003R + 27" iMac5K

[Brian in Charlotte]

A Belated - Happy New Year!

I'm making plans to move from my old 2010 MacPro to a 27" iMac 5K. I've read the stories of how the FusionDrive is not possible to use with PT11 (makes my head want to explode). I'm interested in knowing if my proposed set up is a reasonable & usable one:

PURPOSE: I'm a VO & audio production guy, running PT11

-27" iMac 5K
-003R w/BlackLionMod (so, firewire to thunderbolt cable OK??)
-OWC ThunderBay - using 3 w/7200 CaviarBlack WD drives (1 to back up main hard drive, 1 for PT11 audio and 1 to back up PT11 audio drive)
-512Flash Main Drive (wish it could be 3TB Fusion)
-M295X 4GB Graphics Card
-24gig RAM

Any connection issues or bumps to look out for? I'm on Yosemite now and all is well.....except for the occasional CPU error even though I have no plugins running!!!!

Thank you so much for your time,

Brian

[musicman691]

A couple of things:
What cpu are you looking at? No i5's please; PT11 wants to see an i7

Whose ram are you getting? Don't buy Apple ram as in the 27" you can replace that yourself. I'd get the absolute minimum from Apple and get 32 gig from OWC.

Is there any particular reason you're using spinner drives? If you have them now that's one thing but for PT itself I'd seriously look at an ssd to put in the Thunderbay, otherwise you're just wasting the speed of the Thunderbolt connection. The backup drives don't matter as much.

Also will you be using sample libraries much? I'd look at an ssd for them as well. There's no reason to have a system backup drive online and powered up all the time. Take that out of the OWC and put in an ssd samples drive instead (again if you're using samples).

Get the long wired keyboard instead of the short wireless one that ships with the iMac. You'll need it for efficient PT work. I switched on my setup and am thankful I did (not to mention saving on batteries when you forget to turn off the keyboard). Or you could use your old keyboard that's on the MacPro.

[Brian in Charlotte]

Thanks for the reply.
The cost of SSD drives is still so astronomical that I'd be spending $6k by the time I'm done...can't do that as a single income family. Plus, their capacity is still low. I've been on Pro Tools for over a decade, and I agree with the wired keyboard!! I was not aware of the i7 chip need - glad you said that. Not using sample libraries - I have all my sfx & music on discs that I load when needed. Majority of my work is simple voiceover, but I do all audio production stuff as well.

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by Brian in Charlotte

Thanks for the reply.
The cost of SSD drives is still so astronomical that I'd be spending $6k by the time I'm done...can't do that as a single income family. Plus, their capacity is still low. I've been on Pro Tools for over a decade, and I agree with the wired keyboard!! I was not aware of the i7 chip need - glad you said that. Not using sample libraries - I have all my sfx & music on discs that I load when needed. Majority of my work is simple voiceover, but I do all audio production stuff as well.

OWC has various ssd's in 960 gig to 1 TB going for between $478 and $650 so the size is there but more pricy than a spinner. I don't see that capacity as low. But like you say - single income doesn't help. PT11 has requirements that outrun what previous versions of PT needed.

Something not to forget is plugins. PT11 uses aax64 only and your old RTAS plugins will need updating. Even though PT11 also comes with a PT10 license installing PT10 on Yosemite is a challenge and not supported by Avid. PT10 was the last version to use RTAS. There's always Blue Cat Audio MB7-2 or Patchwork to host the au or vst versions of old plugins in PT11 provided you have 64 bit version of said plugins. Blue Cat has a combo deal of Patchwork and 32 Lives that lets you run 32 bit au plugins inside PT11. Blue Cat is a good company to deal with.

[Brian in Charlotte]

Yea I've been on PT11 for about 4 months or so - starts on 6 many years ago. Ill make a note about the i7 and also revisit the drive choice. I really appreciate the input. I definitely don't want to make the move forward and then regret not getting x y or z. Thanks again!!

