MacPro techno lust
I"ve never had a home Mac, and I haven't bought a Mac in a work environment since sometime in the mid 80's. Apple had a clearly superior office computer, but wasn't able to turn that into dominance. Oh well. I've always liked the machines, but had to live with Windows.
Now I'm considering Macs for both home and work. The motivation is video. For home use, Final Cut (THE video editor) is much more format friendly than Adobe Premier. And quicktime is a very reasonable publishing framework. I'm not sure what kind of machine to get. I'd prefer a laptop, but they seem a little too light weight.
For work, I need support for raw video at screaming fast data rates, and the professional video eco-system is far superior for Macs.
So this is what I might get (for work):
- MacPro with dual quad core processors, and 4 GB of RAM
-2.5 TB RAID with dual Fiber Channel interface, minimum throughput spec'ed at 2.8 Gbps -- bursts up to 6.4 Gbps -- argh argh argh
- Final Cut Studio 2
All that just to stream uncompressed 1920x1080p @ 60 frames/sec.
Maybe I can use it on the weekends for my home movies.
One might wonder why, with SATA II disks spec'ed at 3 Gbps, I'm excited about a 2.8 Gbps RAID array. Drives generally can't sustain rates anywhere near what their interface runs at. The 10 drives in the RAID have a aggregate throughput of 30 Gbps, but that is needed to be guaranteed that >=2.8 Gbps can be played out continuously, for hours at a time.
Nice.
The RAID I picked is here.
It's the big rack mount puppy in this image.
Swee-e-e-et.
|
I"ve never had a home Mac, and I haven't bought a Mac in a work environment since sometime in the mid 80's. Apple had a clearly superior office computer, but wasn't able to turn that into dominance. Oh well. I've always liked the machines, but had to live with Windows.
Now I'm considering Macs for both home and work. The motivation is video. For home use, Final Cut (THE video editor) is much more format friendly than Adobe Premier. And quicktime is a very reasonable publishing framework. I'm not sure what kind of machine to get. I'd prefer a laptop, but they seem a little too light weight.
For work, I need support for raw video at screaming fast data rates, and the professional video eco-system is far superior for Macs.
So this is what I might get (for work):
- MacPro with dual quad core processors, and 4 GB of RAM
-2.5 TB RAID with dual Fiber Channel interface, minimum throughput spec'ed at 2.8 Gbps -- bursts up to 6.4 Gbps -- argh argh argh
- Final Cut Studio 2
All that just to stream uncompressed 1920x1080p @ 60 frames/sec.
Maybe I can use it on the weekends for my home movies.
- mark 3-21-2008 5:56 am
One might wonder why, with SATA II disks spec'ed at 3 Gbps, I'm excited about a 2.8 Gbps RAID array. Drives generally can't sustain rates anywhere near what their interface runs at. The 10 drives in the RAID have a aggregate throughput of 30 Gbps, but that is needed to be guaranteed that >=2.8 Gbps can be played out continuously, for hours at a time.
- mark 3-21-2008 8:03 am [add a comment]
Nice.
- jim 3-21-2008 8:06 pm [add a comment]
The RAID I picked is here.
It's the big rack mount puppy in this image.
Swee-e-e-et.
- mark 3-22-2008 7:44 am [add a comment]