but it does help a lot.
 
laboprod said:
I can build 7-10 of them for the price of one Mac Pro....
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It could be a good option to have multiple machines. This way you can handle multiple jobs or convert / render multiple scenes / takes at the same time. Might be a better allocation of resources and money.
 
Yes, faster FSB helps a lot!
 
Yeah that's why I opted for the 160 gig 7200 RPM drive for my MacBook Pro, NOT the much slower 250 gig drive. I'd much rather have the faster drive than the drive with more capacity -- I can get an external for that.

Leopard is a true 64-bit operating system with full 32-bit application support, so unlike Windows Vista, which is completely incompetent at handling both effectively, Leopard will actually work effectively with either type of application. I wasn't able to get a clear answer from Apple regarding whether Studio 2 will be able to use 16 gigs of RAM once Leopard is out, but I am assuming the answer is yes. More RAM would definitely be helpful as these 32-bit applications have not been useful in taking advantage of my RAM. It ends up using about 4 gigs of RAM on the program when I have twice that, which is frustrating. With a 64-bit OS like Leopard you can use up to 4 terabytes of RAM and that isn't going to happen anytime soon!!
 
JonathanLB said:
Leopard is a true 64-bit operating system with full 32-bit application support, so unlike Windows Vista, which is completely incompetent at handling both effectively
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How so? We've had 64-bit Windows 2000 since Itanium and XP & Server 2003 in 64-bit (x64) since April 2005. That's two years now. 32-bit applications run just fine.
 
If you say so, Rob, I've read nothing but problems with that and know a few people who work with a lot of applications on both platforms and haven't had good luck with that at all. I'm glad to hear it's worked better for you, though, but Windows is a terrible operating system overall and it handles that switch about as well as it handles anything else from what I've heard. But it's good you've not experienced too much slow-down.
 
JonathanLB said:
Yeah that's why I opted for the 160 gig 7200 RPM drive for my MacBook Pro, NOT the much slower 250 gig drive. I'd much rather have the faster drive than the drive with more capacity -- I can get an external for that.
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Agree.

JonathanLB said:
Leopard is a true 64-bit operating system with full 32-bit application support, so unlike Windows Vista, which is completely incompetent at handling both effectively, Leopard will actually work effectively with either type of application. I wasn't able to get a clear answer from Apple regarding whether Studio 2 will be able to use 16 gigs of RAM once Leopard is out, but I am assuming the answer is yes. More RAM would definitely be helpful as these 32-bit applications have not been useful in taking advantage of my RAM. It ends up using about 4 gigs of RAM on the program when I have twice that, which is frustrating. With a 64-bit OS like Leopard you can use up to 4 terabytes of RAM and that isn't going to happen anytime soon!!
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Like Rob said, Windows has been 64bit for some time now and works just fine. Need to sip that Apple kool-aid a bit slower there, mate. Where Microsoft screwed up with 64bit was shipping the 64bit OS as a separate offering from the 32bit version. Then they expected hardware vendors to write separate drivers for it... Didn't happen. Finding 64bit drivers for Win64 to support most of your existing hardware was usually a futile endeavor. With Vista, MS finally got it right... Kinda. They still allow too much 32bit reliance, IMO and are not pushing forward with it as they should. Apple did have 64bit components in Tiger, but they're doing it right in Leopard it seems. They're late to the party with a full 64bit OS, but it looks like they have all their ducks in a row.

It will be interesting to see what new 64bit and memory advantages come with updated pro applications and Leopard. But you also have to keep in mind that there are other factors which dictate memory usage and availability. For example, if you bought your Macbook Pro before the update last week, it still had the 32bit "Napa" chipset, which means total system memory addressing is limited to 4GB. After you factor in all your video memory and system resources, it leaves you with about 3.2GB of usable RAM heap, so Apple would only sell the system with a a maximum of 3GB of RAM. The updated Macbook Pro with the i965E "Crestline" chipset has a total system addressability of 8GB and Apple is currently offering 4GB installed via 2x2GB modules. This is as good as it gets right now for mobile memory installations in a system with two RAM sockets. Who knows if Apple will offer larger RAM sizes as modules grow bigger for this model -- probably not. If 4GB SO-DIMMs show up on the market, you could theoretically install them, but you're usable RAM amount would be about 7.1GB due to memory addressability and chipset limitations. 64bit CPUs and operating systems don't instantly give you access to more RAM. Sorry about picking nits.

