iMac Intel Duo, Macbook Pro or Dual G5 for HDV?

[Ron Pfister]

Thanks for the report, Steve! Very good to know. If a USD 1'500 iMac G3 DV SE 400 MHz could handle DV well back in 1999/2000, It's nice to see that an iMac CoreDuo with a similar price tag can handle HDV fluidly six years later. Fun times! :)

[Betsy Moore]

Originally Posted by Scott Jaco

I hope you are being very sarcastic! I have a fully loaded intel Imac that gives me over 33 hours of capture time in HDV 720p mode. It is a 500GB internal hard disk. That is just slightly better than 30 minutes.

Does anyone know what the biggest 7200 rpm 3rd party hard drive solutions are for MacBook Pros? Is it still just 100 GBs?

[Aaron Koolen]

I wouldn't buy G5 anything anymore unless I was very strapped for cash and needed to buy secondhand or needed any of the advantages of the PowerMacs (more expandability and RAM etc).

Aaron

[Ron Pfister]

Originally Posted by Betsy Moore

Does anyone know what the biggest 7200 rpm 3rd party hard drive solutions are for MacBook Pros? Is it still just 100 GBs?

Yes, AFAIK that's the case. Seagate makes a 160GB 5400rpm drive that could also be up to the task. Unfortunately, it seems that they are currently only offering an U-ATA100 (IDE) version of this drive, no S-ATA.

If an external solution is a possibility for you, and you want the highest performance possible, you could go for the SeriTek S-ATA ExpressCard (not yet shipping, unfortunately) and an external 2.5" or 3.5" S-ATA enclosure.

http://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-2sm2-e/

However, this solution would require you to power the drive by other means (e.g. via the FireWire-port), because S-ATA does not provide bus power.

FWIW,

Ron

[Nathan Troutman]

In another thread David Tames recnetly posted some xbench numbers to compare the laptop options out there. While David correctly mentions that these results are certainly not scientific they do however give you a ballpark comparison.

Originally Posted by David Tames

XBench uses a 2.0 GHz G5 running Tiger as the 100 point baseline for comparisons.

Test: PowerBook G4 vs. MacBook vs. MacBook Pro
-----------------------------------------------
CPU: 66 vs. 73 vs. 69
Memory: 27 vs. 112 vs. 109
Quartz Graphics: 62 vs. 53 vs. 56
OpenGL Graphics: 81 vs. 215 vs. 139
User Interface: 36 vs. 15 vs. 21
Disk Combined: 33 vs. 24 vs. 28
Sequential Disk: 45 vs. 28 vs. 36
Random Disk: 25 vs. 20 vs. 24

And the benchmark G5 is the older dual 2.0 not the newer dual core 2.0. It also has a stock and decaying Radeon 9600 as the video card. Good post David.

[Ron Pfister]

I'd like to advise all takers that Xbench benchmarks are a very poor measure of real-world performance. Its measurements are both imprecise and non-representative of real-world use. For detailed performance comparisons involving real-world tests of all sorts of mac-related hardware, visit http://www.barefeats.com/

HTH,

Ron

[Carolyn McGrath]

With regards to expandability and RAM...

When would HDV require more than 2GB RAM? In other words, if people are editing HDV fine on an intel iMac with 2GB RAM...then where is the problem?

(I currently edit DV, but at some point, will be switching to HDV. I've considered both the iMac and a G5 for my next upgrade. I thought I had made some headway in deciding which direction to go, but now my head is spinning from this discussion...)

[Carolyn McGrath]

Does anyone know if there would be any drawback to using an iMac for longer projects (i.e. 60-90 min. fininshed pieces)? External storage devices have sufficed in the past with my G4.

[Meryem Ersoz]

edit and playback times with 2 gig ram are adequate, but render times are sloooow, so if you are doing lots of effects or compositing, it can be quite painful....

regarding longer projects, same applies. i've completed a fifteen minute project with a lot of effects and layers which requires a dual layer DVD drive. i can't burn the project on my (admittedly old) single layer G4 burner, i can only burn it with the dual layer drive in my non-intel imac G5.

length is just one consideration, but even shorter projects can have a file size which exceeds the G4 capacities....

it's a tough time to buy a mac! i bought a new macbook pro because i needed to edit HDV, and my old 1 gb G4 simply couldn't handle it. but if i didn't need it, i would wait. my old G4 does a fine job with DV, and i see no reason to part with it, either. sometimes i'm multi-tasking on several different computers simultaneously. but six months down the road, you'll be seeing faster computers and more of the Universal applications released. that whole "rosetta" transition thing will be over, and the bugs will be cleaned out. if you can wait, then wait.

