so let me get this straight -

Hello - i just bought a dual 867 G4 so i could burn DVD's and speed up my work in FCP/Combustion (had a 350 G4). Today I happened to check the blackmagic website and saw the DeckLink card, and immediately ran here for the lowdown. I also saw the posts from Charles at Promax about using ATA drives. From what I've read i can upgrade my system to Uncompressed 10-bit for roughly 2 grand. This is ridiculously low and i must be dreaming.
How i came up with the 2k figure -
DeckLink - 1k
4 IBM ATA Drives - 4@110 = 450 (only need 60gb per drive)
Which leaves $500 for all the little things you're going to tell me i need.
So i shoot my 16mm short film, transfer to Digibeta, take my computer to the post house (where a friend gives me a very low rate), digitize the footage uncompressed into FCP3, sync audio that was captured seperately on a DAT, take edited film into Combustion and clean it up, then burn to DVD. WILL THIS WORK?
If so you've made me a very very happy man.
I know i should have a great broadcast monitor, but for right now outputting through FireWire to the TV will have to do.
Thanks for your input and this site rox.

chris lambert
aspiring film student

I am not sure if this will work with the Dual 867, interested to hear if anyone has.

thanks guys - i'll call around and see if the dual 867 is fast enough.

Hi,

Don't think Chris's questions was about 24 fps.

Anyway, this will work, and think the Dual Processor 867 is fine. We recommend a Dual Processor 800 or faster, and 867 is a bigger number than 800 so you are ok!


Regards,

Grant Petty.
Blackmagic Design

Hi,

Actually we found the PCI bridge in the new models really fast, and quite an improvement over the older models. The guts of these units are very fast for moving data around, and this could be why they do some things faster like the overall responsiveness.

I think Apple made a mistake on putting a 1MB Level 3 cache on the DP 1GHZ model, because the cache is important, and make the system seem as slow as the older 1GHZ model with the bigger L3, but slower overall system buss.

If they had added a 2 MB L3, then the system might have looked much faster. It's hard to know for sure though. The new systems might be faster rendering big data types, and a good example might be working on a large Photoshop image with lots of layers. It's really based on the work that's done how various parts of the system help overall performance.


Regards,

Grant
Blackmagic Design