Hi all, I apologize if some of these questions have been asked before.

I've been cutting for the last 8 years always on PC, lately on Adrenalines. I have been asked to cut a feature film and after weeks of arguing have finally persuaded the studio to cut on Avid rather than FCP. After finally winning this battle I have been told that I may have to provide my own system as I will working in a few different countries during the course of the film (assistant suite will be hired)

I own a mojo and MC Soft and as I have always used Macs for my personal computers was wondering which way to go in terms of the fastest option PC or Mac. Its quite a hard decision as i've always found MC running on HP to be very fast and reliable but I do love the ease of setup and reliability of OSX. 

The other major hurdle is working out the storage, I will be most likely cutting in 3:1 or DV420 - is an external firewire drive going to be fast enough for this or do I need a more faster option like Raid. Also do you guys have any opinions on any descent low cost network share storage other than the expensive Isis/Unity/Editshare options?

I know this is a Mac forum but I figured some of you guys would be working on both depending on the edit facility.

Any views/experiences with Mac vs PC or Storage options would be really appreciated.

Thanks,

Matt

Mac or PC - it does not matter. The core components of both are exactly the same (Intel CPU, Intel mobo, NVidia graphics card, standard RAM, etc.). Use what you are most comfortable with.

For shared storage - no such thing as "cheap". You will still spend thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars. Terrablock is probably one of the cheapest when considering the speed. However, if speed is not the biggest concerned a LANShare is competitively priced also.

If you need to share media between 2 stations I suggest not going with a shared storage and just 'sneaker' net the media. You will get a lot of storage via external SATA instead of shared FC storage.

Thanks for the info Dom. Excuse my ignorance but what does 'sneaker net' mean? I've just found out that the studio want me to now cut in HD so it looks like I will be hiring systems for the project.

If i'm cutting in DNXHD36 8bit, will I need some extra fast drive technology? Can you recommend any drives or servers?

Thanks for your time on this,

Matt

'Sneaker net' is a term used to describe the traditional way to move files - hard drives and removable media instead of a traditional wired 'net'work.

Sneaker = shoes, etc. Thus foot network :)

For DNxHD 36 you dont need a fast drive. The bandwidth requirement is 50% more than DV (or 50% LESS than DV50).

Local drives you can use are Avid VideoRTR, CalDigit,ProMax, etc.

For SANs, well that discussion is between you and your post super. LANShare, Terrablock and EditShare are the first thing that comes up.

 Firewire drives may cause some bus problems. Esata external drives would work better.

Watch out for the new Unity system if you are using a MAC. There are many know issues

with the Latest Unity version on MACS. See the Unity forum for more info on this.

Also Lacie has a good 1T raid we just bought for about 1,100