Mac Pro :: Using Final Cut / After Effects Ideal Config?
Aug 14, 2010
I'm a FCP / AE / Compressor user and have been in the market to upgrade my painfully slow G5 for years now. I'm pulling the trigger on a 2010 and trying to decide the best set up. I'm going with a 12-core but thinking the 2.66. Not sure if the extra $1200 can be justified to go to the 2.99. Anyone have an opinion?
I thought with that $1200 I could get more RAM instead. So, my second question is what the best move would be for RAM. I'm going with the base offering from apple and will remove and replace with either 2 or 3 8GB sticks or more 4GB sticks.
Meeting with my IT dept this afternoon to go over final configuration options for the 09 MP I'm getting. I've monitored these forums for the past month, and I think I'm close but have a few more questions. Note: This will be the first Mac in an all-PC environment. No one at our help desk is trained to support Macs.
1. RAID setup - Based on another thread I started, it seems to make sense to go with the 640 GB system drive, an Areca ARC-1212 card, and 3 x Western Digital 1TB RE3s. By my calculations, this would be a better setup for half the cost of going with the Apple RAID and their 3 x 1TB drives.
My IT dept realizes this, but no one here has much experience setting up RAIDs, let alone on Macs, which they will be learning to support on the fly. Because of this, they are leaning toward the Apple RAID card, if only for Apple support reasons. Can anyone who has experience with Areca vouch for their quality of tech support and/or the ease of setting this up? Does going with a non-Apple option for a RAID have any effect on the Apple Care warranty?
2. Graphics Card - To use my existing (PC workstation) setup of 2x24� dell monitors plus a 19� preview monitor, the Apple rep said I would need the 2xNVIDIA GeForce GT 120 option (plus the Mini DisplayPort to DVI Adapter option) to run a non-Apple display for the third monitor. He mentioned they do sell more powerful cards to handle my same monitor setup, but they would have to be purchased separately and we�d still have to get the one I just mentioned.
I just purchased FCPX but it crashes every single time I attempt to open the effects panel. I have verified my system is qualified, tried removing preferences, restarting, even reinstalling the application per Apple's support docs. Nothing fixes it. The crash happens on both 10.9.3 and 10.9.4, and ProApps Codecs are installed.
First of all I'm really new to external HD and stuff so pardon me if I get any terms wrong.I just bought My Passport 500GB and wish to format it for: Read/write on my Mac Leopard OS, Read only for Windows XP/vista. (Even in read-only videos still can be played, right?)What would be the right format? I DON'T want it to be FAT32 since it almost corrupted my friend's HD. I've heard about NTFS but got really confused about it.
I intend to burn close to 30 hours of home HD videos on hopefully HD disks like Blu-ray. I tried the Toast 9 and successfully burned a 15 minute HD on a regular DVD however on my MacBook 2.16 GHz with 2 GB RAM it took few hours for encoding.
Question #1: can any hardware piece ie: elgato's Turbo.264 will make a siginificant difference in encoding time
OR...
question#2: I need to shell out money for a powerful Mac Pro with an internal 3rd party BR burner (about $500), and if so, then what are ideal specs, dual core, quad core...RAM size, video card speed...etc.
Just recently bought a MBP and noticed how hot it will be when I am running WoW. (I saw it reach 100 degrees on istat.) after searching through the forums, I just downloaded smcFancontrol. Problem is, I have no idea what is an ideal temperature/fan speed. Basically, I have 3 questions:
1) Is there a max temperature the MBP should run at? 2) If I use smcFancontrol, should I use it at max setting (6200rpm) to keep my temperature down to the ideal temperature? 3) If I use a leather casing (Macally) for my MBP, would it seriously impair the MBP in terms of cooling?
When i play games, cpu temp runs about 80C , do you think this is not safe for mbp ?What temps must it be running ?Does it have protection against having high temp and shutting it down ?
I shoot about 40 weddings per year. (2500-3000 images per week). I am currently working off a 2 x2.66 Dual Core MacPro with 11GB of memory. I use Aperture and a bit of Final Cut Pro.I need the MacPro for storage issues related to iTunes and photo libraries so I have ruled out an iMac. My question is, when will I cross the "overkill" line. I don't spend my days doing intensive 3D render outputs of math computations so I know a 12 core is "too much".
I am running XP on VMware 2.01 and I was wondering what are the best settings to run it at. Is their a downside to have it running 2 cpus and max ram as well? Will OSX go really slugish? It says something about memory swapping occuring, what is this?
Does the 15" MBP have the ideal resolution for day to day office work (email, docs etc..) and to play the occasional game or is it even too low for this? My feeling is that the 17" MBP resolution is too high for office work and would be too small to read. What is the "perfect" resolution when doing office work on a 15" screen?
I wonder what the ideal artwork is for your music?Because on the pictures below you can see that there is still som white on the upper and bottom place of the artwork and it is a 600 x 600 artwork.. And I Have an iPhone 4S so the artwork needs to be high resolution?
