ADVICE NEEDED : New Post Production system

After nearly 20 years of having an Avid based post production department, we are now seriously considering a move to FCPX. With budgets not being what they used to be I need to get the best value for money.

My current plan is something like this...

Ingest - 27" imac, 3.4ghz i7, 16GB ram, 1Tb system drive
"Offline"/rough cuts - mac mini, 2.6ghz i7. 8gb ram, 1tb system drive
Finishing/online - Mac Pro, 3.5ghz 6-core, 512gb flash storage, dual AMD D500 3GB VRAM

Each system would have their own local thunderbolt media drive, and access to a shared media pool.

The Ingest system would do all of the capturing and transcoding prep work for the offline editors.
MacMini would be working only with proxys (never full quality).
The MacPro would be doing the finishing work of Grading and GFX, as well as final mastering to tape or file.

It is a 1080 HD production, with 4K not even a possibility within the lifetime of this system.

The video input and output would be done using the Blackmagic UltraStudio 4K.

Does anyone have any thoughts regarding the spec or workflow? I have spoken to Apple themselves, and their only worry is the graphics capability of the MacMini.

Hi Phil,

The basic setup looks good. But I concur that the mini might be the weak link here. A maxed out mini is certainly powerful enough for editing, especially in proxy mode, but its limited graphics card will be a bottleneck when working with graphics-intensive plugins.

- Ronny

Thank you for your reply, Ronny.

As the MacMini's main purpose would be for cutting sync and music, with little in the way of graphics or multi layers, My hope is that it will be good enough. Ideally I would give the offline editors an iMac, but it all depends on the final total costs.

Phil,
I applaud you for your courage to switch to FCPX. I bet it wasn't an easy decision, but I believe you'll be very satisfied once you have a workflow ironed out.

You didn't mention what kind of work you typically do, but I think your on the right track.

The only cautions I would give you is that long format shows will bog down your offline if you only have 4GBs of RAM equipped in your Mac Minis. I would strongly suggest that you go for the upgrade of at least 8GBs of RAM- go to 16 of you can find the extra $300 per seat.

The other thing I would caution you about is the graphics card. The cards on the Mac Mini will become an issue if you end up doing a lot of titling in the offline.

Again, I don't know what kind of work you're doing. I deal with episodics for big cable networks, and they like to see finished graphics on their rough cuts and fine cuts. Using the way more powerful NVIDIA GeForce GT cards that are available on the iMacs dramatically speeds up editing time. If you can spring for nearly doubling the cost of an edit seat, then I would turn to the iMac.

Then again, if you really don't need to put layers and layers of gfx on your timeline, then the Mac Mini should serve you well.

Perhaps you could arrange a test before you commit. Get media for one of your jobs on a thunderbolt drive, and bring it to an Apple dealer for comparison.

Good luck, and please keep us posted on how your transition from Avid goes.

Cheers,
Scott M

Scott,

Thanks for your words of encouragement.

I started editing back in 1997, and until the last couple of years all of my work has been done on Avid but quietly learning FCP at home. Around 18 months ago I had my first real job working on FCPX, when I has to step in and recut another editor's work on a half hour documentary. What impressed me was how well the software ran on my 6 year old MacBook Pro - not something that you can say about anything in the Windows world.

Anyway, the system that I'm trying to put together now is for editing a weekly Magazine series for a youth audience (music, fashion, extreme sports, etc) and a music series. I'd also be working on a few documentary series over the year.

We usually edit the individual inserts (usually around 5-10 min long) first, and then I will compile the finished programme in the online stage. If any graphics are added in during the offline, they would have normally come from after effects as an image sequence or video file.

I think I would put the Mac mini on 16gb, but maybe buy the RAM elsewhere to try and shave a little off the final price.

Does anyone have any experience with BlackMagic's UltraStudio 4K?

Phil

Does anyone have any thoughts about the new g-Raid studio? On a purely aesthetic angle, it would look very nice standing next to the MacPro. However looks aren't everything and performance should be a priority.