Thinking of buying a Mac Pro

J

jetjaguar

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im currently in school for film and gonna be getting heavily into using final cut pro .. etc .. currently i just had a pc that i use to game in .. but ive been seriously considering getting a mac pro for school and future work .. i heard there might be an update soon so im holding off purchasing one

from looking at the specs on apple's site . i would prollly just get the dual 2.8s or whatever the speed is after the update .. as far as video .. its either a x2600xt or 8800gt so i suppose i would get the 8800 gt .. as far as ram i would prolly buy it with 2gb or whatever the base is and upgrade myself instead of buying the ram from apple
also i have 2 x 1.5gb hds already but after looking at apples site it seems like the largest hd it can run in the mac pros are 1gb ? is this true ??
 
that's just the largest hdd option they sell, like you said you're better off doing upgrades post purchase, well, memory and hard drive wise anyway, but do get their video card upgrade.
 
the 1.5tb drives will work fine... I'd love to have a Mac Pro but can't really bring myself to buy one... Plus I like having my custom desktop also.
 
I am currently going to grad school for film and have a mac pro. I also used it to edit 2 feature films before I went back to school. It is the original quad 2.6. I use final cut studio 2 usually on a daily basis. All of my footage is shot HDV and converted to the apple intermediate codec which comes out to be about a gig a minute. I also have shot 16mm footage and had it scanned as prorez422 and edited on the system.

If you are planning on serious editing on a frequent basis, a mac pro is essential. I have g5's in the labs at school and they just get slow when you try to do things with HD footage. Even on my system it takes about 4-5 hours to make a nice h.264 5-10 minute hd movie in compressor.

I would suggest buying a mac pro from the clearance section of the apple website. Mine was around $2000 and just as shiny as the new ones. I recently found out apple rehouses the refurbished laptops, I don't know if this is true of the towers but they seriously are identical to the brand new ones.

Do not buy any more hard drives or memory from apple than you have to, they are ridiculous when it comes to those prices. Newegg is literally 50% cheaper for the exact same stuff. You want as much memory and hard drive space as you can afford. I wouldn't suggest less than 4gb, I have 7gb and compressor will gobble up all of it when working. Final Cut usually used around 4gb. In the long run you will find you need a massive amount of hard drives. I would suggest at least 2 terabytes to start with, it fills up fast. I like to keep all my important project on the system so I can get to them whenever I want. I haven't invested in hardware raid yet, I probably will soon, money is just the biggest factor. I have 2 500gb drives in raid and they are not too much faster than my single terabyte drives, you need the hardware card to really see a RAID boost in a mac pro.

In the end it depends on how much editing you plan on doing. You can get away with a Macbook Pro with an external drive, but the cost of that is pretty close to a mac pro anyways. For me, I need final cut to be quick with rendering and exporting so memory and hard drives are big. I have noticed that my processor are rarely all at 100% but I'm sure there is an advantage to the 8 cores over the 4 cores, especially as HD formats are becoming more demanding.

If you've got the mac pro with final cut, you've got a world class editing system that can do just about anything. There are some people who will tell you Avid is the real industry standard, but that's simply not true anymore. Benjamin Buttons was done all on Final Cut and was extremely intensive on the graphics and effects.
 
ya cha cha said:
I have noticed that my processor are rarely all at 100% but I'm sure there is an advantage to the 8 cores over the 4 cores, especially as HD formats are becoming more demanding.
Click to expand...

There is a large difference between the quad and 8-core systems because of the FSB boost and faster Memory.
http://www.barefeats.com/harper.html
http://www.barefeats.com/harper3.html

Hard Drives:

The 1.5TB I thought had some problems,
It is safer to stay with the 1TB or 2TB hard drives.
Western Digital RE2 or RE3 are perfect drives for the Mac Pro, since they are the enterprise edition they really work well.
 
ya cha cha said:
I am currently going to grad school for film and have a mac pro. I also used it to edit 2 feature films before I went back to school. It is the original quad 2.6. I use final cut studio 2 usually on a daily basis. All of my footage is shot HDV and converted to the apple intermediate codec which comes out to be about a gig a minute. I also have shot 16mm footage and had it scanned as prorez422 and edited on the system.

If you are planning on serious editing on a frequent basis, a mac pro is essential. I have g5's in the labs at school and they just get slow when you try to do things with HD footage. Even on my system it takes about 4-5 hours to make a nice h.264 5-10 minute hd movie in compressor.

I would suggest buying a mac pro from the clearance section of the apple website. Mine was around $2000 and just as shiny as the new ones. I recently found out apple rehouses the refurbished laptops, I don't know if this is true of the towers but they seriously are identical to the brand new ones.