I'm in the market for an internal HDD to use as a dedicated TM backup drive. The 2 TB WD Caviar Green is going for about $90 on Amazon right now. Seems like it might be a perfect TM backup drive? It's not that fast, but does that really matter for a TM backup? It's also quiet and doesn't use a lot of power.
I just bought a new Mac Pro and do lots of Photoshop and want to swap out the stock 320 gig drive. I'm leaning towards 2 ultra fast Seagate 1 TB drives in a raid 0 configuration. The Raptor noise level scares me a bit.
Anything negative to say about the Seagate drives? Any other configs?
I know...I know, I could try to do a search to see what others are doing but give an ol boy a break. I need advice...I have 2 F1 750s (just arrived), XP 64, and Fusion software setting in front of me. I also have the stock 320 HD already in my beast. What would be the best set up using all three HDs and loading XP/Fusion.
Currently I have 2x500GB and 1x250GB in my Mac Pro. I use 1 500GB as my boot drive, another as my Time Machine drive, and the 250 GB as a scratch disk/boot camp (although honestly I usually forget it's there).
My free space on my main drive has been fluctuating between 20GB and 3 GB due to encoding video. So last night I went to Newegg's site and ordered a 1TB drive. My intent is to run the 2 500GB's in RAID.
So my question is... should I run the 1 TB as my boot drive or the 2x500GB as my boot drive? Short term it would be easiest to run the 1 TB as my boot drive since I'd clone it to the 1TB. If I want to run the 2x500GB as my boot drive I need to clone twice essentially.
OK I just got a new Nehalem quad core Mac Pro. I am new to Mac and I bought it because I will be doing some heavy video editing. I have 4 harddrives for it, a 640gb that came with it, and 3 1TB seagates barracuda's. My question is exactly how I should set up my RAID config to be as fast as possible?
I have read some articles about RAID 0 on Mac Pro's but am a little confused. Setups that any of you use would be much appreciated.
I've just setup the basic installation of 10.5 server. For some reason it's picked up the wrong info for the .config file - it's using my laptop's name.
So to access remotely via ssh, it says I need to use "ssh myServerName@myLaptop.config.
I seem to have trouble connecting my mpb with certain hdtv's - sony, toshiba. the screen resolution seems to always be bigger than the actual tv size, so the ends are cut off, such as menubar and dock can't be seen. i can't change the settings on my tv, and the display settings on the mbp are limited. is there any app which can adjust the screen size manually? such as a zoom out tool?
Figured I would come right to you guys (even though I'm a Macbook PRO owner I know this is the place to ask questions)My current config is a 1.8 GHZ Core 2 duo (base)13" model, 128GB SSD, 4GB ram upgrade (is this smart?)Warranty 1 year...will upgrade later this year.Free printer..100 cost, 100 rebate..worth it?Anything else I should add? How will this perform with imovie, iphoto, windows dual boot if I choose to?also adding pre install of iWork...41 bucks to add with student discount and promo price.
i had my friends white book and when i opened the air port it found the linksys wireless G router i had had connected but it didnt ask me for the password.
I know i set a password for the linksys router because when i log on using my HP it ask me for the password.
Question is what did i do wrong? or are the linksys wireless routers not the best things to use with the mac?
New ADSL Modem/Router from ISP.A Zyxel P-660HN-T1A_1Pv6 Only wanted the modem function as I use Time Capsule and an Airport Express to extend the signal.On bringing up the modem web page and login box for device configuration, my password is not accepted using Safari ( My default browser)I have managed a successful login with Firefox(on adjusting permissions) and immediately with Opera and Google Chrome.I use "wireless"off and the Open DNS servers, but the login failed initially while showing my ISP's DNS addresses To add to the confusion, a friend who was visiting today with his laptop was able to access my device configuration with his Safari (which he doesn't use usually) I am left with the conclusion that there is something in my Safari setup which is blocking the browser from accepting the password.For the life of me I can't identify it and other than checking others' setups I don't know where to go from here.
Info: iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.3), 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
I've been using my Logitech MX1000 for a long time now with USB Overdrive and it's been fantastic. Being able to use the extra buttons to serve different purposes on a per-application basis has been amazing.
I just bought a Logitech Wave keyboard, which is great, but I ended up installing the Logitech Control Center since I couldn't find a way to configure the extra keys and I wanted volume controls, etc via the keyboard. The LCC software took care of this with flying colors, but it seems to also take control of my mouse and replaces the settings I had from USB Overdrive.
Basically what I'm asking is... is it possible to disable the mouse settings in LCC so it only sets up the key configurations on my keyboard? If not... is there some software available similar to USB Overdrive, but instead lets you configure all of the keys on your keyboard?
Since upgrading to Lion I've had the problem with wi fi losing connection and this seems to be common?The Apple support talked me through a change in system config. I'm no expert and not sure if I could repeat if needed.The support desk could not guarantee that this will permanently fix the problem though.
