(About to purchase)Opinion of this set up for editing HDV shot with GY-HD100

[Justin Ferar]

Gary, I use the HD200. Your 720p30 will work fine with FCP.

I can also confirm that burning 720p30 onto a DVD-5 works every bit as well as burning a normal DVD with chapters, titles, menus, etc. Only it's in HD. In fact it works so well I don't really see the need for an HD burner unless your programs end up over 45 minutes. I bet you could even fit 60 min. of 720p30 onto a single layer DVD-5 because your material takes less space thatn 1080i.

The Toshiba A2 is a steal right now at $135. It doesn't do 1080p60 but who cares at $235. My 720p60 DVD's are stunning burning with H.264.

Best.

[Gary Williams]

Thanks Justin thats great to know.
I am making my purchase later today just doing the final piecing together at the last minute, I wasnt sure if I should go with a smaller data drive say 500GB and a dual instead of a quad core & leave out the Data Video converter so I can get a black magic HD extreme, a MacGurus 1TB SATA RAIDS external with a Sonnet EP Card so the final verson would look like this.

Final spec > Two 3.0GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon
> 8GB (4 x 2GB) Ram added by them
> 250GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
> 500B 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s Barracuda ES added by them
> ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB (2 x dual-link DVI)
> One 16x SuperDrive
> Apple Keyboard and Mighty Mouse - U.S. English
> Mac OS X - U.S. English
> AppleCare Protection Plan for Mac Pro (w/or w/o Display) -
Auto-enroll
> Black Magic Decklink HD Extreme & Sonnet E4P card
> MacGurus 1TB Sata Raids

INSTEAD OF THIS

Final spec > Two 3.0GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
> 8GB (4 x 2GB) Ram added by them
> 250GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
> 750GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s Barracuda ES added by them
> ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB (2 x dual-link DVI)
> One 16x SuperDrive
> Apple Keyboard and Mighty Mouse - U.S. English
> Mac OS X - U.S. English
> AppleCare Protection Plan for Mac Pro (w/or w/o Display) -
Auto-enroll
> Data Video converter for $200 for Mac Pro purchase

I know I thought I had my mind made up! last minute jitters
I guess but this is costing me allot of cash and I want to get it right any final inputs would be greatly appreciated.

[Justin Ferar]

Word on the street is that there is no benefit to quad-core at the moment. Perhaps we'll know more when Leopord comes out in 8 days.

[Dino Leone]

Originally Posted by Justin Ferar

Word on the street is that there is no benefit to quad-core at the moment. Perhaps we'll know more when Leopord comes out in 8 days.

Well, that "word on the street" has been shown to be not totally accurate. I remember there was a macworld story that made such a claim a while ago, and this story has been shown to be inaccurate.
I'd say it's important to be aware that up to Leopard, it's up to individual applications to be optimized for several cores (which is in many cases not done properly, so to this extent, I do agree with Justin); Apple claims one of the new technologies part of Leopard specifically addresses this issue.

With respect to final cut studio, you can actually configure an 8-core machine to take full advantage of its 8 cores. Here's a link to a thread that describes how:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread....65000&tstart=0
In essence, you need to configure Qmaster with 4 instances for the MacPro. In this way it'll distribute a compressor job to 4 virtual machines (residing) on that 8core which will subsequently push all the 8 cores to the max.
Dino