[David Tamés]

Originally Posted by Meryem Ersoz

edit and playback times with 2 gig ram are adequate, but render times are sloooow, so if you are doing lots of effects or compositing, it can be quite painful.... [...]

Yep, sure is. I was producing a project back in January and we were working with three machines, a couple of iMacs (1.8 GHz with 1GB RAM I think) and a Dual 2 GHz Power Mac G5 with 2 GB RAM... the difference in terms of performance (to use a subjective benchmark measure) was between "frustrating" on the iMacs to "accceptable" on the Dual 2 GHz Power Mac G5. And the memory difference was not the big factor: HDV needs processing power to rebuild all those fancy frames that don't really exist. Render/conform times will drag you down editing native HDV unless you avoid any effects and do cuts-only editing and wait until the end to add all the effects.

And here's a solution to faster HDV editing without hardware upgrades... I had to edit another project (also shot in HDV) using my own single processor 1.6 GHz Power Mac G5... my solution? I decided to use Offline RT and edit the old fashioned way: "offline" editing with Offline RT JPEG proxies (created using the Media Manager feature in FCP), this gave me super lighting fast rendering and editing workflow (since the JPEG files are so small and JPEG decompression is so fast) so I could speed through the work, and then when I was all done, do an "Online" (conform the project automatically with HDV media using a new project created from the offline project using the Media Manager feature in FCP).

I decided to do this instead of upgrading to faster iron, as I'm waiting for that Intel speed deamon that will eventually replace the Power Mac G5. Media Manager and offline/online editing workflow might sound like a thing of the past, but it is still relevant today. It's one way to get all the footage from a feature-length project onto a laptop for editing on the road without the hassles of external drives. You can leave those at home and use them when it's time for the final conform, a.k.a. online edit.

The down-side of using Offline RT media proxies is the proxies are not pretty, but I had two weeks to cut a 16 min. doc and I was not going to let anything get in the way of editing quickly, and I like to see all the effects in place for timing/aesthetic reasons, I don't mind the crappy quality proxies, it's easy enough to go back to the original media and look at it when you need to.

So that's another way to tackle at the performance/HDV issue, more hassle, but if you can delay harware purchase for a while (as I wanted to do) it might be worth it, depends on your priorities while editing...

[Carolyn McGrath]

[QUOTE=Meryem Ersoz]edit and playback times with 2 gig ram are adequate, but render times are sloooow, so if you are doing lots of effects or compositing, it can be quite painful....

Painful, I guess is relative. I've been editing DV on a 400MHz Powermac G4, using FCP version 1. Now that's slow.

This, plus a few 80 GB Lacie hard drives are what I used to complete an hour long documentary with minimal to moderate levels of effects. My main complaint now is that I can't use FCP in classic and I keep having to switch back to OS9 to use it. And, too, I have a sense that the technology, has leaped light years ahead of me...

Still, the question is, whether the Intel dual iMac can perform reasonably well for longer projects, not just DV, but HDV (which I anticipate switching to eventually). David, you mentioned the iMacs you worked on--were they older versions? Wouldn't that make a difference?

[David Tamés]

Originally Posted by Carolyn McGrath

David, you mentioned the iMacs you worked on--were they older versions? Wouldn't that make a difference?

Yes, it makes a difference, those were G5 iMacs. Any of the newer iMacs with Intel duo running Final Cut Pro 5.1 Universal should perform somewhat better. I guess the simple point is, only the latest, fastest machines fast enough for native HDV editing without frustration. But again, do offline/online and you can edit away a slower machine and wait a little longer if you want to.

[Meryem Ersoz]

Originally Posted by Carolyn McGrath

Still, the question is, whether the Intel dual iMac can perform reasonably well for longer projects, not just DV, but HDV (which I anticipate switching to eventually).

the short answer is, yes, it will perform reasonably well for longer HDV projects with minimal effects.

can someone already working in HDV address whether the intel dual iMac resolve issues that the non-intel iMac 2gb G5 machines bring to HDV? my non-intel iMac G5 2GB/2GB machine captures HDV at half speed and has stuttery playback in HDV when playing back footage with a lot of motion (fast moving water, fast pans, etc.).

these are not huge issues, but they do increase capture times and are occasionally a little irksome, and i'm wondering if the move to an intel-based platform has resolved these issues at the new intel iMac G5 price point?

[David Tamés]

Originally Posted by Meryem Ersoz

t [...] but they do increase capture times and are occasionally a little irksome [..]

Hmm, if you're capturing Native HDV with FCP, then capture is real-time, however, if you're using the Intermediate codec, that's another story, as it has to covert the HDV footage to the Intermediate.

[Meryem Ersoz]

thank you, david, that is exactly the issue...i'm still waiting on Apple's special FCP 5.0 Studio upgrade deal, which has apparently shipped by slow boat....