Final Cut Pro users here?

[Claus]

I'm toying with the thought of building a Hackintosh. However, my main reason to use Macs is Final Cut Studio. Is anyone here on this board using it successfully? What is the recommended GPU for Color and Motion?

 

[ninetto]

Of course... it runs and runs and runs. Hackintoshably wonderful.
The video card depends really on how high-end you want to go. Essentially video-editing is 2D and thus not GPU intensive (cpu very much so for rendering)... so pick a 9800gt Nvidia with 256 bit interface and 1GB Ram and you can't go wrong.
And if you got the moolah then grab a 280gtx.
For uncompressed 10-bit/SDI Monitoring I had a Decklink Extreme2 card running fine in my last Hackintosh.

Some claim color and motion work smoother with ATI cards... but it used to be trickier to get OSX up and running with ATi cards, I have no personal experience with that.

So on a whole other line: you are aware how unhappy many FCP Pros are with SL teamed up with the current FCP 7.02 release? It is really much more buggy than in the past... check just about any FCP Pro forum.

I myself and many colleagues are switching more and more to CS5/Premiere. The presets for e.g. DSLR and other codecs is simply awesome: with FCP you will have do a lot of transcoding to ProRes before you can even start to edit.

my 2 cents.

 

[Claus]

Thanks for the answer. Yeah, I heard about the trouble with FCS3. That's why I stick with version 2. Video wise, I keep it simple - nice MPEG2 (HDV and XDCAM)....

GPU: I'm torn between the 9800 and the ATI 5770.

 

[bjr2]

For my 2 cents worth it works great. I'm a news and documentary editor by trade and decided to try a hack pro build (i7-930 + GA-x58a + radeon 5770). Rock solid so far and outperforming my 2009 mac pro edit station at the studio. I even have an intensity pro card working with it.

Now if I could only get the esata2 working I could get better performance than fw400 from my external media drives.

 

[Claus]

Thank you, that settles it for me.

FW400? Won't run-off-the mill PCI FW800 cards work? Not as fast as SATA, but....

Had to do some stuff with 5400RPM FW400 drive the other day - talk about

 

[ninetto]

Thank you, that settles it for me.

FW400? Won't run-off-the mill PCI FW800 cards work? Not as fast as SATA, but....

Had to do some stuff with 5400RPM FW400 drive the other day - talk about

Sure... I have a cheapo no-name dual FW-800 card in my Hack and it serves well, since in real-mac-land FW800 devices are still quite common. Make sure you choose a FW800 card that uses pci-e bus instead of old pci-bus.

Esata is of course faster and 100% reliable in my machin.

hiside, ninetto

 

[Claus]

Thanks again!

Cool place this forum

 

[Claus]

Thanks, quattrofx. No interest in Adobe for several reasons.
Right now, I stick with FCS for job related reasons. Our complete infrastructure is based on Final Cut. A change would be too expensive.

 

[jreeve0805]

I've installed FC6 on my hack Just to play around and it works great. I am also running the free trial of Neo3D from Cineform and working on stereoscopic content over the last few
Weeks. I think it's important to note that I installed a third party FW800 PCI card. I meantion this because I needed all the pci express slots for other devices ( a sonnet DX800 And two additional NIC cards). The performance of the PCI card has been just great and gave Me a chance to fill up one of the legacy ports on my board.

My case (cooler master something...) has a SATA dock built right on the top so I can dock bare drives with GIGS of media on them and just dump it all to the sonnet disk array. Cannot believe how simple setting up the sonnet DX800 was! As for the other sata drives... Hot swap works good enough. Sometimes i find i need to reboot cause the system won't recognize multiple consecutive swaps on one sata port. Overall I'm so happy with the whole thing.

 

[charlzm]

For my 2 cents worth it works great. I'm a news and documentary editor by trade and decided to try a hack pro build (i7-930 + GA-x58a + radeon 5770). Rock solid so far and outperforming my 2009 mac pro edit station at the studio. I even have an intensity pro card working with it.

Now if I could only get the esata2 working I could get better performance than fw400 from my external media drives.

How difficult was it for you to configure your video card? I'm still "kexting" my Hackintosh build; so far, the video card I chose (Radeon 5870) seems to be the major issue still requiring fine tuning.

BTW, the only reason I wanted a Hackintosh was to run FC7. Glad to hear people are making it work. I wasn't able to install yet - the OS didn't like my video card as currently configured.