all four hard drive bays full, I went with the Velocity Duo card which is actually a benefit as the SSD
drives perform much better on it then they would in the hard drive bays. It's a pretty easy process.
Order the Velocity card and the SSD drives.....pictured below is what I went with:
And it took.....14 minutes to compress it to DVD! But alas, I forgot to take
screenshots, and by the time I remembered, the project had already went out to
the client. Yikes! Luckily, I was just about to start another project. This was
Order the Velocity card and the SSD drives.....pictured below is what I went with:
First you just take out the SSD drive and line up the pins
and snap it into place on the card
And then you repeat the process for the second SSD
Now all that is left is to slide the Velocity card into an open PCI card slot....mine
went right next to the 980 Ti GPU.
Now for some benchmarks. First I ran a disk 'speed test'. Here is the results
Next for some real world tests. First, I encoded a multicam dance performance
from AVCHD(FS700/100/VG20) to DVD using the default 'DVD' settings in
FCP X's 'Share' menu. The timeline was about 1 hour and 22 minutes long. And it took.....14 minutes to compress it to DVD! But alas, I forgot to take
screenshots, and by the time I remembered, the project had already went out to
the client. Yikes! Luckily, I was just about to start another project. This was
a multicamera play/performance. It was 24 minutes long. And it encoded from
AVCHD (FS700/100/VG20) to DVD using the same default 'DVD' settings
in FCP X's 'Share' menu in....5 minutes! It literally is so fast that I click on
'Share' and by the time I can click the keyboard shortcut to take a screenshot
(Command/Shift/4) and take the screenshot.....the timeline is already 5% finished!
(See, in the above picture it is already 5% done in the time it took me to click 3 keys!)
(Started at 12:24 and finished with the encode at 12:29!)
So there you have it. A 2009 Mac Pro, upgraded from a stock quad core 2.66Ghz model
to a six core 3.46Ghz, a GPU upgraded to a 980Ti (6GB) GPU, and a couple SSD drives
which are on a PC card. Not bad, not bad at all. It's an older computer, but it can still
give the 'new kids' a run for their money. As a basketball fan, I saw today that one of my
favorite players just announced his retirement. Tim Duncan, who was still ballin and
showing the young guys how it was done this past NBA season has hung it up. I'll miss
watching him play. He wasn't a showman and didn't talk a bunch of junk, he just went
out and performed like a 5 time NBA champ. Truly an end of an era! And when this
old Mac Pro finally retires I'll miss it too. They really don't make them like this anymore.
I may just have to rename my edit computer 'The Big Fundamental'.
Gabe Strong
Cinematographer/Editor/Owner
G-Force Productions Digital Cinema
