Is a Mac Pro worth it in the UK?

I'm doing more and more intensive video work and it's likely to end up being a full-time thing, so as you'd expect I require quite a bit of power from my computer.
I've had the same q6600 setup for a while now and is feeling the strain.

I've been thinking about building a new powerful PC, probably 6-core based. But I keep remembering I really want to work on Final Cut rather than Premiere.
I like Windows 7, and I work on OSX all the time, I'm happy with either.

An 8-core MacPro in the UK is £2700, and in the states the same tower is about the equivalent of £500 cheaper.

Americans, would you pay that much more? Do you think you'd get enough years out of it to be worth the cost?
I don't make much money I'd have to save for months to able to afford it.

If you want to work with Final Cut, and your working on large projects then you have little choice put to get a Mac Pro.
Fortunately if your doing it for a living, then should also be accounting for the cost in such away that it is covered by your pricing.

If your working with external, or networked storage you could also look at an i7 iMac with plenty of RAM. Although the high spec models can cost almost as much as a Mac Pro.
I know here in NZ the price difference is minimal.
The problem with an iMac though is the very limited internal storage options, which can be a problem when doing video or photography work.

I'm in a similar position to you in that I'm running a Q6600 Quad Core Intel system that is annoyingly slow.

As has been said if you want to use FCP then you are either into a MAC or a Hackintosh.

I can't justify the cost of the MAC myself so am looking at a dual boot Windows 7 64bit and OSX Snow Leopard 64 bit Hackintosh.

Roughtly I'm looking at the following spec:

Intel Core I7 920 2.66GHZ Overclocked to 4GHz
Water Cooling System
6GB Ram (minimum)
4TB Raid 0 split 2.5TB Windows and 1.5TB OSX
Top end NVIDEA Graphics

I'm expecting this to come in at below £1500 dependant on graphics card spec (as they have recently changed).

I do video for a closed circuit TV and for city wide broadcasting and I use a 2008 2x2.8GHz Mac Pro and 2010 i7 MBP (as well as the ability to tap into a lab of iMac's if need be). The i7 with 8GB of RAM can crank out standard def like a knife through butter... 1080p is a whole different story Premiere and Final Cut Pro are about equal in functionality. The real difference comes with Motion. It's like a watered down version of After Effects, but typically it's enough for 90% most people's work. Not having to buy AE would save almost $900. Add Apple Color and you have everything you need to do professional television production. With Adobe, to get the same functionality you'd need to buy some plugins and/or AE bringing the price beyond $2,000. Of course, for that much you'd get AE, which is much stronger than Motion, but it also has a much higher learning curve and far more than most people need. Motion is extremely easy to work with since Apple has tried to keep you from having to worry about keying or scripting, but those things are still there if you need them.

MaxxuM wrote in post #11066608
I do video for a closed circuit TV and for city wide broadcasting and I use a 2008 2x2.8GHz Mac Pro and 2010 i7 MBP (as well as the ability to tap into a lab of iMac's if need be). The i7 with 8GB of RAM can crank out standard def like a knife through butter... 1080p is a whole different story Premiere and Final Cut Pro are about equal in functionality. The real difference comes with Motion. It's like a watered down version of After Effects, but typically it's enough for 90% most people's work. Not having to buy AE would save almost $900. Add Apple Color and you have everything you need to do professional television production. With Adobe, to get the same functionality you'd need to buy some plugins and/or AE bringing the price beyond $2,000. Of course, for that much you'd get AE, which is much stronger than Motion, but it also has a much higher learning curve and far more than most people need. Motion is extremely easy to work with since Apple has tried to keep you from having to worry about keying or scripting, but those things are still there if you need them.

Thanks for replies guys.

Reason I want to work on FCP is partly because it's an important tool to know for the industry. But Premiere just gets on my nerves, often unresponsive and under performs on simple tasks. Functionality isn't so bad.

At the moment any motion I do is very simple, just position and scale key-framing, nothing fancy. Although I may be doing more advanced work later on. If I feel it necessary I can use AE for that.
Plus because of the things I shoot colour-correction is very basic.

But It sounds like If I go for FCP I'd need a good MacPro, which is difficult for me. Especially as it's hardly an 'investment', I'll never get anywhere near a return on it. I think I'll have to wait until I'm making more money from it and just persist with Premiere for now. I'll try upgrade to CS5 as it seems a lot less painful to use.

benesotor wrote in post #11067648
Thanks for replies guys.

