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General discussion

HDV on current Macs

Jun 27, 2007 4:18AM PDT

How does the current Mac lineup handle HDV High Definition Video? The MAc Pro I have heard does it in real time but what about the others?

Is the performance so bad that in within 2 years an upgrade would be quite necessary to get 'good' performance?

Discussion is locked

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Define Handle.
Jun 27, 2007 4:34AM PDT

Play it?
Edit it?
Stream it?

My G4 will show the content listed at this URL. http://www.apple.com/quicktime/guide/hd/
which is all HD.

On what do you base your "performance so bad" statement and question?

P

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EDIT
Jun 27, 2007 11:33AM PDT

I mainly meant how they edit it like how they perform when bringing it from the cam to Mac and the whole process.

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Ahem...
Jun 27, 2007 8:52PM PDT

Anyone?

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All current Macs
Jun 27, 2007 9:54PM PDT

will edit HD video.
All current Mac's, and a whole bunch of less current Mac's, will bring HD video from the camera to the Mac via Firewire with no problem whatsoever.
Limits being available HD space.

Once there, iMovie HD will perform well for those with fairly modest editing needs, while FCE or FCP will serve the needs of the Pro type editors. Usually a faster processor is required for the latter.

There have been a number of discussions regarding this subject in recent weeks.

If machine "A" edits HD video well now, there is no reason to believe that it will not edit HD video well in two years time.
Unless, of course, your editing demands change drastically.

You seem to suggest that you have information contrary to the above, please share.

P

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"the whole process" is the same.
Jun 27, 2007 10:03PM PDT

So I'll skip that.

Maybe you are concerned about speed. Yup, a single core CPU equipped Mac will be slower than a new Mac Pro with it's quad core and so on.

But it all "just works."

Bob

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Thanks
Jun 28, 2007 12:13AM PDT

I just want to know that will the performance expectations of HDV editing increase drastically in the near future? e.g we cant expect a drastic performance increase from Firefox with the next few updates in the Mac lineup, but I expect HDV performacne to drastically improve with the next few Mac updates? True or not so noticeable?

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I'm writing "no." Here's why.
Jun 28, 2007 12:23AM PDT

The truth is that video editing and more so the rendering is quite optimized. I don't expect to see any more than a single digit percent reduction in time if some better programmer was tasked to improve the code.

Is that what you are asking about?

The truth is that more cores and more GHz reduces the rendering time. In fact if you research this you learn about RENDER FARMS to really slap the time down.

Bob

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Hardware Update
Jun 28, 2007 5:56AM PDT

I thyink you got me wrong.

When I said update I meant hardware upgrade like from Core Duo to Core 2 Duo. In the recent future do you expect huge performance gains for HDV? like a 200-300% performance increase on HDV? Quad cores are expected next year. That would make it around atleast 200% performance increase taking into consideration the double cores and better architecture and faster clock speeds.

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Quad cores are here now.
Jun 28, 2007 6:03AM PDT

And yes, some of the softwares use it to get that time down. Also some use the render farm which is something you have to see to believe.

Bob

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Oh My God
Jun 28, 2007 7:14AM PDT

Render Farming looks AMAZING. Is it the same thing as Apple's Xgrid? My friend who has a Core 2 Duo PC said that Maya lags even with basic stuff. I was surprised. So is it true that his single PC can not be as powerful as a basic render farm for Maya?

What tasks can render farming do? Video encoding? Rendering? What else?

So if I go around 'collecting' old PCs from friends and buying dirt cheap ones form ebay and bargain places, and then put them all in a corner of my room called the 'server' room Happy, and then if I set up a video DVD burning task, then will it be much faster than lets say even a quad core Mac Pro? The cheap computers will most prolly be under 1 Ghz an with no more than 256 MB RAM. Maybe around 5-10 Pcs.

My dad's new office is going to be built and they are going to change their PCs my dad told me. So I will try and convince my dad to give me or sell those old PCs to me for really cheap. There are about 3 PCs with 1.7 Ghz Pentium 4, small HDDs, 32 MB Nvidia cards. Then I have my old 600 Mhz Pentium 3 with 64 MB RAM and 32 MB Nvidia.

Do you think that these PCs plus maybe a few more will make a nice render farm? I will not be going into anything too advanced. Just an experiment.

Now we have a computer lab in our school with about 20-25 PCs with Pentium 4 procs and some other basic stuff. Is it possible to run a livecd linux on them and make them a worker on a render farm?

Pardon me but I am new to render farming and very excited.

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For PC's look to ...
Jun 28, 2007 7:55AM PDT