iMac Edit Suite?

Anyone using the i7 27" iMac in a professional edit suite set-up? Any anecdotes? Quite fancy building an edit suite around one with a Pegasus Thunderbolt raid. Building another set-up around another MacPro feels like a backward step - esp with lack of Thunderbolt.

Wasn't my machine but I just finished cutting some commercials on one.(with FCP7) Machine was great. Attached to a firewire800 raid and just using basic monitoring. However the final project will be audio sweetened and graded elsewhere.

I'm thinking of getting one myself as my old MacPro can't run Mountain Lion. But I'll wait at least until Oct as they're long overdue for an update.

I spent 2 weeks on a maxed out late 2011 17" MBP with a LaCie T'bolt drive and Apple 27" T'bolt Display. It was pretty powerful. Rivaled my Mac Pro. T'bolt and maxed out RAM make a world of difference. You're still limited by the GPU, but they're still nice editing machines. Looking forward to the new MPs in 2013 Apple announced.

Editing on the 27" iMac with the Pegasus RAID and it's an absolute dream. I maxxed out the graphics card and am rocking FCPX with RED workflows and Davinci like it ain't no thing. I have an UltraStudio 3D I'm using for monitoring

Love it.

Editing with it will be fast, other question how do you want to expand, customize and what rout do you want to go with the I/O.

Thanks all - sounds really postive. We currently run two new 21" (but lower spec) iMacs as desktop edit stations and we've been impressed with how they run in comparison to our Mac Pro, esp with FCPX.

Re: the I/O, we're completely tapeless, so no tape ingest/layoff needed. With Thunderbolt, think we'd go for one of the new breakout boxes from Aja or Blackmagic to run a monitor/give us some input just in case. We don't need a reference monitor for the stuff we do, but clients do like a big screen for viewing.

Be good to hear more thoughts...

fcpguru wrote: Editing on the 27" iMac with the Pegasus RAID and it's an absolute dream. I maxxed out the graphics card and am rocking FCPX with RED workflows and Davinci like it ain't no thing. I have an UltraStudio 3D I'm using for monitoring

Love it.

Any pics of your set-up please? Be interested to see what it looks like in situ..

Well if you don't need critical monitoring then why bother with Blackmagic or AJA?
Just get a nice monitor and plug it into the Thunderbolt port as it is also a display out.

That's true. At the moment though we use a good quality LCD TV for client to watch the edit and I'd need the HDMI feed to run that. Also having a capture capibility would be useful just in case we get given a tape and have to hire in a deck/ingest via a tape camera. Doesn't happen very often these days but it's good to be prepared I guess!

Because someone asked - here is a pic of my humble iMac edit suite.

That's a sweet setup. I'm planning to go iMac to aja ioXT to monitoring and a TB RAID. I know I can do this RIGHT NOW, but the iMac hasn't been updated in over a year, so I am not buying in at this time.

With the Mac Pro morphing into something else next year, I'm hoping that the next rev of the iMac allows for card swapping. If not , fine, I'll just get the beefiest gfx, cpu and max out the RAM.

I'm on an FW800 iMac right now and it's a nice all-round machine but I desire an upgrade.

I'll need to run Resolve now it's gone to V9, I can't run it at all on my ATI card, which means my Resolve training has been put on hold but Color still runs like a dream on ATI hardware.

That's the thing for me. fcpguru, you say Resolve runs great. Questions..
Is that on ATI or on NVIDIA hardware?

Also, does TB carry a real baseband video signal that's legit for critical monitoring purposes?

Does Resolve run on two monitors as I'll be planning to use this existing iMac as a 2nd GUI monitor and hook up a grading monitor to the ioXT.

All recent macs with the exception of the Retina Mac Book Pros utilize ATI graphics. I haven't had any issues, but I also can't claim to playback in realtime either. I use a BMD UltraStudio 3D for monitoring. I noticed you were thinking an AJA ioXT, but I am not sure if that will be compatible with Resolve.

T'bolt carries two signals. A standard computer monitor signal, which isn't useful for broadcast monitoring. And it carries a PCI signal, that can be used for broadcast monitoring. Also look at AJA's T-Tap for a nice portable solution for the necessary HD-SDI broadcast monitoring signal.
www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/857191-REG/AJA_T_TAP_T_TAP.html

Thanks for your reply fcpguru.

fcpguru wrote: All recent macs with the exception of the Retina Mac Book Pros utilize ATI graphics. I haven't had any issues, but I also can't claim to playback in realtime either.

So how many fps do you get. Is it passable for client purposes or horrible? Because Resolve on ATI in my experience its been an unusable crawl. Color on the other hand flies.

fcpguru wrote: I noticed you were thinking an AJA ioXT, but I am not sure if that will be compatible with Resolve.

This is the first i'm hearing of this. Is this (semi)officially reported somewhere? Why wouldn't it work with the ioXT?

Also, can Resolve spread over two screens because I have a perfectly good iMac that I can use as a 2nd GUI monitor :whistle:

Ben, just to confirm, that signal is a proper signal that I can grade from?

I have been coloring mostly RED Epic and Scarlet footage and working with the R3D files at 4K or 5K resolution. When I run the system at half-res good, or sometimes quarter-res good I get realtime playback with between 7-8 nodes.

Footage is coming from the Pegasus raid and I have the AMD Radeon HD 6970M 2GB card installed.

I think it's passable for clients, as it still looks fairly good, but to really check the crispness I go to full res premium and then the system acts fairly slow. Hoping for a few speed improvements in 9 though.

Impressive. TB really is going to be the great equaliser.
Sorry to press, but why wouldn't the ioXT work with Resolve? and about that 2nd GUI.

Cheers fcpguru, i appreciate your experience in this.

Read it here a while ago:

mobi.creativecow.net/thread/277/15133

"Ben, just to confirm, that signal is a proper signal that I can grade from?"

Of course. On a Mac Pro tower, you're using a PCI card to go out to an HD-SDI signal to a broadcast monitor. T'bolt is the same PCI data format. Same thing. AJA, Blackmagic and Matrox are riding the PCI data stream, not the monitor stream, for their devices to go to HD-SDI. Just like their cards do in a tower.

Thanks Ben.

fcpguru wrote: Read it here a while ago:


Wow, fcpguru, are they serious?! Isn't that anticompetitive ?

So i HAVE to buy BMD product to monitor with Resolve? say it ain't so Joe?

Well is it the best situation? Perhaps not. But then again, they give away the lite version of software that was 20k two years ago for free. So I find it pretty hard to be upset.

Any reason why you prefer Aja over BMD?