getting the Mac Pro. need advice pls.

Edward wrote on 8/24/2006, 1:55 AM
I'm taking the step and getting the Mac Pro with Bootcamp. I've tried searching, but couldn't find anything about know issues. I know that there might be some mac/windows issues, I just don't know what.

I'm getting the Mac Pro 3.0.Ghz
Is there anything that I need to know about setup?
Blackmagic card work or no work?
Saving files on the hard drive so that I can open it up in FCP? Vice versa?

Thanks for your help.

Comments

farss wrote on 8/24/2006, 3:41 AM
I think you should be OK,
what you need to check is what sort of slot the BMD cards need, on the previous Macs there was no PCI-E slot for the high end BMD cards so you needed a bridge card that looked kind of expensive. The obvious people to check with are BMD themselves.

Fortunately this new Mac has space for a few more HDD internally avoiding the cost of fibrechannel. Still not enough room for drives in my opinion but a step in the right direction.

What projects are you intending to do, just SD or HD as well?

Bob.
Edward wrote on 8/24/2006, 3:15 PM
thanks farss.
I'm doin' mostly SD. looking at the BMD site, they've already ran tests. Since I'm only doing SD stuff, they said it's supported in any Mac Pro model, but this was for FCP 5 tho, and nothing about bootcamp, windows and vegas. I'm thinkin' there won't be any problems.

What caught my eye is that post on some of Vegas 7's new features. Aja support? We're runnin' G5's with Aja firewire boxes. Later we'll have our server up and runnin', so going with Aja might be helpful when transferring footage between machines.

I think I'll try to get Spot to come down here and consult.
Coursedesign wrote on 8/24/2006, 4:17 PM
Recent G5s and the new Mac Pro models are 100% PCI-E.

The hardware really is incredibly well designed, a real beauty and an amazing value too.

3TB in the box not enough for you?

Your best bet on file formats imho would be to just use Windows add-on drivers that can read and write Mac file system for when you need to shoot files back and forth. Search for previous posts here.
Edward wrote on 8/24/2006, 6:41 PM
we picked up MacDrive 6, hope that helps.
unfortunatly, we're only gettin' 500 Gb.
I'll do some more searchin'.

Thanks for your help. I guess there's nothing to worry about.
farss wrote on 8/25/2006, 12:44 AM
My current monster could take 7.5TB of SATA, my bank account couldn't.. Working in 10 bit 4:2:2 you eat up disk space very quickly. Shift to HD with that codec and you need not only very large amounts of storage but speed as well, hence my comment.