It's also going to take some time for software to truly shine in a 64bit environment too. Much of the code out there has been optimized for single processors and 32bit environments over the past several years. Developers have had more new platform changes in the PC/Mac world over the past 2 years than at any other time in the history of this industry. The closest was the 16bit to 32bit transition, but they didn't have multiple CPU cores in the mix (and evolving at their own hurried pace as well), nor the complexity of today's software or the huge userbases and competition. There's a lot more that goes into making an application perform well under a 64bit environment than just tweaking memory allocations and re-compiling with a 64bit compiler. I also have a hunch that a lot of software out there will remain 32bit for some time yet because the extra memory abilities aren't an immediate priority and we will see increased efforts placed on multithreading and resource allocation in newer multi-core systems. The software industry is still trying to digest that change, even though it's been a long time coming and isn't really new. It's just that now it's finally mainstream.
 
regista said:
That is a fact, Rob. BUT... since the days of DEC Alpha and Tru64, nobody has come up with a top to bottom, all planets aligned, 64 bit solution. Nobody. Meaning... OS, drivers and apps, all working together in a 64-bit pipe from beginning to end. Not even Windows x64 in any of its flavors.
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So then how do you classify 64bit Linux? SUSE 64 is pretty darn good and stable and so are the accompanying 64bit drivers. Of course, running Linux is an adventure in itself and can be severely limiting if you need application support and to work with client data. But I'll have to tip my hat to the Linux community on this one, they had 64bit covered quite well.

IMHO, Apple is doing a much better job of putting a complete, top to bottom, 64 bit solution in the hands of people than both Microsoft and Sun. And Leopard proves that.
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Better than Microsoft yes. Better than Sun? Hmmm... I don't know about that one, I suppose it depends on which Sun offerings you're looking at. However, Sun is a different animal.

IMO a 32bit/64bit transition with 32bit backward compatibility all done right was already presented by SGI with Irix several years ago. Too bad they failed to evolve with the industry. These days, other than high-end storage servers, have little to offer the industry besides grossly overpriced Linux boxes in bulky, flamboyant enclosures.
 
regista said:
Being a HUGE long-time Linux fan myself (even have YDL installed on my PS3), I hate to say that it still definitely doesn't do as much as one would like it to and it's still not for everyone. I keep my fingers crossed that someday soon it'll go mainstream. Wouldn't THAT be something?
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Yep, I feel the same way...

As to Solaris, being a registered Sun Developer Network member, I can assure you that I love Sun hardware and software (the hardware is far pricier than Apple's, mind you). However, like Linux, Solaris also falls short on many fronts and it's clearly not for everyone, either.
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I used to deal with Sun hardware all the time and I always liked their workstations. Or I did back in the day when they were actually something kinda special. I still like their server offerings, but like I said they're a different animal compared to Apple and they target a rather different industry segment.

To be clear, I was referring to a top-to-bottom, all planets aligned, 64-bit hardware and software solution people can use out of the box without needing a Computer Science degree or MSCE certification. And not necessarily the kind of solution you'd expect to find in a high-end FX production facility or an enterprise server farm.
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Looking at it that way, yes, Apple is getting it together first. Microsoft had their chance and blew it by segmenting their products and failing to woo developers over to the 64bit side earlier in the game.

Sorry if my previous post made me sound like an Apple zealot, which I'm not. However, it does remain my platform of choice at the moment and I'm encouraged by Apple's close collaboration with RED.
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Hehe... Nothing wrong with a little Apple zealotry every now and then. I've done it myself. :) My G5 Quad is still my all-time favorite computer. And OSX is still my OS of choice to work with.... I still like Irix, but it's dead and outdated these days. Too bad because SGI really had a nice Unix implementation there. I also really like Next and the NextStep OS, and we get some of that with OSX as well.
 
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