FCP HD System questions

Hi folks-

I am setting up a basic FCP HD editing system (offline & online) for the first time and am curious about a few things. I am considering either BlackMagic DeckLink HD or Kona LHe capture cards, and I assume either will be fine. My main concerns are:

1. Should I drop bigger bucks on the fastest CPU processor speed or will 2.8 gig be enough?
2. Can I drop in 2 or 3 one-TB SATA drives internally and will that be fast enough (with RAID 5?)

Source will be primarily HDcam material (1080p) and delivery the same.

Any other info or resource links would be appreciated.

Thanks-

Matt

Faster CPUs will be better, obviously, but not that much better. Investing in faster storage would help you out more.

If you're working in ProRes, minimum disk bandwidth is nearly a non-issue, as long as you have two spindles going. But without extra hardware, you can't do RAID-5 with internal disks. I'd recommend an external RAID ? I use a G-SPEED ES ? because, among other things, if a disk goes down you can replace it without shutting down your system. Not that it's wise to continue working during a RAID rebuild, but it saves you the trouble of going all the way down and coming all the way back up.

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Not that it's wise to continue working during a RAID rebuild

...definitely would not recommend doing that. Too many things could go wrong.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

I would strongly suggest faster Storage too as Jeff pointed out.

>2. Can I drop in 2 or 3 one-TB SATA drives internally and will that be fast enough (with RAID 5?)

There's a cool sentence in the almighty FAQ..

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Read Andrew Balis's article, Video Storage For Final Cut Pro at the Moviola Resource center. it contains storage requirement tables for specific formats of Video.

[www.lafcpug.org]

>1. Should I drop bigger bucks on the fastest CPU processor speed or will 2.8 gig be enough?

FCP doesn't have access to all 8 cores in an octo machine (as well as all the RAM), as FCP was originally written a while ago on 32 bit architecture. That may change with the arrival of the next OS Snow Leopard, and and further developments of FCP into a 64 bit software.

Currently FCP accesses one or two cores, and 2.5 gigs of RAM (according to the apple doc here [docs.info.apple.com]), the rest helps run the OS and other background processes to keep things stable, since Leopard is able to access all that as a 64 bit OS. So the faster the individual cores, the faster FCP works (to the extent of 32 processing).

But that's only one part. Also, how easily can FCP access the data. And that is what you need for RT capture/playback. The drives and the connection must be able to consistently sustain the data rates needed for the format.



www.strypesinpost.com

Just to clarify, Final Cut sometimes does and sometimes does not benefit from having eight processors. The ProRes Quicktime component was carefully optimized to scale in performance very well on eight-proc systems. Real-time playback performance is nearly twice as good on eight as it is on four, which means more streams of real-time playback on your timeline. Critical for, for example, multi-cam editing.

Anyone play around with the AJA Data Rate Calculator? How accurate would it be for spec'ing out a system? Thoughts? How does a codec's data rate contrast with the data rates you get with the calculator? Ex. 1080i ProRes422 @ 29.97fps gives a video data rate of 20.6 MB/sec. in the calculator, but ProRes is reffered to as a 140MB codec is it not? (I know it's not 140 but it's up in there, right?)

Thanks in advance for the teach.