Need Help with the new setup im building this might sound bragging but i need help

[Gemini Dream]

ok this is my second big red project and i am building a set up with the funds they are giving me for the equipment right now i have ordered

MacPro 8core with

10gb of ram (memory)
(1) 320gb hd
(3) 1tb hd for internal storage (all 32mb cache)
and the stock video card the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256M

i have all the other things i would need
(2) 24inch montiors
mackie speakers
mackie mixer

the software i am using is
FCP
Crimson
and redcine


The question i'm coming to is the video card , my old mac has the same one and i have heard rumors that redcine uses alot of your memory card (maybe thats why it can't play full speed at higher qualities in redcine)
so i know they are ddr3 video cards in macs, would it make a big difference going up to a 512mb card or 1gb video card?
will it help the render and playback in redcine?
what would you suggest?

thanks

JMV

[Bob Gruen]

Exporting footage is number crunching, which is CPU, memory, and disk intensive. It does not go through your video card, so it shouldn't have any effect.

Viewing a stream in real time does use the video card, so you might have issues there, however there are detail settings that you can turn down if the motion is important to you. You can turn the detail down to check motion and turn it back up for color inspection.

Depending on the size of the project your disk and lack of a backup solution might be your bigger issue (unless you have a disk store you didn't mention).

Bob

[Michele Gavazzeni]

My suggestion is to buy an external DAS RAID Storage

Fill all the Ram slot with memory banks of the same size and brand

Actually 16Gb (8x2GB) OWC has good deals and are affordable memory

[amrrahmy]

1-like the other posts, rams has to be divided evenly for better performance, so it's not good to have 10GB, it would be (8*1GB)=8GB or (8*2GB)=16GB or (8*4GB)=32GB(the 4GB ram is a bit slower than the 2GB, al least last time i checked)

2-if u mean 1 320GB san drive for the work, and the rest of the harddrives 1TB sata for storage, u'll put the san drive in the mac pro and a fiber card, and connect a storage system like a raid storage with the 1TB or other san drives through the card, u cant mix san and sata in the same mac.(so it's all san or all sata, or the sata is connected through a fiber card.

there is a very good 24" hp 10bit rgb(or 30bit), but u would only need one, u can get any other monitor with it.
the hp works as the second or the preview monitor.

i would suggest to get the nvidia 8800gt, because it's better and also it has cuda enabled processing which should be very useful encoding either with win premiere cs3(h.264 rapidhd) or hopefully next year fcp.

as for the 8800 and the 5600, 8800gt is faster than the fx quadro 5600, but doesnt do as many processes at the same time, the 5600 has more than 3 times the size capacity, if ur not planing to do very heavy cg work, u would be better with the 8800gt.