An FCP system for Uncompressed HD

I was at a TV station a few days ago with a requirement to capture uncompressed HD at 4:4:4 dual link out of a telecine. The captures had to be a jumbo reel at a time which works out to about 22 mins in one go. Telecine was a Cintel with Stereo or Dolby audio coming from a Sondor sound follower in sync. 

The system was configured as a Dual Quad MacPro with 8 GB RAM. A Kona 3 card with a AJA embedder to embed analog audio into the HD-SDI stream. And disks were internal. Yes internal disks. I was skeptical. The disks were SAS disks RAIDed together as RAID 0 with the Apple internal RAID card. SAS drives are wicked fast. But the signal was HD 1080p24 at 4:4:4. 

I checked the AJA Control Panel to be sure. And I was still skeptical. I first ran the AJA disk test and it showed sufficient Read and Write speed. But only just. I've forgotten the actual numbers as we did a few combinations of cache on and off. 

So we threaded the film. And the sound film. Played pack to check sync and inputs. The colourist fussed over the colours a bit and was ready to go. He ran the film and I hit capture now. The 'Abort capture on dropped frames' warning was on. We went over the whole reel and the capture went through. 

The RAID drive wasn't empty, but wasn't full either. About 20% full from previous captures. The capture went off fine. Not a singe dropped frame. Just to be sure we did it one more time. And that went through as well. I'm not entirely sure this is going to work if the drives get full like about 80% full. And I have no way to check. 

A colleague will be running further tests over the next week or so. Maybe he'll fill up the drive and we'll find out that this works up to a point. Also, these drives are striped as RAID 0, so its not a secure RAID and one drive failure will result in total data loss. The whole telecine will then need to be repeated. 

But then, I guess their workflow will have to be to encode these to whatever their target format is and take it off the drives as soon as possible, so maybe that may not be such a problem. And SAS drives are seriously reliable. 

Finally, just to make sure that the same setup performed fine for compressed HD capture as well, I did one reel captured to Apple ProResHQ. The data rate of ProResHQ even at 1080p24 4:2:2 is well within the capabilities of even a single SATA drive so the SAS RAID wasn't going to sweat much over ProRes. But I wanted to be sure if the combination of an HD input and the extra processing that ProRes takes, would be handled by this configuration. It did. 

So, here it is. a simple system to capture HD Uncompressed all within one box. I went over to the Apple store to spec it out and check what it would cost. 

Here is the complete spec... 

# Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 

# 8GB (4x2GB) 

# Mac Pro RAID Card 

# 320GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s 

# 300GB 15,000-rpm SAS 

# 300GB 15,000-rpm SAS 

# 300GB 15,000-rpm SAS 

# ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB 

# One 16x SuperDrive 

# Apple Cinema HD Display (30" flat panel) 

# Apple Mighty Mouse 

# Apple Keyboard + User's Guide 

# AppleCare Protection Plan for Mac Pro (w/or w/o Display) - Auto-enroll 

And here's the cost. 

(US$, Customs duty extra) 

$ 9097 for the system - spec above 

$ 1300 for Final Cut Studio 2 

$ 2300 for the AJA Kona3 

With Indian Customs duty you're looking at About Rs 8 lakhs. The only saving I can see anyone making is to get a Blackmagic Multibrdge Pro in place of the Kona3 which can save you $ 700. 

But I haven't tested the Multibridge with this setup so can't say. I have used a Multibridge extensively and found it to work fine even with uncompressed HD. Either ways, the ability to capture and work in HD, as uncompressed 4:4:4 is now within reach. 

8 lakhs may seem a bit much, if you're in the market for a cheap DV only system. But if online quality video and even 2k is what you're getting into, then this is it. With an AJA Kona 3 you're going to get video quality indistinguishable from a Smoke/Flame or eQ for a fraction of the price. 

By the way, the new Smoke/Flame systems ship with an AJA Xena card which sources at Aja have told me is the same as the Kona in quality terms. Besides with Final cut Studio, you get Motion, Color, SoundTrack, LiveType. 

Add Shake, a 3D CG software, Adobe Video bundle, some DPX tools, Apple Color and a really imaginative editor, and you've got a mean system that can make you some big bucks. 

And, if you want to go further, add two iMacs, GigE network them, snag two enthu cutlets who can assist with capture and graphics and you've got some real great human throughput that one online machine just can't deliver.

New Dual Quad or 8-core MacPro

So the MacPro has also gone Octa - or octo. Eight CPUs in one Mac. Just had to happen since HP and others are already selling PCs with 8 CPUs. This is the same Woodcrest or whatever its called CPU.

The 8-core was just placed on the web site with an announcement that it would be available in a few days. No show, no fanfare. And this announcement has happened a scant 10 days before NAB. Where Apple will have a special media event on the 15th Apr.

So what does that mean for NAB and FCP? Definitely no more hardware announcements. At last year's NAB it was widely rumoured and even believed that there would be FCP 6. But no such thing came out. No new hardware, no new systems, just the new MacBook pro announced but not shipping. And FCP 5.1 shown but not shipped.

I guess Apple wanted to avoid the inevitable disappointment that this would cause if they just came up with a 8-core MacPro and nothing else. And even the 8-core XServe and newer higher capacity XServeRAIDs have already been introduced a few weeks ago.

