MacVegas: A New Chapter

vitalforce wrote on 6/2/2007, 12:38 PM
Just had to celebrate something. My render time for a feature-length DV project on my old Dell 8200 was 27 hours. It was a hot rod when first purchased, just before that newfangled HT enhancement came out.

Now, I have invested a rare company bonus into a Mac Pro, a quad Xeon 2.66, 2GB RAM, running XP Pro on Boot Camp. Vegas automatically defaulted to use all four threads to render, and rendering the film from a firewire source drive onto the same hard drive that the OS's are installed on, reduced the render time to 6 hours.

That's not the punch line. I just plugged in a newly arrived SATA 3GB internal drive into one of the Mac's bays, formattted it and rendered to it.

Render time is 3 hours. Unbelievable.

Comments

p@mast3rs wrote on 6/2/2007, 2:44 PM
Would be nice if Apple dropped their prices a bit so that PC users dont have to mortgage the house to use their OS.
deusx wrote on 6/2/2007, 3:17 PM
Why wait for apple to drop prices, just buy a PC. Same chips, same render times.
Coursedesign wrote on 6/2/2007, 3:48 PM
So which ready-built high quality PC would you recommend that can beat a Mac Pro on price?

Same specs as above.

The Mac Pro has already spread panic among Dell's sales reps. Just mentioning "Mac Pro" on the phone to them leads to an instant 25% discount off their list price, and Dell still loses the business (because they're still more expensive and less attractive on top of that).

HP/Compaq workstations are pretty good if you are selective, but beating Mac Pro on price? Not that easy.

Build your own? Sure, but it won't look as nice inside as a Mac Pro, no matter what components you buy, and you still have to do the assembly, testing, and warranty support yourself. Not everyone wants to do that.

Mac Pros have really good solid engineering, and they are provably good for Windows PC use too, as huge numbers of customers all over the world have confirmed for themselves.

For many video editors, there is also a great practical advantage in being able to work with Mac files natively in FCP, Motion, or other apps before or after jammin' in Vegas. Most other industry folks (about 800,000 of them) use FCP, and whether we like it or not, that makes it a standard. The various converters are beyond fiddly in my experience, and nothing beats handing over a native file or a native hard drive, or being able to receive a native Mac drive and then being able to work on the media on either platform.
LSHorwitz wrote on 6/2/2007, 4:32 PM
I would be extremely interested to see how your MacPro does with the rendering test being discussed and compared for many other CPUs on this forum in the thread:

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=526098&Replies=63

Running this brief test and reporting your results would allow me and others to see exactly how well your MacPro compares to the latest quad QX6700 / QX6800 Intel boxes and AMD high end systems others have already measured.

Many thanks,

Larry
farss wrote on 6/2/2007, 5:04 PM
I don't buy this at all. A few weeks ago I sat down with a Macolite and we priced out a decently speced Mac. The price was significanlty higher than what a PC from a top end vendor would have cost. Apple are keeping the base machine very cheap but once you kit it up with all the goodies the price goes through the roof.
Try adding SCSI RAID with 10 drives which you can't even fit in the Apple box and you're through the roof and into orbit price wise. Good engineering, no way. It's engineering done by marketing.

Bob.
johnmeyer wrote on 6/2/2007, 5:12 PM
I sat down with a Macolite ...

Excellent, and very accurate, term Never heard it before. I like it.

Good engineering, no way. It's engineering done by marketing.

Sometimes when I talk to Mac acolytes, I feel that the famous "1984" Mac intro ad showed the wrong group of users in the audience, listening to Big Brother and believing everything he said ...
farss wrote on 6/2/2007, 5:31 PM
It was quite revealing talking to the engineers from high end systems at NAB. They'd show me their stuff and mention how it could handle QT, so I'd ask how they dealt with the issues of handling QT. Once they established that I wasn't a Mac user their whole tone changed after a bit of head shaking. Interesting too that almost all the high end stuff runs on PCs.
Coursedesign wrote on 6/2/2007, 6:03 PM
Anyone who buys anything but the base machine from Apple should have his head examined.

The base machine is value priced, the add-ons are highway robbery.

Bob, I don't understand why you would want to put a 10-drive SCSI RAID inside a Mac Pro? That makes no sense.

Are you perhaps referring to Apple Xserve components that fit in standard 19" racks?
farss wrote on 6/2/2007, 6:32 PM
Bob, I don't understand why you would want to put a 10-drive SCSI RAID inside a Mac Pro? That makes no sense.

Exactly my point, you can't!

You're forced to use a fibre interconnet. Apples boxes are engineered on the "function follows form" paradigm. How many optical drives can you fit? What can you do if the power supply runs out of steam?

I've got an empty G5 chassis here, one day I plan to build a PC inside it using off the shelf bits just for a giggle. Significant metalwork will be required by the look of it.
Coursedesign wrote on 6/2/2007, 10:21 PM
I politely disagree with the desirability to put a 10-drive RAID inside a workstation, whether it be PC or Mac. For reasons of heat, noise, serviceability, fast swappability and more, that RAID array should be outside.

