Recommended Mac Pro specs for video editing

[somedude]

I am considering getting a Mac Pro tower for video editing with the Final Cut Suite. Right now I use an iBook G4, but as you can imagine it is slow with rendering and other processor intensive tasks.

What specs would you recommend for a Mac Pro setup? I know you can max out the RAM and hard drives, but how much is really necessary?

 

[PowerBookG4]

what is your level of professionalism... do you edit your home videos? do you edit weddings/ other events? are you a free lance editor for MTV? a little bit more information would help us better recommend specs.

 

[somedude]

My level of editing

I do weddings, short commercials for inventions or businesses, and brief 10-15 min promos or full DVDs for non-profits. I am not quite a freelancer for MTV, but I do pretty high quality videos.

Hope the info helps.

 

[bobtomay]

Personally would recommend the fastest processor you can afford - first - especially for encoding tasks - this you'll never regret

For the RAM - you can get after market 2GB kits for less than the upgrade from 1 to 2 GB from Apple. Would start there and watch your RAM usage. If you are pretty consistently using 80% +, then would opt for another 2GB kit. Think at 4GB, this should handle pretty much anything you throw at it with negligible gains with any more than this.

Don't have a Mac Pro and am new to Apple so I don't know how you set this up, so am speaking from just a plain hardware enthusiast perspective here. Would set up a system disk for your OS, and then a RAID 0 with a couple of drives that would be used for your video work. And of course, separate drive(s) for back up would probably be pretty important for you.

Of course, unless you have plenty of $$ you have to weigh the options between the processors and proper hard drive set ups. Just remember - processor is expensive upgrade option down the road and you then have one sitting around or having to try to e-bay it, while RAM and hard drives are pretty cheap upgrades down the road.

 

[EDIT-XTREEM]

Are you shooting DV or HD? If you are shooting DV, then a mac pro with less than 4GB ram will do very well. Since you are doing this for profit, I assume, you dont want to waste your time with long renders and stuff. You probability want to get some external hard drive (500+ GB for starting...)
If you are shooting HD, you should buy as much Ram as you can afford. And you probability should get 2 or 3 500+GB drives.

 

[CAMERA MAN]

yea if your doing HD work make sure your mac pro is at lest 2.6ghz or higher, that makes a big diff. A high end video card is something you will need to 256mb will do it.

 

[somedude]

What about Video Cards?

What's the difference with Video Cards? I know there's a lot of options, but what do you really need?

Also, how many external hard drives do I need. Right now I use a 320 and 500 GB Lacie drives, but I'd like to just buy an enclosure or two and just pop them into one of the Mac Pro bays.