Thread: My Super Mac

Hello tech lovers,

Scuse me but I just thought I would post up a bit of stuff about my Mac Pro. We use it to edit video, and it's now just about perfect. It has taken me a long time to learn enough about the tech side to get this thing to perform. It can crunch full HD at 1080 25p and up to 50 frames a second without dropping frames. A lot of programs will play back at less than full frame rates so it is deceiving until you try to play out to a video deck at full resolution, then you get nasty warnings etc...

I had it built with just a 2.26 GHZ processor - but with 8 cores to multi task the video conversions. A 3GHZ processor was another few thousand dollars and unnecessary for our work - despite my ego wanting one badly. I paid nearly Nine grand for it without the drives etc.. .

It has only 12 GB of Ram and I might put another 4 into it - although apparently they like multiples of twelve for some reason! And it seems to run really fast now so maybe maybe maybe!!!

It has a single 1TB internal drive that is junk and due to be replaced ASAP!

It has a dual monitor ATI true HD graphics card that we run two 22 inch LG 1920x1080 monitors through DVI ports, as well as a 22 inch HP HD Video monitor that runs off the Video card. The Apple monitors of the same size are about three times the price and I don't use them for reference anyway so seemed a little OTT!!!

The video card is a Blackmagic internal High Def set up. What a nice piece of kit, we can capture full uncompressed 10 bit HDSDI Video up to 444 colour depth. It has about 5 different composite video inputs and outputs for analog as well as an HDMI in and out for monitoring and capturing true High definition (See above screen). 4 channel Fully balanced audio in and out as well.

I have made a small patch panel with various extensions from the back of the computer to run extra monitors and capturing off SDI video decks.

I monitor the audio out of a pair of Roland studio speakers and also have a small Sony 9" professional CRT Studio Monitor for colour grading.

I just put an ESATA card in it to run our external drives. The ESATA is so unbelievably quick. It will transfer 1GB in about three and a half seconds! Much faster than firewire 800 by a country mile. Attached to the ESATA are 3 G-Tech External professional drives, a 1 TB, a 2 TB and a 4TB. I also have a Lacie 8TB drive attached to the ESATA but it is solely set up as the Mac Time machine back up and is a perfect copy of our computer. This Lacie is having a bit of a hissy fit and is overheating at the moment! That's about 4 grand on drives alone

We have some smaller 500gb external drives for photos and stuff running off firewire 800.

It runs the current Final Cut Studio and a stack of other video software but FCP is pretty good.

Currently I am working on a job that has over 4TB of media - which can be interesting.

So if you need help setting up a professional edit suite, I'm here to help!!!




The System



The back of it.... Iphone photos so Solly

Thanks for all that.

The Geek bench site gave me a score of 12392! Which is pretty good I think, seemed to be only beaten by Hewlett Packard servers and a few mac 3.3ghz servers.

I have run a pro Black Magic speed test that tells you how many frames per second of HD video you can crunch and I get about 50 per second uncompressed so that's all I need to know! Twice as much as needed so happy with that!

You are killing me with the black out thing and lighting etc.....We live in a 2 bedroom apartment in inner city Brisbane. Both me and my wife work in the same room. Not seen in the photos but I only illuminate the desk and the reflections in the screens don't really bug me at the moment. But all that is on the cards after I buy a Sony F900 camera for about $250K .

It is far from ideal but like I said when we get some returns on our investment, there will be a whole blackout curtain, sound deadened custom unit thing going on.