Now that we got that out of the way, get yer duff off that editing chair and trek over to the nearest Mac Pro to take a look inside. Then tell me what you think of the hardware design inside that box and how it compares with any PC or PC-based workstation you have ever seen (and hint: it looks nothing like a G5!).
farss wrote on 6/3/2007, 12:52 AM
Hm,
my main workstation was designed for a 10-drive SCSI RAID, yes all hot swappable, all plugged into a backplane. Unfortunately the budget didn't stretch as far as all those SCSI drives so it's kind of choking running a few SATA drives. But is a workstation? Well it can be rack mounted very easily, so maybe not. But then it does "work" while I'm on "station' so maybe it is. Not all that hot but yeah it can sure get noisy. Then again if it ain't wirring it ain't workin'. It's is very serviceable though, you can replace any part without a screwdriver, even the fan modules just clip in. Definately not a machine you'd want anywhere near your recording studio.

You're right, I should get out more, spent all day feeding printers. Who ever came up with the idea of putting booklets inside DVD cases. Time to buy a color duplex laser printer.

Bob.

vitalforce wrote on 6/3/2007, 1:36 AM
Actually Apple calls the Mac Pro with the new Intel Xeon chips a "workstation."

But my reasoning was not merely to jump ship to Apple-land. Given this company bonus (which was the one thing that kept my wife from going a little nuts), buying the Mac Pro gave me two computers in one. I like to explore the Apple software on that side of the hard drive, but I'm using 90% Windows software in it now through Boot Camp which Apple was smart enough to have as a free download off their site. Over the next year I expect to learn Avid and FCP, which will all run with Vegas in the same box.

And I do have to admit two things: Apple's software graphics are very aesthetic, and having drive bays where you just plug the drive straight into the motherboard, no cables, is a stroke of real innovation. Windows XP still loads slowly, though faster than on the Dell. Apple's system, OSX, literally loads in two seconds.

I still have to use the old Dell for certain features that I have not yet migrated over, especially e-mail, and discovered that I can plug its VGA cable into the same Samsung flatscreen as the Mac Pro, which uses the digital cable connector. The SyncMaster 206BW has a 'source' switch where I can toggle the screen between both running computers with no ill effects.

P.S. I was indeed wary of the high prices on any add-ons to the basic Mac Pro. Bought the extra 1GB of RAM through an online Mac memory store, and bought a 500GB internal drive from TigerDirect for $139. If you buy, from Apple, every option available on the fastest Mac Pro with the 8-core Xeons, including filling the drive bays and getting the best recommended nVidia Quatro graphics card, the price hits $10,000. That doesn't phase Disney, for instance (the Apple store here in Burbank just sold eight of those to "a major studio," I'm sure as a render farm for their animation department), but it sure keeps me sane.

Don't know when I can get to the recommended performance test but will try to work it in over the next week.
Moebius~ wrote on 6/3/2007, 3:36 PM
Vitalforce: Don't know when I can get to the recommended performance test but will try to work it in over the next week.

It's an 18.5 KB download and will only take you about three minutes to load and run. Please, we must know!
Coursedesign wrote on 6/3/2007, 4:50 PM
Time to buy a color duplex laser printer.

If you find a good one, please give us a holler here!

I have a Samsung CLP-600 color laser that works great in manual duplex (that's not a given, many printers don't work well when feeding previously printed sheets through again), but I wouldn't mind a full duplex unit. This printer gives great quality for business graphics, prints perfectly on sturdy 100# text (148g/m2) which the HP's can only dream about, and only costs $399 including starter toners for 2,000 pages each of CMYK.

I just put in a fresh round of 4,000 page toner cartridges, proudly procured at Newegg for about $500 altogether. I was glad to have saved $100 compared to buying at my local Staples store, at least until I noticed that I could have bought them from Amazon Marketplace for about $375...

I have scoured reviews everywhere for color lasers, but cannot find anything even as good as what I have, that also has duplex.

I was hoping that HP or Tektronix would come to the rescue, but they seem to have messed up every product so far. HP with drivers and wacky details, and Tektronix with $5-10 bootups each time, an unnatural waxy printing look with most of them, and astronomical purchase prices.

I hope somebody gets it right soon. Whoever hits that bell and claims the cigar will be very busy...
farss wrote on 6/3/2007, 5:13 PM
I've been looking a Fuji Xerox for around AUD 1,700 but as there's no reviews or any in a store to go try I'm very nervous about committing such a large slab of cash sight unseen.

I'd thought about the Tektronixs Phaser series but I have serious doubts about how the wax inks would hold up inside the plastic cover on a DVD. I also agree, they feel very strange to the touch.

Finally solved the double sided printing issue using the trusty old Epson Photo 900, took forever but the job got done, yawn. Problem apart from feeding with the laser was holding registration between the two sides of the paper.

Bob.