Just wanted to post a quick note that while I never had much trouble cutting native HDV or XDCAM on my old G5, I updated to a quad Intel 2.66 w/X1900 yesterday, and boy, what a difference.

I also noticed that moving my media to a 4-drive SATA raid made yet another big difference, whereas on the G5 having low bit-rate material like HDV didn't make a difference whether it was on a G-Raid or eSATA 4-drive raid. I guess with the Intel the FW drive is the bottleneck, where on the G5 it was the MPEG decoding.

Anyway, native HDV and XDCAM is like butter now. I never dropped frames before, but this is a whole new level!

Nate,
I am ready to make the jump to a new machine from the G5 dual 2.5 power mac I have.
If it takes 3 hours to process a 45 minute HDV sequence to a standard Dv QT movie with my system, about how long with your new setup?
Please give me some real world time comparisons.
Thanks,
Ryan

Nate:

How the hell are ya. (I'm guessing that little road-trip we talke about--no go?)

Please enlighten with your choice of SATA drives--what did you go with? andhow much faster than the G-Raids with your new system, d'ya think?

mazel tov on the purchase!

this is off topic but im having trouble getting any replies in other threads..
do you guys think a 15inch 2.2ghz/2gbram/128meg 8600gtm macbook pro is good enough for editing 1080i 24f(p) hdv footage in fcp6?
do you think a macbook could handle it? specs page suggests the actual video card is required (vs. onboard intel stuff)

edit: im basically trying to decide between the cheapest macbook, the cheapest macbook pro, or the highest end macbook pro.. perhaps even upgrading the ram to 4gb..

Ack. I didn't see the replies to my own thread...

Ryan:
I'm seeing varying numbers compared to my old G5 when rendering out via Compressor. And by varying, I guess I mean "not as good as I'd like", but I have ALSO found out for the 4 core machines you have to trick Compressor to use a virtual cluster on the single machine to get your best times. I am still tweaking the virtual cluster stuff, but it seems that almost 2x speed from my previous G5 is possible.

Charles:
I'll give you a ring about the concert gig (it went away, then came back halved!).

I bought a Sonett Fusion500 last year which is a 5 drive eSATA enclosure of what I'd maybe call the "2nd generation" variety. It's big feature was that it could feed all 5 drives from one single eSATA cable and not bottleneck. The RAID aspect of it comes from the Apple Disk Utility, so it's a "software RAID". I get 280mb/sec with only 4 of the 5 RAIDed together, which is more than fast enough for uncompressed 1080p (by twofold).

These days I guess you can get the same deal with hardware to do the RAID part either in the interface card or in the enclosure, so I'd recommend that.

David:
I own a 2.0ghz Macbook Pro, and have done HDV on it. I don't recommend it. It works, and certainly can be done, but the desktops faster busses make a huge difference. I especially would not recommend a Macbook to do the job.

Any of these machines would be smashing for SD work, but responsiveness in FCP with the HDV material is lacking enough any real work is a bit frustrating.

nate, thanks for your reply.
my problem is, as a film student, im not at home too often and I already have a fairly powerful home pc for editing.. i'd really like to make the transition to a laptop system but what you're telling me isnt very supportive :S are you talking native hdv only? what about using intermediate codec instead? i dont mind.. i usually use cineform with premiere.. obviously the 2ghz model is a little older but the actual architecture hasnt changed.. do you not think the added ram, faster video card, cpu, would make much of a difference?
thanks
-dave

This sounds promissing to someone whos wanting to switch.

Whats this I hear about compressor having issues? Is compressor the rendering engine or export tool for FCP (similiar to adobes media encoder)?
Does is crash? I don't mind slow renders, it's audio sync, non-responsive timelines and weird image handling that I need to get away from.

How would you compare this to Premiere CS3? (In terms of stability)

yes compressor is the exporting tool for FCP.. never had any issues with it when i use it really... but i pretty much just export mpeg-2 which is easy enough. it does a better job resizing hd footage to sd than premiere.. better quality that is. when i use premiere i have to export it master quality then encode to dvd with another encoder (tmpg, cce, etc)..