Do not buy any more hard drives or memory from apple than you have to, they are ridiculous when it comes to those prices. Newegg is literally 50% cheaper for the exact same stuff. You want as much memory and hard drive space as you can afford. I wouldn't suggest less than 4gb, I have 7gb and compressor will gobble up all of it when working. Final Cut usually used around 4gb. In the long run you will find you need a massive amount of hard drives. I would suggest at least 2 terabytes to start with, it fills up fast. I like to keep all my important project on the system so I can get to them whenever I want. I haven't invested in hardware raid yet, I probably will soon, money is just the biggest factor. I have 2 500gb drives in raid and they are not too much faster than my single terabyte drives, you need the hardware card to really see a RAID boost in a mac pro.

In the end it depends on how much editing you plan on doing. You can get away with a Macbook Pro with an external drive, but the cost of that is pretty close to a mac pro anyways. For me, I need final cut to be quick with rendering and exporting so memory and hard drives are big. I have noticed that my processor are rarely all at 100% but I'm sure there is an advantage to the 8 cores over the 4 cores, especially as HD formats are becoming more demanding.

If you've got the mac pro with final cut, you've got a world class editing system that can do just about anything. There are some people who will tell you Avid is the real industry standard, but that's simply not true anymore. Benjamin Buttons was done all on Final Cut and was extremely intensive on the graphics and effects.
Click to expand...

Wow thanks for your input. Like i said ive always been a pc person but mac is the standard when it comes to the film industry and i want to get into editing .. making movie trailers .. etc. I have a regular macbook but its crappy and slow. When it comes to projects I like working on a big screen so im pretty sure i would get a desktop since they can be made very powerful. I believe some people have said that the refresh of the mac pros is coming soon and they should be around 3k. I would definitely not buy storage or extra memory from them. In my pc currently i have about 3.5tb .. 2 x 1.5 tb drives that ive had no issues with and 2 x 300gb raptors
 
Macbook is nowhere near the performance of a Mac Pro (where Mac Pro doesn't mean Macbook Pro, as one is a workstation while the other is a notebook).
 
I personally do my daily editing and graphics on a 24" imac. We have multiple mac pro's here and while they are faster, if it were my money, no way I would consider it. The pro's just aren't better enough to justify spending more than twice as much.

When you outgrow the Imac (probably after after school is done for you), you can sell it and upgrade to the latest mac pro.

I also own an aluminum macbook and really don't like editing on any laptop. Screen space is essential, the 24" 1920x1200 screen is EXCELLENT in almost every respect for editing, especially color accuracy.

Refurbed 24" imac: $1545 or the 3.06ghz one with with 8800gs: $2199

mac pro: $2800 + the cost of a 24" monitor.... and most 24" LCD's pale compared to the one included in the imac (ironic).

If you've got money, go to town. But if your just going to be using motion and final cut pro, don't waste your money. If you've got 10-hour after effects renders, it makes more sense... but thats an extreme minority. Even our mac pro's are underutilized. and here we've got a few, so we use qmaster for renders.

Spend your money on software instead. FC studio and adobe CS.

Admittedly, the mac pro's are nicer and faster. The hard drive expansion is slick, but the memory costs a fortune (FB-DIMMs suck).... and the graphics card expansion is nice too, but ask yourself if your actually going to upgrade the card and use that extra expansion. I personally store most of my files on the network (gig-E) and for nearline files, a FW800 drive (which freaking rocks).

//edit: we've also got some G5's and they are stupid-slow compared to any intel mac.
 
well monitor isnt an immediate concern as for my pc i have a 30 inch monitor .. but eventually i would switch to an apple or pick up another 30 inch and run duals .. the reason i like the mac pros (which currently waiting for the update) .. i have alot of hds that i can use .. as for memory i would add as i need it

as far as software i know i would need final cut pro .. and possibly avid .. still waiting to hear on the update from apple for the mac pros
 
honestly, you'd be much better off building your own i7 system for less than half the price and more performance.
 
honestly, you'd be much better off building your own i7 system for less than half the price and more performance.
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Considering you can't legally run Final Cut Studio on a Core i7 at the moment, and the 4 physical with 8 logical cores are not quite as fast as 8 physical cores, the Mac Pro as is is the better choice. Mostly because of Final Cut. The performance difference isnt significant when talking about current Xeons to an i7. But, if he waits for the update he gets a pair of Nehalem EPs which mean 8 physical cores and 16 logical cores (hmm.. I wonder if he should wait for that...) I think that would be worthy of spending 3 grand on. Plus, with Grand Central in Snow Leopard (which should be out by the time the next mac pro release), makes extremely efficient usage of all cores available to the Operating System, both physical and logical.