[VRW]

Originally Posted by musicman691

What cpu are you looking at? No i5's please; PT11 wants to see an i7

+1
You may take this one... 4.0GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 4.4GHz
Unfortunately it´s more money but an i7 Quad Core a crucial thing as to a flawless
PT11 performance.

Originally Posted by musicman691

Whose ram are you getting? Don't buy Apple ram as in the 27" you can replace that yourself. I'd get the absolute minimum from Apple and get 32 gig from OWC.

+1
This is where you can save a lot and it´s ridiculously easy to replace the Ram yourself.
Have a look at the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_F9YYhgS6pQ
Only $389.- for 32GB from OWC
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/memor...etina-5K/DDR3L

Originally Posted by Brian in Charlotte

The cost of SSD drives is still so astronomical that I'd be spending $6k by the time I'm done...can't do that as a single income family. Plus, their capacity is still low.

Why not using only 1 SSD for the audio drive only, 7200rpms for the back up drives.
These would be quite affordable ones with 1 TB:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/SSD7E6G960/
http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-2-5-In...amsung+850+Evo
(this is a very new one, the 850 series really great, even a big step up from the 840s)
Just as a suggestion.

As to the 003 I hope for you that you will get it to work properly with all the latest stuff like
Yosemite and PT11. There were many users who experienced serious issues with Mavericks
and PT11 (although they used the official Mavericks driver available from Avid).
Anyway Avid have released another Yosemite ready driver for the 003.
http://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=361983
As to the Thunderbolt-to-FW-adapter there´s no other way to connect it actually and there
have been people have used it successfully this way. Others had general problems with the
003 with Mavericks /Yosemite and PT11 as well as problems with the connection.

You definitely will have to try it out to see how it will behave with your specific system.

Wishing you the best of success with your new gear,

cheers,

VRW




Mac Mini i7Quad, 16GB Ram, MBP Mid 2012 2,5GHz i5, 16GB Ram, Mac OSX 10.10.1 Yosemite, Apogee Quartet+Duet 2
Genelec Active, Yamaha NS10, Pro Tools 11.3, Logic 10.0.7, Waves, MCDSP, Duende Native, HOFA, IK Multimedia, NI etc.

[Brian in Charlotte]

That may be a good option to use the SSD as my audio drive and then if I want to use the 7200 drives as backups I'd be okay. I noticed a difference in PT11 when I moved from Mavericks to Yosemite in terms of speed but now I'm getting some CPU errors even though I have no plug-ins 32 gigs of RAM and the buffer size set up the highest. (I really thought there would've been a much larger difference going from PT 10 to PT11 in terms of speed but I did not see that much of a difference at all.)

I had to install the 003R drivers again because I was having issues once I did that it seemed to clear them up.

I've got a lot of number crunching to do now you guys it really helped a lot thank you so much. You're costing me more money but you've helped 😎

[Brian in Charlotte]

Found this on Adorama:

NEW RELEASE
Apple 27" iMac 5K , Intel Core i7 Quad-Core 4.0GHz, 8GB RAM, 1TB Flash Storage, AMD Radeon M295X, Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite. I'd get additional memory from OWC, as planned, and then the Thunderbay with SSD for Audio and 7200 spinners for the backups.

Price of iMac itself is just under $3800.

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by Brian in Charlotte

Found this on Adorama:

NEW RELEASE
Apple 27" iMac 5K , Intel Core i7 Quad-Core 4.0GHz, 8GB RAM, 1TB Flash Storage, AMD Radeon M295X, Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite. I'd get additional memory from OWC, as planned, and then the Thunderbay with SSD for Audio and 7200 spinners for the backups.

Price of iMac itself is just under $3800.

Good catch. And if for some reason Adorama hiccups, B&H also in NYC has the same machine for the same price. I've not dealt with Adorama since the 70's but regularly do with B&H. Good people.

Something to be aware of is the Facetime camera comes up on powerup so don't be surprised to see yourself on screen. Scared the daylights out of me when it happened. I just put some black tape over the camera (there's no light to tell you the camera is on).

[Brian in Charlotte]

I think Adorama comes with free AppleCare - that's $169 savings!!