Setting up a Mac Pro for Video Editing
October 5, 2014 2:00 PM Subscribe
I recently bought a preowned Mac Pro that is wiped clean except for the OS. I need some guidance on how to configure it to optimize its awesomeness for video editing. The OS is installed on a 128GB SSD. It has three other drives (2x640GB, 1x500GB). How should I use the other drives? Where should the applications live? Backup space? Scratch disk? In case it's relevant, here are some other specs: 22GB RAM, 2x2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon. Thanks!
if you can configure the two 640gb drives in RAID 0 as a scratch disk that would be a good idea.
the very first upgrade i would get is a 256gb+ SSD. SSDs have become so cheap that 256 gigs is like, $100 now too. I'd probably hunt for a 512 honestly if you can afford it.
any HD video editing i've done on a spinning drive-based machine has felt like molasses compared to doing it on my macbook pro(of the newer retina dedicated graphics variety, so a pretty fast machine, but still). The specs of the machine were sort of irrelevant. Hard drives will be your biggest bottleneck.
Disk speed seems to be to video editing what a graphics card is to gaming, or a CPU is to DAW work. It's your primary "spec". a system from 2007 with a stack of SSDs might overtake you on a lot of activities in FCP or premiere or whatever. If i had to choose between a 2nd gen mac pro from 07 or so, and a brand new maxed out imac without an SSD... i'd take the old mac pro every time, even if on paper the imac is faster.
posted by emptythought at 2:45 PM on October 5, 2014
the very first upgrade i would get is a 256gb+ SSD. SSDs have become so cheap that 256 gigs is like, $100 now too. I'd probably hunt for a 512 honestly if you can afford it.
any HD video editing i've done on a spinning drive-based machine has felt like molasses compared to doing it on my macbook pro(of the newer retina dedicated graphics variety, so a pretty fast machine, but still). The specs of the machine were sort of irrelevant. Hard drives will be your biggest bottleneck.
Disk speed seems to be to video editing what a graphics card is to gaming, or a CPU is to DAW work. It's your primary "spec". a system from 2007 with a stack of SSDs might overtake you on a lot of activities in FCP or premiere or whatever. If i had to choose between a 2nd gen mac pro from 07 or so, and a brand new maxed out imac without an SSD... i'd take the old mac pro every time, even if on paper the imac is faster.
posted by emptythought at 2:45 PM on October 5, 2014
Response by poster: Thanks for your answers. I'm using Final Cut 7, but want to learn Premiere and Avid.
posted by timnyc at 6:46 PM on October 5, 2014
posted by timnyc at 6:46 PM on October 5, 2014
I have a similar Mac Pro and have been running smaller SSDs in it for a few years. I am just about to upgrade to a 1TB Samsung 840 EVO. This is because they're cheap enough now so that I can afford to keep all my media (still photos for me) on the boot disk where I will suffer no slowdowns due to disk IO issues, which is what makes (nearly) everything feel slow these days.
You could stripe the 640GB drives to get increased speed for a scratch disk, but striping doubles your risk of losing data and more or less eliminates any chance of recovering it from a failing drive, so you would want very good backups. You could use the 500GB for Time Machine until it's full and then get something larger too perhaps.
Overall, for video, I would be starting with bigger drives if I could. The ones you mention must be a few years old at least and could fail anytime. You could have 12TB (or more) in those 3 HD spots if you wanted to. Why limit yourself to such low capacity?
But if you can afford it, get something bigger than that 128GB SSD - the smaller sizes are the slowest - and put everything you can on it, as long as you don't try to keep it too full. I try to keep mine under 50% where possible.
posted by mewsic at 2:08 AM on October 6, 2014
You could stripe the 640GB drives to get increased speed for a scratch disk, but striping doubles your risk of losing data and more or less eliminates any chance of recovering it from a failing drive, so you would want very good backups. You could use the 500GB for Time Machine until it's full and then get something larger too perhaps.
Overall, for video, I would be starting with bigger drives if I could. The ones you mention must be a few years old at least and could fail anytime. You could have 12TB (or more) in those 3 HD spots if you wanted to. Why limit yourself to such low capacity?
But if you can afford it, get something bigger than that 128GB SSD - the smaller sizes are the slowest - and put everything you can on it, as long as you don't try to keep it too full. I try to keep mine under 50% where possible.
posted by mewsic at 2:08 AM on October 6, 2014
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But realistically, storage access time will slow you down at every turn, so I would recommend upgrading to faster, higher capacity HDDs. HDDs are cheap.
Also, you never said which application you're planning to use - Old Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid, Premiere? You may want to consider different set-ups depending on what you're using. I've used mostly Final Cut, so if you're using something else, consult with somebody who uses that.
posted by Strudel at 2:34 PM on October 5, 2014