We took delivery of our first 27″ iMac today and in just 5 minutes, we had it connected to our 32TB SAN and playing back our latest timeline of Foul Water, Fiery Serpent documentary. After reading the specs on these machines when they were announced, I immediately planned to install them in some of our new suites when the new building opens up.
Why? We run an Ethernet based SAN so any computer with an ethernet port can connect to, interface with and edit from that SAN. Laptop, iMac, Mac Pro, Mac Mini, you name it. Apple Pro Res 720p and 1080i HD all day, every day. For the Foul Water project, I’ve had an Edit Assist working with me for the past four months or so and she’s been cutting on a 21″ iMac while I work on a Mac Pro.
That 21″ iMac has worked so well, after seeing the specs on the 27″ iMac I knew we had a full editing system just perfectly tailored for long form work that is the backbone of our projects these days. See with long form, you don’t need to worry about being properly connected to a critical color display during the initial editing phase, which can take anywhere from 1 to 10 months or more. It’s when you get into the final polish edit that you really need the Mac Pro, AJA Kona 3, Flanders Scientific monitor and such to make your final decisions and color grade. So my idea is to outfit two or three suites solely with these 27″ iMacs for all the storytelling process of the edit and when it’s time to finish a project, move it into one of our AJA Kona based suites. Everybody’s connected via the SAN so it’s as easy as closing the project on the iMac and opening it on the AJA system.
In fact, as we develop some original television series, we just might do the same thing. Cut the primary shows on the iMac and then finish on the AJA based systems. The Ethernet based SAN has been a bit of a bear to wrangle and get to operate correctly, and we have invested about $30,000 into it, but now we’re really starting to see the cost savings on the back end. More iMac editing workstations will feed into a few “high end” finishing stations.
I’ll definitely update you guys as we move along with this experiment, but so far so good. Next week we’re going to test out a Matrox MXO feeding out to a Flanders Scientific 1770W just to see how accurate that feed truly is.
The iMac is the 27″ 2.83GHz Intel Core i7 with 8GB RAM. We’ve installed Final Cut Studio 3 on it and I’m not sure if we’ll go ahead and purchase CS4. We’ll make that decision as we move forward.