Reason I want to work on FCP is partly because it's an important tool to know for the industry. But Premiere just gets on my nerves, often unresponsive and under performs on simple tasks. Functionality isn't so bad.

At the moment any motion I do is very simple, just position and scale key-framing, nothing fancy. Although I may be doing more advanced work later on. If I feel it necessary I can use AE for that.
Plus because of the things I shoot colour-correction is very basic.

But It sounds like If I go for FCP I'd need a good MacPro, which is difficult for me. Especially as it's hardly an 'investment', I'll never get anywhere near a return on it. I think I'll have to wait until I'm making more money from it and just persist with Premiere for now. I'll try upgrade to CS5 as it seems a lot less painful to use.

You don't 'have' to go with a Mac Pro. It's optimal, but definitely optional. Look, there are a lot of people (mostly PC people) that are hung up on two things - speed and storage space. Both are important, sometimes critical, but sometimes they forget that what is fastest/biggest may not necessarily be what is required. Some of the most brilliant photographers and movie producers are currently working on less powerful machines than are being advocated here. Ever hear of Zombie Girl (link)? She's more recognized and awarded than anyone here giving you advice and she produced her feature length movie on a 2006 iMac with FCE.

An i5 or i7 27" iMac, even 21.5" i5, would do what you want and do it quickly and effectively. You'd probably even beat me in a few renders and I have a 2008 octo Mac Pro! The iMac's only real limitation is storage. You'd have to use firewire storage to store unused media. That's really it. Personally, I don't see it being much of a limitation. Many do though.

Who here has used up 2TB of space with active (in use) media? I can only imagine what a 1TB photo catalog/library would be like. It would be HUGE. Rediculously huge and no professional I know would do such a thing unless there was a lot of video in there. Pro's put their work into logical, often self contained, folders. When they are done with the project, they archive and back them up. They don't keep them on their main drive taking up space. I close of my work library once a year and it's about 100GB each time. It resides on a 1TB drive along with previous year's projects and also on my Time Machine. If I need to access it, I go to that drive and open that library. I do not notice any speed problems until I try to zoom through a few hundred pictures quickly, and then it just skips rendering the middle files. Aperture is very good at network connections vs LR.

I also don't know any movie producer that keeps his projects on his main drive. It would be filled up in a few weeks depending on b roll and Fx. Old projects are moved over to storage and backups making room for new ones. I have four projects on my MBP that are finished (30s, 4min & 28min long) and I'm off loading them to a archive drives sometime today. They've already been Time Machined.

Look, you could have the most powerful computer in the world, but if you're not passionate about working with the OS, then your work is going to suffer. However, if you love working with an OS and the software then you're going to spend more time on it, dedicate more effort to projects and be a better artist for it. I guarantee you!

Look, buy as powerful a Mac as you can afford, an i7 would be best of course, but an i5 would still do just fine. Then, get as large a USB external drive as you can for Time Machine and then, when you have more cash, buy a NAS with RAID5 or a FW800 RAID5 enclosure for archiving your projects. Optionally, if you ever do get a Mac Pro you could use the iMac as a Final Cut Server or at the very least, a QMaster workstation for faster media conversion and renders.

There's always used or refurbished if you wanna save a few hundred, if you haven't considered that yet. The 2009 models in particular aren't much different from the new ones - both are based on Nehalem, Westmere is just a die shrink.

Thanks again Maxxum (and others!)

I've been here and there about an iMac, I'm not in love with the all in one setup personally, but I could certainly live with it. Thing is I don't necessarily long for OSX, I probably have just as many quarrels with it as I do with Win7, and I love about as many things in OSX as I do 7. As an OS, I actually work faster on a PC.

I haven't given FCP a proper tryout but I'm sure I'd more than CS from what I've looked at. Saying that I've got a trial of CS5 now and it's quite an improvement over CS4, it's especially good with my 7D footage.

Do you guys think an i5 or i7 iMac would handle DSLR projects well? I just don't want to drop a load on an i7 mac to find myself wishing I had a 8-core a year later.

Everyone would love 8 cores but even an i5 would be OK as long as you don't expect it to be as fast as an 8 core Mac Pro. Can you tell me exactly what you're going to be throwing into the timeline? How many video/audio layers, 3d elements, any serious plugins and what your expectations will be. Are you going to be using 1080p though the whole timeline or are you going to be mixing media types. I might be able to tell you what my realworld times are on my i7 MBP and Mac Pro - that way you'll have an idea of what to expect.

