[coolmemin]

Hello everyone, I would like to say first of all that I am just starting making videos and have taught myself everything just by looking at tutorials online so my knowledge probably has some holes in it, but basically this is my issue. I make teaching videos for my calculus students. I have started making more because they find them very useful but i find myself waiting a long time in the transfer of files from the camera, rendering, and then compression (i compress many different versions...small,medium,large), so I have decided to get a 2.8 Ghz 8-core mac pro. I have searched and searched around the forums and the internet but I can't seem to find the answer to my question. Most of the talk is about doing RAID setups which I don't think I can afford at this point in time (I don't get paid to do these). I would like to upgrade the hard drive in my Mac Pro though since I assume it would be a bottleneck in all of the steps that I am trying to make faster. I also have 2 external firewire 800 drives that I have so far been using as my scratch disks on the Imac I have now. I am trying to figure out what hard drive to get as my scratch disk. I heard good things about the velociraptor but 300GB seems like not enough space for FCP, so my question is,

if I did go with the Velociraptor, what is the best way to set up FCP so that I can improve the speed of the tasks I need to perform while at the sime time not running out of hard drive space?

I also considered the 1TB Samsung Spinpoint which got good reviews, and I'm considering getting both maybe, but in that case, what would be the best use of the combination. Should I set the Raptor as my boot drive and scratch drive, and what about the rest of my applications?

Also, if I set the raptor as the scratch disk then would I just set it in the settings for FCP to capture, render, etc on that disk?

Or would it possibly be better to forget about the raptor altogether and just get a high quality 1TB drive like the Samsung or Hitachi and be done with it. Would the raptor even be worth it?

Or what if I got the 1TB drive, then later i might be able to, when i have the money, get a raid card and add another drive or so...

I know this is long, but its really bugging me. Thank you

[tooki]

In video compression, the bottleneck is almost always the CPU. Assuming you're working with normal consumer gear, which all works with compressed video, the bitrates you're dealing with a well within what any hard drive 5 years ago could handle. The compression benefits from a fast CPU and multiple CPUs -- a Mac Pro is great for that.

You say you have an iMac -- you'll find that FCP will import/export significantly faster on the Mac Pro, regardless of what drive you use. Right now, the overall fastest 1TB drives are the Western Digital Caviar Black, and the Samsung F1 -- but all the 1TB drives are fast, really. (Look at some other threads in the Mac Pro forum now, there's an active discussion on hard disks.)

And remember: as your needs grow, you can always upgrade your storage later. In fact, since storage costs always drop with time, I don't recommend buying significantly more than you need now, since the extra space will cost less later.

I think the 2.8GHz 8-core will be great, just add a bit of RAM (it comes with 2GB stock, I'd recommend 4-8GB, bought from a third party since Apple's RAM prices are stupid high). Also, for Final Cut, the standard ATI graphics card is better than either of the upgrade options from nVidia.

For my Mac Pro (8x2.8), I added 6GB of RAM (one 1GB module in each RAM slot, for optimum performance), as well as a 640GB Western Digital to be my boot drive, plus a Hitachi 1TB drive just for backup. (The stock 320GB drive now serves as a scratch disk for EyeTV and other apps, as well as for DVD rips.)

[coolmemin]

that is great news, although i was planning on upgrading to the nvidia 8800 card. Everywhere I have read says that it is worth it. If for example I plan to use Motion later and/or Aperture it would be a good idea no?

I also already ordered 8GB of ram through OWC.

Thank you for your advice

[bearcatrp]

Just to add. Keep an eye on your page ins/outs in activity monitor. If the outs are more than 10%, bump up the ram as its writing to virtual disk (hard disk again). Am assuming your your working with SD video, not HD. I jumped from a iMac to a 2ghz quad core mac pro and cut my time almost in half. You should really see a big time drop. For what your doing, you could be doing this in iMovie which is allot easier but if your comfortable with FCP, go for it. I actually import my HD video into iMovie 8, them import into iMovie HD as I find iMovie HD very easy to use for doing home/ family events/ a few family weddings, etc.. Found some cool plugins from http://www.geethree.com . I just wich the next version of FCE or iMovie supports AVCHD fully. Good luck.

[coolmemin]

I like using FCP because I can send all of the jobs over to compressor and it can go to work on them overnight. The movies aren't very professional or anything I just like being able to compress in many different sizes. I am actually using HD. I just got a canon hf100 and it's working out great. No more tape capturing :-)

[tooki]

Originally Posted by coolmemin 

that is great news, although i was planning on upgrading to the nvidia 8800 card. Everywhere I have read says that it is worth it. If for example I plan to use Motion later and/or Aperture it would be a good idea no?

NO! The 8800GT is slower than the ATI 2600 for Motion (and the rest of Final Cut Studio) and Aperture. (The 8800GT is faster for gaming, but slower for the pro apps.)

The ATI 3870 card (an aftermarket card) is faster for the Pro apps.

[coolmemin]

Oh that is great to know. I had no idea. I will use the stock card then and maybe upgrade later to the ATI 3870 or whichever good one is available at that time. Thank you for that tip. I am also planning on starting out with 10GB of ram, and then upgrading to 16GB if I need to with another 4 sticks. I doubt i will need 32 GB... i hope

[coolmemin]

Would I notice a speed boost with the ATI 3870 for final cut pro or mostly for motion and those kinds of programs?

[angelmb]

Originally Posted by tooki 

NO! The 8800GT is slower than the ATI 2600 for Motion (and the rest of Final Cut Studio) and Aperture. (The 8800GT is faster for gaming, but slower for the pro apps.)

The ATI 3870 card (an aftermarket card) is faster for the Pro apps.

I wonder… would it be a drivers issue?, while I am not interested on detailed tech stuff, aren't games more demanding than apps or are video apps the most G/CPU hungry thing out there??

[tooki]

Drivers would be my best guess, but there's no way to know for sure, since we can't test the hardware and software in isolation.

As for what's faster, it really depends on what aspect of the GPU's tasks you're talking about.

Modern GPUs do a bunch of things, a few of which are:

1. 3D drawing
2. graphics processing (like texturing, resizing, morphing, etc)
3. video playback

Each of those are handled essentially separately in the card. 3D games use the first two extensively. The pro apps (except Aperture) are basically using the second two, while Aperture is really only using #2.

As it appears, the graphics processing in the nVidia card/driver combination isn't as strong as ATI's. For games, though, nVidia comes out ahead.