Editing raw video on a $900 Hackintosh as well as on a $5000 Mac Pro

[Andrew Reid]

With the raw format becoming affordable for the first time this year (Blackmagic Cinema Camera, Red One, Ikonoskop) many aspiring filmmakers are considering taking advantage. But to edit raw you need to up the ante on the hardware side.

What is the most suitable (and affordable) editing rig for raw - Windows, Mac Pro or Hackintosh?

[andy lee]

Custom built Hackintosh??

[Jeff Orig]

We use FCPX and recently edited Red Raw with our 13" MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM.  We recently upped the memory to 16GB in that machine from www.MacSales.com.  My point being that pure power is not necessarily needed if you are using FCPX.

 

Granted many old school editors hate FCPX but I personally think it is the future.  I was a hater of FCPX before but have grown to love it.

 

Just something to consider.  For a $1100 real Mac with FCPX, you could be editing raw.

[Pechente]

It's nice to see you built one yourself :) Mine is running very very well and I got no problems with the onboard audio. The hackintosh runs almost as well as my old iMac and certainly works better than Windows on the same machine. I hope Apple realizes they need to adjust some of their business strategies, so many people start to move away from them.

 

It's sad I can't completely abandon them since their laptop hardware and desktop OS are still unreached in my opinion.

[richg101]

Im on a hackintosh.  I mirror all what Andrew has said.  im running an i7 2600 overclocked to 3.8ghz, 16gb of 1600mhz ram, ssd, and a cuda nvida gtx 460 card - the cheapest one which worked with apple.  running on Lion.    a mate of mine configured it.  superb machine.  lightening fast.  

 

a few funny things I have found with mine:-

 

1. Parts of OSX seem to be defaulted to some type of arabic text - which I am unable to work out why.  This is not affecting workflow but is a bit annoying.  - certain windows such as the cd burner window has all text in arabic.  most things are not affected though.

 

2. The internal sound on the motherboard is twitchy - definitely use an uprated soundcard.  using the inbuilt sound on mine means that if you import some audio into premiere and play it back you lose audio on youtube / vimeo due to some conflict somewhere, and you need to reset the machine in order to get audio back.  again, not that bad really.  

 

3. When using some of the usb 2/3 ports on some occasions and with certain hard drives, the machine tries to boot from the portable usb hard drive.  as a result, when you shut down to restart after disconnecting the usb hd, the system changes the boot setting to ram speed of 1300mhz.  If this happens I just need to restart and go into the boot menu and reload the optimised user setting we saved originally so the system is set up to run the ram at the correct 1600mhz.

 

 

As far as everything else is concerned, I am over the moon.  cost under £900 including Lion and a genuine apple keyboard

[galenb]

I was just thinking, it would be cool to get an old Power Mac or older Mac Pro case, gut it and replace all the components with new hackintosh parts. Someone probably has an old G5 tower sitting with the pile of other old retired computers in there basement. I know my parents still have an old blue and white G3 in a closet somewhere. That could be a fun project. :-)

[Pechente]

I was just thinking, it would be cool to get an old Power Mac or older Mac Pro case, gut it and replace all the components with new hackintosh parts. Someone probably has an old G5 tower sitting with the pile of other old retired computers in there basement. I know my parents still have an old blue and white G3 in a closet somewhere. That could be a fun project. :-)

 

Lots of people actually do this. The hackintosh sites are full of these builds and you could get some tips and advises there.

[galenb]

Oh, that's awesome. Great minds... What site is that?

[zephyrnoid]

We use FCPX and recently edited Red Raw with our 13" MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM.  We recently upped the memory to 16GB in that machine from www.MacSales.com.  My point being that pure power is not necessarily needed if you are using FCPX.

 

Granted many old school editors hate FCPX but I personally think it is the future.  I was a hater of FCPX before but have grown to love it.

 

Just something to consider.  For a $1100 real Mac with FCPX, you could be editing raw.