MaxxuM wrote in post #11077389
Everyone would love 8 cores but even an i5 would be OK as long as you don't expect it to be as fast as an 8 core Mac Pro. Can you tell me exactly what you're going to be throwing into the timeline? How many video/audio layers, 3d elements, any serious plugins and what your expectations will be. Are you going to be using 1080p though the whole timeline or are you going to be mixing media types. I might be able to tell you what my realworld times are on my i7 MBP and Mac Pro - that way you'll have an idea of what to expect.

Well reason I'm worried about an i7 is my Q6600 is struggling, so in my mind all i can think of is 4 cores ha.

My timelines consist of 1080p footage from the 7D, usually 1 video layer but occasionally 2 or 3. I can end up having 4 or 5 audio layers most of the time.
Effects wise It's usually colour correction, some basic motion keyframing or other colour effects.

I have the option of an i7 iMac, or a xeon quad MacPro (with student discount). I just think I'd regret going the extra for a MacPro but not have 6 or 8 cores.
You think the quad xeon would be better than the i7?

The i7 leaves the Q6600 in the dust in just about every category except one, programs that require specific actions to be performed in order (ex. Photoshop). Even then, the i7 will be about 5-10% faster than the Q9650. The i7 is newer technology and thus get's more work done per CPU clock cycle than the older C2D/C2Qs. The Q6600 is on par with the i3 desktop CPU.

The only thing the Mac Pro will gain you, besides the ability to upgrade the HDDs and video, is shortened render times and you would need to get 8 or 12 core MP to see significant speed differences vs. the i7. Just getting the quad Mac Pro will gain you little to no performance difference. My 2008 2x2.8GHz Mac Pro can pump out a fifteen minute 1080p video with two video layers, 30seconds of Motion rendering, titles, four layers of audio (Fx and music) and some rendered transitions in approx. 3-5 minutes. My 8-core 2.8GHz system is on par with the current i7 iMac, speed wise, and the iMac has a superior video card.

To sum up, the Mac Pro will gain you no real speed difference unless you get the 8 or 12 core versions. It will give you the ability to add more hard drives (4 internal), ability to upgrade the video card, production cards like the Black Magic and much higher memory upgrade-ability. The Mac Pro is also tested to a greater degree by Apple as well as the original OEM's (like Intel).

The iMac's are consumer grade machines with the added benefit of having an excellent IPS screen, powerful desktop processors with upgrade limitations (chief among them being video and HDD) in a small footprint

Like I said, for me having to export to HDD after projects are done isn't a limitation. Some people want everything on eSATA for instant access. That would be very unrealistic for me.

Thanks Maxxum that's reassuring. At the end of the day I'm not that worried about rendering times as it doesn't have a direct impact on me... I can just let it sit there are do it.

All I'm concerned about is a responsive and smooth workflow in FCP. If the i7 iMac can deliver that then I'll certainly consider it with the student discount.

Couple questions though... can the iMac take a 2nd hardrive? And what's the maximum RAM it'll take on board?

There are only three ways to add a secondary or tertiary drive, be it DVD, Blu-ray, hard drive or other media type: buy an iMac with a SSD HDD already installed, send your iMac to OWC and get an eSATA port installed for around $170+shipping or lastly, use the included firewire or USB ports. They all have their drawbacks and benefits. SSD for instance, though expensive, is fast. Sending your iMac to OWC to have an eSATA port installed (it's the internal SSD port routed to the bottom of the case) would allow you to attached different drives or a large RAID5 array enclosure, but it's a nuisance to have to wait and OWC takes over your warranty. USB is fine for Time Machine backups and moving files, but a poor solution for a work drive. Firewire is fine for many things, but it will slow you down somewhat unless you know what it's limitations are and how to limit them.

That's the drawback of iMac's. Like I said, I don't personally see it as much of a problem because once I finish a project I just copy it over to a archive drive and the project is also saved in my Drobo NAS, then delete it from my HDD. I have never even come close to filling my 500GB MBP, much less my MP's TB's of space. I even have fiber channel to servers and I hardly use them except to make render farms.

The iMac can take up to 16GB of RAM, but it's going to cost you a good chunk of change. Again, I don't see much reason for going past 8GB unless you are a really heavily multitasking. If you upgrade, do it here (link). Way better prices and you can trade in Apple memory for a rebate too.