Questions about buying a new Mac Pro for 4k video editing.

# 1 seems OK since

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/1866D3R9M32/

says you can use 2x16. Note that it has to be registered ECC memory

#2 See the following for selecting number of cores and other things

http://macperformanceguide.com/index_topics.html#MacPro2013

#3 See #1 above

#4 not comment

#5 When yo say hard drives do you mean the blade SSD installed in the Mac?

You can sometimes find them on eBay. Other OWC is the only third-party place at this time.

5. I'm not finding many deals for cheaper ram and hard drives.

You are buying the state of the art. There will be no deals until there is less demand or the technology moves on to something better. If in the US, try shopping here:

http://www.datamemorysystems.com

The Internal SSD drive is intended as the Boot drive. Substantial amounts of Video data will not fit on it, even if you get the largest available.

It is expected that you will put your User data on External drives. USB-3 will work for two drives used simultaneously, then may start to slow down. ThunderBolt enclosures will give best performance.

New Processors are not expected soon. So a new Mac Pro is also not expected soon.

I have been using a fully maxed out Mac Pro (late 2013) since mid-January of last year. It is a superb machine for editing 4K video when paired with high quality external Thunderbolt 2 raid systems. The main difference that you will see between the 6-core and the 8-core Mac Pro will be in shortening the export time. Going to the 12-core will offer further reductions in export time since all cores are used by Final Cut Pro X. Only you can decide if the trade off of shorter render (export) times is worth the extra dollars for more cores. Many people think that the 8-core machine affords the "sweet spot" in this regard in the Mac Pro line.

I strongly recommend that if you purchase a Mac Pro you leave behind Final Cut Studio 2 and move immediately to Final Cut Pro X. FCP X has a significant learning curve (mainly because it is a totally new way of doing things), but it affords not only full 64-bit speed but is optimized to work with the late 2013 Mac Pro. I can tell you from first hand experience that working with FCP X on the late 2013 Mac Pro is a superb experience. The program literally flies on that machine even when playing back 4K video in real time. Furthermore, FCP X makes optimum use of the GPU of the AMD D700 graphics cards in the 2013 Mac Pro so effects, filters, etc. are rendered with amazing speed.

If at all possible, I would highly recommend a Pegasus Thunderbolt 2 raid system, e.g. the Pegasus R4 or R6. I am editing 4K video daily using a Pegasus 2 R6 Raid 5 system and I am easily able to handle multiple 4K streams form my Sony FDR-AX100 4K camcorder with this raid array. It has also proven to be totally reliable. If the Pegasus 2 is beyond your reach, then Western Digital makes a number of Thunderbolt raid 0 hard drives that afford excellent speed, but, of course, raid 0 does not afford you any protection in the event of failure of one of the hard drives in the raid.

I hope this adds to The other comments you have received.

Tom

The late 2013 Mc Pro uses Intel Xeon ECC processors (error correction), and as far as I know Intel has not announced any newer Intel Xeon processors than those in the late 2013 Mac Pro. I would not expect to see an update to the 2013 Mac Pro until the end of 2015 at the earliest and probably later than that.

If time is not an issue, then you should be quite happy with the 6 core 2013 Mac Pro. It will do an excellent job with 4K video footage. And, yes, I would suggest getting the best raid system you can afford. That is actually more important than processor speed since I/O is frequently the bottleneck when doing multi camera video or 4K video.

I have the latest version of Adobe's Premiere Pro 2014 CC installed on my late 2013 Mac Pro and i have used it a bit without problems. However, I find it much much slower to edit with than FCP X. Also be advised that if you Google you will find several individuals on the Adobe Forums who purchased the late 2013 Mac Pro and have not been able to use it with Premiere Pro CC because of either a hardware incompatibility or software issues between Premiere Pro CC and BMD's Resolve. It is quite possible that I have not experienced these problems because I have not made very demanding projects with Premiere Pro CC on my 2013 Mac Pro.

I strongly recommend FCP X. Apple released FCP X before it was ready, and many early users were unwilling to take the time to learn how to use this very different NLE which is not track based. Apple has over the last 3 years since FCP X was released, issued more than 10 updates (all free), and the program is stable and blazingly fast. I urge you to check out the FCP X training offered by Ripple Training and/or Larry Jordan. Both are inexpensive, and worth every cent. Watch their training videos and you will be up to speed in FCP X in no time at all, and you will wish you had switched a long time ago.

If you can afford the 1 TB of PCie internal flash storage on your Mac Pro, then by all means get it. For me 1TB is well worth the cost.

As far as editing 4K video, the format of the video will be important to the ease of editing. For example, I am able to edit in its native format (XVAC S) several streams of 4K video form my Sony FDR-AX100 with no problems. If I were editing Sony's XVAC format used in their professional 4K cameras, that might pose a problem that would require transcoding. Similarly for other 4K formats. XVAC S is an easy format to edit natively because it is essentially a high bit rate h.264 format.

Best of luck on whatever you decide to do, and happy editing.

Tom

Hi Tom

I just bought an R4 based on your feedback and currently have it setup as RAID 5 to see if that is quick enough. Did you re-configure to RAID 0? If so did you try RAID 5 before doing this?

Appreciate your thoughts as and when you get the time. Thanks in advance.

Congratulations on your purchase of the Pegasus 2 R4. I hope you will enjoy yours as much as the Pegasus 2 R6 that I purchased more than a year ago. I have my R6 configured as Raid 5 just as it came from Promise Technologies. Raid 5 offers the best compromise between security and speed. It is fast enough for virtually any video that you can throw at it, and if one of the drives fails in a Raid 5 setup the system will rebuild itself when you insert a new hard drive into it. With Raid 0 you will have a faster data throughput, but you will sacrifice any security, i.e. if any of the drives in your R4 fails then you will lose all data.

Tom