Spooky Mulder

Having become a sad Mac evangelist (which I said I would never succumb to) I am looking at replacing my main machine at home. I currently have a HP Wintel Desktop running Vista. It is not particularly powerful.

I also have a Mk I Macbook Pro.

My main home need is lightweight web browsing with the odd website build.

But my growing hobby is movie creation and editing which with HD is massively power hungry.

Hence looking for a new machine to sate my need to visit the Apple Store.

Anyone got an old Mac Pro or a new Mac Pro - any specific advice on spec?

It would be all to easy to spec up a £10k spend - base spec looks like £3k including monitor.

Thoughts (other than more money than sense )

Spooky

ScoobyDoo555

I've got one of the 8-core/2.66Ghz jobs
Using it primarily for Logic Pro, ProTools and a bit of Final Cut Pro.

I've put in about 6 gig of ram IIRC, and I've got an array of bolt-on drives.
Also got two 17" monitors (one for main arrangement, the other for plugins and mixer) but I want to upgrade to at least 19" jobs)

£3k is a good start - obviously HD video EATS up storage space and the amount of bandwidth required to transfer to and from the drive (potentially at the same time) is gargantuan. (I'm doing the same type of thing with audio tracks - up to 60-odd)

The processor doesn't really get dented due to not really doing any rendering. Just make sure you spec a good graphics card - there's an upgrade iirc, but I didn't go for it. Don't really need it for audio!! LOL!!

There's a cut-off point with the memory too - I know that Logic isn't overly bothered about having too much (an Apple "feature" )......

Hope this helps in some way

Dan

Spooky Mulder

Thanks Dan,

my friend who is a PC buff thinks I will have enough power to do weather modelling! Even with base spec.

Sounds good to me. And good point about storage - will get a couple of terabyte disks.

Do Apple support a BD writer/drive?

ChefDude

Steve Jobs thinks Blue Ray is a fad lol

Think about your hard drive set up before you jump into it - I have 9 HDD in my PC and only have 5TB of space, so I could have got more space had I used RAID 5,6 or 1+0 for all of them.

Spooky Mulder

OK - will look into RAID - it is one of the build options :-)

Markus

Apple doesn't provide a BD drive in either default spec or BTO spec. Steve has commented that it's something to do with a nightmare due to licensing rights.

It is possible to purchase BD drives that you can put into the second optical bay on a Mac Pro. A quick google revealed the following:

FastMac | Product - Blu-ray Drive Upgrade for your Mac

and

MCE Internal 8X Blu-ray Recordable Drive for Mac Pro and Power Mac

I've no experience of these drives however.

As for wether OS X itself supports BR. Well, from what I've read, you can't play movies in OS X from a BD disk. As for burning to BR, OS X probably does not support this but Toast + HD/BD Plug-in will allow you to burn to BD media.

Spooky Mulder

I have the appropriate Toast software (privilege of knowing the UK MD )

Thanks for your helpful comments.