I'n too lazy to read the specs, but is FCPX running with proxies? How do you manage the file sizes otherwise?

[Paul Watt]

I'm on my second Hackintosh for editing.  As Andrew stated, it took a little while to get to rock solid stability, but now my machine cooks hard.  One thing I'd recommend is using an external RAID 5 or 10 as a media drive, with (as suggested) an SSD system drive, and a second SSD as a media cache drive.  Then use another big 7200 drive (or even better, two in a RAID 1 setup) as an output drive for rendered files.  This doesn't cost as much as you'd think, and it lets your machine snap through data even faster.  Plus, if your Hackintosh runs into problems, you can plug the media drive into another computer and keep on working without too much stress.

Love the Hackintoshs!

[KirkGaydon]

Some interesting points on building your own Hackintosh, especially the soundcard comments. I've been using a hackintosh for three years now and have never had a problem with updates. I find Gigabyte motherboards to be the best for compatibility. I'm still using a Gigabyte GA-X58A-UDR3 motherboard with an i7 6core processor and 24gb of triple core memory and have never needed to upgrade it. I like this system as its fast and doesn't have the speedstepper issues when updating through Software Update. Whenever Apple release a new update, the only thing I need to do is replace the sound driver with an older 10.6.2 kext, and replace the USB3 kext, then reboot, but multibeast does that for you these days!

 

If you know someone who already owns a mac, try and persuade them to create an account for you and purchase and download Mountain Lion, then work out how to install this to an 8gb USB stick (many websites show you how to do that).

 

I've installed a 480GB SSD for the operating system and raided three 3TB hard drives together and get a nice speed from it, All easy to do in Disk Utility.

 

I've always had problems with Dell systems as they lock their bios down too much. This is much the case also with many laptops, In the end I gave up with hackintoshing laptops and purchased a retina macbook pro!

[Jens Schwoon]

Building a hackintosh is something "normal". My local PC - Components dealer is located to many studenthouses nearby. He has buildt about 40 or more Hackintoshs that run really well and cost a quarter of the original Mac Computers.

 

For all those guys who are not interested in struggling around with drivers and some conflicts at the beginning, I would advice the Reseller in Germany that sells "ready to use" Hackintoshs ...

 

http://pearc.de/PearC-Advanced-eng?parentid=73&parentname=produkte

 

They are not as cheap as the real "Hackintosh" clones, but the simply work out of the box.

[MattH]

"The cards have various amounts of video memory from 1GB to 4GB. You can edit Blackmagic Cinema Camera raw with 1.25GB of video RAM but running Resolve and Premiere at the same time will require 3GB."

 

How do you know this please?  Is it from personal experience or someone else’s personal experience that you know?  Did you/they try running resolve and premiere simultaneously on both a 2GB and 4GB graphics card?  What happened with the 2GB version.? Did it just fail or run more slowly?

 

I'm currently specking out a pc and up to now I'd kind of concluded that 2GB would be enough.  Most tests are bassed on games and consistantly prove no benefit to a 4GB card.  But for the sake of future proofing I may be inclined to go for 4GB if the evidence is there.

As its seems to be around £100 extra for a 4GB version of a graphics card that would otherwise offer no benefit it’s a pretty significant question for me at the moment.

 

Any info or a forum thread url would be really cool.

[tokyojerry]

Greetings.  This article focuses on proceeding through the loops and hurdles on how to build a Hackintosh  (and I appreciate this guideline) to avoid the high price of exorbitantly overpriced and outdated MacPro equivalent.  To avoid all the hassles associated with the Hackintosh route,  and this is a long shot maybe,  what do you think about a relatively inexpensive system spec'd as follows:

MacMini 2012

Core i7

16GB RAM

SSD 512GB internal.

External 3TB x2 striped (RAID0) over USB3 ports. (TB ports as alternative)

External 27" monitor 2560 x 1440 (not Apple's Cinema display).

