Build for FCP7 Video Editing Station

[FrProd]

Hello All,

First post! Glad to be here!

I'm Stan, and I'm looking for a build that would support heavy-duty video editing through FCP7.

I have several MacPro and Imac running at the office as video editing stations (exclusively FCP7 and AE).
One of my old work station (Imac late 2012) as passed away today (RIP), and I see this as an opportunity to go ahead a build my first CutoMac Pro, and of course I want to get it right on the first try...The idea is to get the best possible performance out of FCP7, with a build that will be stable, and very powerful & fast when encoding videos.

I mostly work with various formats of 1920*1080(p/i 25fps or 50fps) footage that I then encode in Apple ProRes 422 before editing in FCP7 on dual screens.

The last station that I bought was a MacPro, works smoothly but the price tag over 5000 with two monitors is still painful.

Voila! This is all I think of so far, if anyone as in mind an existing build that would fit my need I am all ears! If I forgot any useful info I'll try to do my best to answer any questions you might have. And if a similar post as already been answered please excuse the redundancy as I did not find it...

Thanks to all of you!!
Stan

 

[FrProd]

I felt like I needed to do a bit more homework, so I made a list on Amazon following the Buyer's guide:

http://a.co/gLLSQSi

What do you think ? Overkill for my needs ?

As I said earlier my main worries are performance & stability. There is also the fact that FCP7 stopped being supported after OSX Lion (10.7.5) - However many people are using it with recent OSX and have minor problems with it, but I might want to set up a dual boot one with Sierra and another with Lion just in case...

It's for work so budget is really not an issue, but it also means I can mess up...

Do you think that would work ?

Thanks

 

[trs96]

There's no way to run Lion on a Skylake based system, no backward compatibility with older versions of OS X. Sorry.

If you must run Lion you'd have to use older hardware like Sandy Bridge, circa 2011-2012. See the sticky
at the top of this buying advice forum for more details on this topic. Build recommendations......

 

[FrProd]

Thanks for the info trs96! That's really good to know, had no idea...
I just check with some editors that still working on FCP7, and so far the general feedback is that FCP7 under El Capitan is stable! They don't have enough info on Sierra just yet, minor glitches that still need be worked-around...So I'll do an install of El Capitan to start with, and wait some time before going to Sierra.

Do you think I still need to go with an older build, or this current one should be a go... ?

 

[trs96]

Sure, El Capitan would work well on that hardware.

 

[FrProd]

Ahah can't wait to start building it, will have the parts by beginning of next week!
Last question so I can brag to my bosse (if it's positive...):

Do you think I'll get better performance than with this Mac Pro (Late 13'):

• 3.5 GHz Intel Xeon E5 Six-Core
• 32GB of 1866 MHz DDR3 ECC RAM
• 1TB PCIe-based Flash Storage
• Dual AMD FirePro D500 GPUs (2 x 3GB)

The price tag is 5000USD without monitors!!!

Here with the setup I gave you I'm around 2200USD without monitors.

 

[trs96]

Better performance in some ways, possibly not in others. You'd need to ask a more specific question. If you moderately overclock your I7 you'll see much better single core performance than you'd ever get with the Xeon. The 980 Ti should perform as good or better than your dual D500s. Ultimately you'll just have to run the comparison benchmarks when performing different tasks once you get the new build done.

 

[FrProd]

Ok great, mostly interested in the speed of converting footage to prores442 and exporting final projects out of fcp7.
That's what is most time consuming with the stuff we do. Should I change some of my components to see a real gain in performance on those aspects ? My max budget is 3,000USD, so I still have a little margin for improvement...Anyways, thanks for all your help so far.

 

[trs96]

I would definitely go with the hardware you've chosen already. Here's some benchmarking by Max Yuryev you should look at.
You can skip the intro and start viewing at about the 6:30 mark to get the important info, relevant to you. One statement made in the video is incorrect. You can't use any ram you'd like in these. It needs to be on the mobo manufacturers QVL. This is why going with the Crucial Ballistix kit is a good idea here.

 

[FrProd]

Thanks!!
Will post again when project completed, it's been a long time since I build my last, should be interesting!
Take care