And yes, I know all about OSx86, and the companies porting OS X, but technically, those are not legal ways to run OS X
 
RaphaelVinceti said:
Considering you can't legally run Final Cut Studio on a Core i7 at the moment, and the 4 physical with 8 logical cores are not quite as fast as 8 physical cores, the Mac Pro as is is the better choice. Mostly because of Final Cut. The performance difference isnt significant when talking about current Xeons to an i7. But, if he waits for the update he gets a pair of Nehalem EPs which mean 8 physical cores and 16 logical cores (hmm.. I wonder if he should wait for that...) I think that would be worthy of spending 3 grand on. Plus, with Grand Central in Snow Leopard (which should be out by the time the next mac pro release), makes extremely efficient usage of all cores available to the Operating System, both physical and logical.

And yes, I know all about OSx86, and the companies porting OS X, but technically, those are not legal ways to run OS X
Click to expand...

Is there really no Final Cut Studio equivalent on Windows? I seriously doubt that. And what's the big deal about "Grand Central"...really? From what I know, Windows 7 will have better multicore support, too. Plus Devs will have to re-program their apps to take advantage of grand central anyhow, so it won't be an amazing feature right off the bat.

I'm not a mac hater. I do have a macbook. But from personal experience, tying yourself to the mac operating system is just not worth it.
 
I tend to agree with both sides of this argument in this case. Yes, an i7 build would be a capable performer. If you wanted to run Windows. If the OP wants to run OSX, then the only legal way to do it, while still meeting his requirements, is to buy a Mac Pro. End of discussion.

OP: Yes, the Mac Pro is a splendid machine, and I think it would definitely do anything you ask it to do. Many will try to turn you away from the Mac Pro because of it's price, but, even though few can afford the Mac Pro, the few that can are very pleased with theirs. While I do not personally own a Mac Pro, I do know people in person that do, and they have had no trouble with theirs. The one person I know upgraded from a Dual G5 2.3, and he said that the Mac Pro is over twice as fast, and he operates a for-profit amateur video and photo studio out of his home. He still likes his G5, but the Mac Pro is obviously a far more capable machine, and it has become the only machine he uses when using Final Cut.
 
There are windows alternatives to final cut, but Final Cut is considered the industry standard for video editing, and if the OP wants to run industry standard, then a Mac Pro would be his best option.

To the OP: For your undergrad courses, I doubt you will really need the power of a Mac Pro for editing. Granted, yes, it would make things faster, but it is quite a bit of money, when you can get a 24" iMac that will be completely capable of handling everything except maybe your senior project flawlessly, and the only issue it will have with your senior project is it might take a bit of extra time (project planning = must). I would recommend just getting an iMac, or, if you want something portable, as you already have a desktop, get a Macbook Pro and the 24" screen to go with it (ends up roughly the same cost as the Mac Pro if you got the 1999 Macbook Pro), and some external firewire 800 hdds
 
For Final Cut get a Mac Pro. The time you save rendering make you more productive and time is $. Or you can use the extra time to make your work even more complex =)
 
RaphaelVinceti said:
There are windows alternatives to final cut, but Final Cut is considered the industry standard for video editing, and if the OP wants to run industry standard, then a Mac Pro would be his best option.
Click to expand...


and protools is the "industry standard" for audio editing, but we're not talking about 1999 here, there are plenty of studios running other systems other than MAC and PT/FCP
 
Plenty of other post houses running something other than Pro Tools and Final Cut/Avid? No. There's no such animal, my friend.
 
Optional87 said:
that's just the largest hdd option they sell, like you said you're better off doing upgrades post purchase, well, memory and hard drive wise anyway, but do get their video card upgrade.
Click to expand...
I agree, that's what i did when I bought mine. it saved me about $400 upgrading my ram and hard drive post purchase.
 
Mavvok said:
and protools is the "industry standard" for audio editing, but we're not talking about 1999 here, there are plenty of studios running other systems other than MAC and PT/FCP
Click to expand...

Plenty studio's run without network cards? I find that hard to believe.

On another related note;

MAC = Media Address Control for Networking
Mac = Macintosh

Sorry, I'm personally a PC fanboy but I CAN'T STAND people who make that mistake, often deliberately. I love my PC's to death, but *Mac's* (and MAC's coincidently) all have their places/uses.
 
Chilly said:
Plenty studio's run without network cards? I find that hard to believe.

On another related note;

MAC = Media Address Control for Networking
Mac = Macintosh

Sorry, I'm personally a PC fanboy but I CAN'T STAND people who make that mistake, often deliberately. I love my PC's to death, but *Mac's* (and MAC's coincidently) all have their places/uses.
Click to expand...

HOW ABOUT MACINTOSH COMPUTER? DOES THAT WORK FOR YOU?

seriously, are you just trying to up your post count?
 
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