 

I guess the weak link here perhaps is the Intel Integrated 4000 graphics.  Alternative to this, I am thinking the new 27" iMac 27" with Core i7 and max'ing the RAM to 32GB. 

[terrykim]

I don't have a Hackintosh or have edited raw but I do have some comments on using Geforce cards in Premiere CS5.5. Definitely get the 6 series over the 5. Even though there isn't a huge performance boost, the 6 series cards allow for 4 monitors per card which is huge for editing. I use a gtx 560 ti and whenever I incorporate large picture files into my videos it crashes. From what I hear it's because it only has 1 gig of ram (although it could be something else.) most of the 6 series cards have 2 gigs and up while the 5 series are almost all around 1-1.5 gigs.

[Sergefrse]

Great article to get feedback with your own adventure. Hackintosh is the most use solution in indie film & music video. Most cheaper & also much more speeder than the MacPro.

Keep your Hack only for Video workflow, other application internet, surf, mail on a separate computer, do not take any risk. A up to date have to be done apart, when no project is in process. Always keep a copy of your system. Keep safe!

 

Pop in there :

http://www.tonymacx86.com/buying-advice/58820-hackintosh-davinci-resolve-raid-system.html

 

& for GPU on Da Vinci

http://www.barefeats.com/rogue04.html

 

Old link on Da Vinci & Hack :

http://reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?54430-DAVINCI-RESOLVE-and-***HACKINTOSH***/

 

 

In case you are using a real MacPro have a look there : 

http://macvidcards.com

 

Its shop :

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Nvidia-GTX-580-Apple-Mac-Pro-3-GB-CUDA-DaVinci-Resolve-Adobe-Premiere-GTX580-/330781487487?pt=PCC_Video_TV_Cards&hash=item4d041cf17f

 

Thanks for your article and involvement by sharing. Cheers

Merry XMas

[Leang]

Red and CS6. love

[Jens Schwoon]

Greetings.  This article focuses on proceeding through the loops and hurdles on how to build a Hackintosh  (and I appreciate this guideline) to avoid the high price of exorbitantly overpriced and outdated MacPro equivalent.  To avoid all the hassles associated with the Hackintosh route,  and this is a long shot maybe,  what do you think about a relatively inexpensive system spec'd as follows:

MacMini 2012

Core i7

16GB RAM

SSD 512GB internal.

External 3TB x2 striped (RAID0) over USB3 ports. (TB ports as alternative)

External 27" monitor 2560 x 1440 (not Apple's Cinema display).

 

I guess the weak link here perhaps is the Intel Integrated 4000 graphics.  Alternative to this, I am thinking the new 27" iMac 27" with Core i7 and max'ing the RAM to 32GB. 

 

I think the grafik power of the mac mini is the grafic card...

 

Did anyone ever use an external Grafic - Card from Matrox?? There are several external boxes ... http://www.voelkner.de/products/203186/Grafikkarte-Matrox-TripleHead2Go-DisplayPort-Edition.html?WT.mc_id=googlebase&utm_source=google&utm_medium=base&utm_campaign=C42905

[HurtinMinorKey]

I thought the whole reason to be on Mac was to avoid the "hassle" of windows.  This hackintosh stuff all sounds like a big hassle. Just suck it up and come back to windows. 

[richg101]

I thought the whole reason to be on Mac was to avoid the "hassle" of windows. This hackintosh stuff all sounds like a big hassle. Just suck it up and come back to windows.

most people go mac because they think it makes them more creative and professional - I love seeing these idiots flaunting thier apple macbook pro's on the train. though not worth 4 times what an equivalent windows based machine costs, an apple is better overall. the hackintosh idea brings the benefits of the apple workflow, to a pricepoint the same as a windows pc. The 'Hassle' isnt really hassle, but more effort.

The argument is that Apple is losing it's edge due to a change in direction and windowns is improving meaning the apple benefits are getting smaller. I still prefer my hackintosh than any other pc. It runs smoother and with less hassle than any pc I have ever owned, from custom builds to off the shelf dells etc