So at NAB there might be demos with the existing FCP and Motion on the 8-core MacPro, some fast shared storage with the new XServeRAID.

And then maybe there might be bigger things around so Apple just got this MacPro out of the way so they wouldn't be diluted. Who knows? We all definitely will on the 15th Apr.

Avid Media Composer on Intel Mac

Avid announced a few days ago that the new version 2.7 of Media Composer and versions of XPress Pro will now run on Intel mac systems. MacPros, MacBook Pros and even Intel iMacs.

And I've just finished installing 3 Media Composers on Quad G5s. I even tried running the PC version of Media Composer on a Dual dual-core MacPro on the 'Windows side'. it works fine except for the serial port thing. Keyspan doesn't work under WinXP.

No more of that needed. You can run MC on the 'Mac side' of a Mac Pro just as well. But if you've bought MC ver. 2.6.4 or earlier and now want to upgrade your older G5 to a Mac Pro its not going to be free. Adrenaline users need to pay $ 1000 to upgrade to MC ver 2.7 (as the Universal Binary version is called) while MojoSDI owners need to pay $150 from what I can gather.

I don't have India pricing just yet, will get it from Real Image by and by.

Avid Media Composer on Apple MacPro

or... a whole new way of looking at this software for Mac vs PC thing.

In April last year Avid announced the new Media Composer software-only version. Later it shipped. In Mac and PC versions in the same box. Both separate. We just bought two last week.

The PC version and Mac version have Avid 'qualified' systems as OK by Avid. On the Mac front the MacPro is still not qualified and in beta. The Mac version can hence run only on a Quad G5 or at best on a Dual G5. Not a MacPro, not a iMac, not a MacBook Pro.

So I did a study on 'qualified system' spec.

Avid's qualified system is (quoting from Avid's site)

Microsoft ® Windows ® XP 32-bit Edition (SP2)
Dual Dual-Core Intel ® Xeon ® Processors 5150 2.66 GHz, 1333 FSB, 4 MB L2 cache
2 GB DDR2 ECC FBD SDRAM (2 GB minimum, 3 GB recommended for HD and complex workflows)

The 5160 3.00 GHz processors also supported
NVIDIA Quadro FX1500 256MB PCIe or the NVIDIA Quadro FX 3500 256MB PCIe

And the new MacPro is (quoting from everymac.com)

two Xeon 5150 "Woodcrest" Dual-Core processors, 4 MB of L2 cache per processor.
OR
two 3 GHz Dual Core Xeon 5160 processors
Both have
ECC DDR2 FB-DIMM and has 4 Mb L2 cache

Graphics is NVidia GeForce 7300 GT but you can optionally get an ATI Radeon X1900XT or even a NVidia Quadro FX4500, the same one that the PC is qualified with.

Further, if one considers laptops, then Avid's qualified systems are...

HP nw8440 Mobile Workstation
HP nw9440 Mobile Workstation

An nw8440, from HPs site consists of...

CoreDuo T2600 2.16 GHz, 667 MHz bus, 2 Mb L2 cache, DDR2 SDRAM. 15" screen, ATI FireGL graphics with 256MB VRAM,
OR
Core2Duo T7400 2.16 GHz, 667 MHz bus, 4 Mb L2 cache, DDR2 SDRAM. 15" screen, ATI FireGL graphics with 256MB VRAM,

and a nw 9440 from HPs site consists of...

CoreDuo T2600 2.16 GHz, 667 MHz bus, 2 Mb L2 cache, DDR2 SDRAM, 17" screen, NVidia Quadro FX1500M with 256 MB VRAM.
OR
Core2Duo T7400 2.16 GHz, 667 MHz bus, 4 Mb L2 cache, DDR2 SDRAM, 17" screen, NVidia Quadro FX1500M with 256 MB VRAM.

On the Mac front,

And the older CoreDuo 15" MacBookPro is
2 GHz Core Duo T2600, 667 MHz bus, 2 Mb L2 cache, PC2-5300 DDR2 RAM and Radeon X1600 graphics,

and the newer Core2Duo 15" MacBookPro is
2.16 GHz Core2Duo T7400, 667 MHz bus, 4 Mb L2 cache, PC2-5300 DDR2 RAM and Radeon X1600 graphics, 128 MB VRAM

So the specs match. Desktops and laptops.
As for iMacs, they are T2600 and T7400 so they 'count' as laptops, more or less.

So if I load up the PC version of Avid Media Composer on the Win partition of a MacPro, MacBookPro or an iMac Intel...

Will Avid Media Composer 'see' the Mac as a PC? I'm trying to find out if anyone has actually tried this. I have access to all these systems and am waiting to pinch a free Avid MC MojoSDI to try. If it does then that opens up new way of looking at this Mac vs PC thing for us creative professionals.

We no longer need wait for the Mac version of anything. Just Boot camp to Windows and run the PC version. What a coup!

Incidentally, the www.everymac.com, that I've mentioned above is a great web site which has exact specs of each and every Apple Mac ever made. You can look up your old 9500s and 8100s and the first PowerBook or even, if you're as old as me, a MacSE (which my parents used).