New to Red workflow, looking for a Mac Pro FCP/AE suite.

[Patrick Kaplin]

I'm looking to purchase a Mac Pro in order to edit, color-correct, and online Red footage. Being quite new to this, I'd like to ask if there's any reason that this machine would not be sufficient for the Red workflow.

http://www.powermax.com/parts/show/c-rfb451ll__a-ref

benchmark tests: http://www.barefeats.com/nehal03.html

Obviously, I'd like to upgrade the RAM to at least 16GB, upgrade the graphics card as well (suggestions, I've heard good things about the ATI Radeon cards) and add more internal storage. With the add-ons, I'm expecting the cost to add up to an extra $2,000, coming to just under $5,000 for the system.

Are the Nehalem Mac Pros what I should really be looking at? Are they that much faster for Red processing? If I were to purchase a Red Rocket card with the Mac that I linked to, would the performance be sufficient? What kind of render times should I expect for a machine powered with Red Rocket versus no Red Rocket? Render times with Nehalem versus no Nehalem?

The station would also double as our After Effects intensive graphics suite. Right now we're running a dinosaur, G5 dual 2Ghz with 4.5GB RAM and it's quite slow. How much faster would the aforementioned Mac Pro be with render times for AE?

Sorry for the barrage of questions, lots on my mind regarding this purchase.

Thanks in advance everybody.

 

[Andrew R]

the nehalem machines, in my experience, aren't necessarily faster than the other machines right now. you'll be fine with the 3.2x8 that you've got picked out.

my 2.66x8 nehalem worked spectacularly with RED footage before upgrading to snow leopard, but it never seems to use more than 4 cores with the RED apps. the extra clock speed for the price and cheaper RAM for the model you've picked might be a better use of your money

 

[Stephen Lovett]

Hi Patrick,

I'd go with the Nehalem.

I can't do a direct comparison as I have a 2.8 instead of a 3.2, and a 2.26 Nehalem.

Doing a true apples to apples (so to speak) between even these two would be a huge pita because mine have different disk arrays unequal memory etc. but the Nehalem seems to be faster to me.

That said, I also use ClipFinder a lot, and you can set ClipFinder to use all eight cores.

The barefeats data seems to bear out that conclusion.

While not available today when I've looked in the past the 2.26's have been available refurbished from Apple for the same price you have quoted here. The memory will cost you more however.

There is one other thing to consider. The newer model makes using any internal hard drive bays with your raid a real pain, where the last generation makes it super easy. I have two built in raid arrays on the 2.8, a raid 5 set up with the three motherboard bays, and a raid six based on 8 2.5" drives in the optical bays. Makes for a nice relatively portable DIT machine.

I also remember that at least initially the Rocket worked better with the newer machines, that may have been resolved however.

Finally as always, if you can wait do. Moore's law and all that, the new Gulftown's are supposed to ship quite soon.

Cheers,

Steve

 

[Bruce Guido]

Hey Steve,

Can you give us a rundown of your raid 6 and raid 5 in your Mac? Are the 8 2.5"s for SSDs? I'm going to be getting a Mac Pro soon, but I'm waiting for the Gulftown Mac to come out (hopefully soon, because I'm getting anxious to make a purchase!) Obviously this is for Red post, and I'm looking for the fastest/most efficient hard drive array I can get (I'm willing to spend some money, but not too much). So far I was just planning on 4 2TB WD Caviar Blacks in Raid 5 and using G-Raid's for storage when I'm done with projects. What more could I reasonably do to interior additions of storage (excluding external storage).

(Side not, what Andrew said about "before snow leopard came out," does he mean that his Nehalem performed better before Snow Leopard or after?)