best used tower specs for RR?

[Nate Clapp]

I am investigating getting a mac tower, and need advice. I am leaning towards a used solution, and imagine a good solution would handle a Red Rocket no conflicts, and also have a fair amount of esata for lots of data pushing around. I am not going to be doing heavy editing, mainly looking for something that brings more to the table than a MBP.
in a previous post Deanan said:
"What we use:
mac pro 4,1
2.66ghz 4 core
nvidia 120 GT or 285 or a recent ATI (nvidia is needed for 4.5k)
Graphics card should have at least 512MB of memory."

so i am guessing 4 core is enough for what I am interested in? Seems these systems used aren't too expensive. I am mainly looking for something the redrocket plays nicely with and isn't too expensive. Thoughts?

Nate Clapp

[Matthew Riggieri]

Nate

What's up man? Been a while.

If you can find a used 2008 Mac pro would be your best bet. You get faster than realtime transcodes with the rocket on that machine. Just need to upgrade the graphics card to one if the new ATI 5870s or fined a GTX 285. Storm loves both of these cards and every workflow/DIT station is gonna need Storm. I love it. Been on the development team for a while.

I would suggest outfitting with with 16gb ram, a highpoint 4211 or Atto 344 raid card and an extra fw800 card. Both those raid cards will let you run a 4 drive Raid 5 internally and give you 4 esata ports on the exterior. If you need more ditch the fw800 card for another esata card. If you do the 4 disk internal raid, you just need to move the system drive to the second optical bay. The highspeed raid is important if you want to be doing ordinate and transcoding at the same time at full speed.

Gimme a call if you got any other questions. I am reconfiguring my tower DIT cart for 2011, as I suspect the influx of data from RED One SSD modules and epic SSD to be to high to even consider a laptop right now.


Cheers man
Matt Riggieri
Local 600 DIT

Btw typed this on an iPhone, so forgive any typos

[Nate Clapp]

when I get back in town I'll give you a call for sure. maybe end of this week if your not busy then. seems like base tower (w out extra cards and raid setup is about 1K, which seems decent.
and I have no idea what Storm is. Go ahead pitch it to me. :)

[David Lagos]

I'm looking at configuring a Mac tower myself and was wondering what's essential for me to have if I am looking to use it as a DIT station as well as a heavy editing platform.
Spare no details or levels of configuration. Software, hardware, accessories and etc.

I have a MBP that's worked fine on a couple of Red One shoots (if somewhat ridiculously slow compared to a RR configured station) but I don't think it'll hold up once Epic hits the market. I run a production house for TV ads so turnaround time is key, so I'm looking for the setup that'll give me speed and quality.

Thanks in advance.

[Matthew Riggieri]

Check out The Foundry's Storm. They have a subforum here. Great Onset preview, dailies, and workflow tool. Public Beta opens soon, very very soon.

[Eric Santiago]

Ive been testing our RR on an old Mac Pro 1,1.
Sorry forgot the specs.
8GB RAM with an old Nvidia Quadro 4500.
Seems to work great on Dual 30 Cinema's.
It hasnt been abused yet due to missing camera parts.

[Michael Hastings]

Nate: I have a Macpro I bought in Jan 2008 with my red1 that I'm looking to sell to upgrade. 8gigs ram, quad core, and I have a bracket that allows an additional drive for boot drive so u could have a4drive internal raid. 2tb are cheap now so an 8tb raid can be had for about $600.

Contact me if interested for more info and price negotiation.

[Nate Clapp]

Matt: D'oh! (smacking forehead) Michael: I'll PM you. I might be moving slowly on this but who knows....