Thunderbolt is the future of editing, add this to one of the new sexy 27″ iMacs and you’re ready to go. My editing setup today is two 24″ OLED Apple monitors, 6 core MacPro with a Black Magic Intensity Pro card, 24 TB of drive space run with Sonnett EP4 E-sata cards and drive bays running FCPX 10.0.6.
I hope to get away from my MacPro setup, it’s not fast enough for today’s software and not upgradable to Thunderbolt. The Pegasus R6 is a cracking way forward with 2 Thunderbolt ports on the back and space for 18TB of storage it’s a no brainer.
Along side the Pegasus R6 you can have Black Magic’s Ultra Studio Express I/O Thunderbolt device with HDMI monitoring and HD SDI input and a breakout cable for analogue devices, it also comes with Media Express a cracking ingest software for older analogue camcorders like Betacam etc.
The cost…For the setup as shown above you are looking at £6,400 and that does not take into account the highest spec 27″ iMac configuration as there are no prices yet on the Apple store.
This will run FCPX 10.0.6 plus Motion 5 admirably, miles ahead of any present MacPro configuration seen today. During the “MacPro lull” I have had time to reflect on both my edit suite and my need for heavy bulky slow towers. FCPX has come on leaps and bounds since version one and I am now glad it’s my choice of editing platform …once again.
NOTE : I had a Drobo D5 in the graphic above but I have been told it’s not up to scratch for HD video editing.
Ugh, more fcpx fanboyism. And check your grammar dude. It’s all wrong
Steve it’s about what works for me, FCPX as I recall does not work on a PC and while I am on that topic Windows 8 is appalling.
I hate that there is polarization in the editing world regarding which program to use. Not everybody will like FCPX or Adobe Premiere Pro or Avid or whatever NLE is out there. In the end it is all about works for the individual editor and the final piece. Audiences certainly don’t care what kind of camera or editing suite the final movie was made on. All they care about is the story. They want to be entertained or educated, the audience could careless about the means to get there.
This article is a nice look at what could potentially be a nice FCPX setup for budget editors.
I don’t think I could, or you for that matter, accuse HD Warrior of FCPX ‘fanboyism’. In fact the opposite, if truth be told. I’ve had more than one go at him over his anti FCPX attacks, so, dude, your well wide of the mark. I’m glad he’s come to his senses at last!
Not quite sure about running a second monitor from the iMac; I’ll reserve my judgement on that one.
Well I have just used FCP X for the first time and been pleasantly surprised how easy it is. More importantly just clicking a button and off goes the cut story to Vimeo is very very good. Need to sit and learn the real ins and outs now. Not sure if a 50min doc is possible though.
On a technical note. Didn’t it used to be, and it could be different now, that if you use a second monitor, connected to thunderbolt, that it had to be at the end of the chain for it to work properly? So hanging an Ultra Studio Express of one of the thunderbolt ports breaks this? I could be wrong be thats how I read/understood how it works…
The new 27″ iMacs will start at £1495 or there abouts.
I will find this out and get back to you.
“Not sure if a 50min doc is possible though.”
Why not?
I run my TB drives through my monitor and see no difference.
It goes TBdrive to TBdrive to TBdrive into 27in LED monitor into macbook pro retina. All drives read the same speed even if I flip that order reverse. Then I plug my SSD TB drive into the additional TB port for transfer to different computers or temp projects.
Yes, the display has to be the last device in the chain, as that’s how TunderBolt works
I’m not sure a single socket system will be quite up to your needs though and you’re also “limited” to 32GB of RAM. Keep in mind that the Ivy Bridge CPUs aren’t exponentially faster than a pair of the Xeon’s in the MacPro, in fact, it’s likely that the single Ivy Bridge CPU will be slower in multi-threaded applications. On top of that, there’s no option to upgrade the graphics card and unless you get the top of the range model, you end up with a very low-end card, i.e. the GTX 660M is the same as a regular desktop GT 640 as far as the GPU itself is concerned. The GTX 680MX uses a slower clocked desktop equivalent GTX 670 at least, so this would most likely be the option to get if you’re going to be using GPU compute intensive applications.
Then why am I getting 380+Mb/sec with my monitor being at the front of the chain? ANd I get 380+Mb/sec with my monitor at the end of the chain.
My 2008 MacPro (8 cores) with FCPX wins easily against a 2011 iMac 27 with better graphics… I think that the only serious editing machine is still the MacPro. Hope they update with TB soon!
FCPX 10.0.6 rocks!
My £2k hackintosh is as fast as the new iMacs will be. Same processor, better GFX card, more IO, but my price includes two 24 inch screens and an intensity pro. 32GB of RAM makes it run nicely too. Now that’s a budget edit suite.
Importantly though. How does mt setup run FCPX… Answer… Really well. Geekbench of 15000. And a LuxMark. Of 2000. Thunderbolt. I don’t need it. But I’ve got it on the motherboard anyway.
“…miles ahead of any present MacPro configuration seen today.”
Absolutely and factually not true! What a bunch of hogwash this article is!
There are feature length documentaries and dramas that have been done with X. Not a question of “possible”, but a fact of “it has been done already”.