I’ve been meaning to build a sensibly priced Hackintosh to replace my struggling 2013 Macbook Pro – hopefully to be able to grade and edit 2.5k raw and compressed 4k and get the most out of cameras I already own.
Sensibly priced? I’ve since learned there’s no such thing. Just a chain reaction of obligatory top-shelf parts that need the other expensive stuff to work.
To begin with, anything starting with video- and not ending in -game is going to be CPU intensive. It is known. So a new i7 with hyper threading (8 virtual cores) is a good place to start if you’re not the “money is no object” type.
Each core, real or not, works best with at least 4gb of RAM. So that’s 32GB. Make it fast RAM, just in case.
Lots of storage space for those giant files, of course, but the most important thing is that it’s fast storage. Regular SSDs work fine for installing the OS and programs, but you’d better have the fancy new PCI-e ones for instant access to media. And another for cache. And a regular (fast) HD for rendering out. And a brute of a RAID array for long term storage. Don’t forget backup!
Beastly gaming GPU with 6 to 12gb of RAM for DaVinci Resolve, After Effects and the like. Big boy pants-level motherboard, PSU and cooling. A case, probably. A grading-quality monitor under $1000 is “entry level”. A pair of $500 also entry-level audio monitors to start with if your movies aren’t silent. Probably some stuff I forgot.
Yeah, the latest mac laptop offerings are just more nails in the pro-mac coffin. I remember when apple considered video production a killer app to sell expensive macs. Now they consider thinness to be a killer app…
I think this case mod shows that there are other aesthetics beyond small that one can chase rather than just thinness…
To be fair, my laptop has served me well for the desktop-grade duty I’ve asked of it every day for the last few years. Apple puts in the effort in to make their user-facing parts like the “retina” screens and trackpads among the best around for real life use. And, apart from those damned fraying charger cables, made to last.
Whoever complains of planned obsolescence in Macs or iPods or whatever apparently has never compared them to pretty much any available alternatives after half a decade of hard use. They are the nice, silent, efficient computers someone argued in this conversation that should be enough for most people.
But the ‘power user’ Apple customers have every right to feel abandoned lately. The only ‘Pro’ thing of theirs that keeps getting 100%, no bullshit better (with free updates, even) is Final Cut. They’d better be cooking up something good, and soon, if they care at all about that particular market having no choice at all but to turn to Windows.
I’m still using a 17 inch macbook pro. Love the unibody construction. Was ready to finally leap into the new eagerly anticipated laptop release, but Apple soldered every component in, including RAM and SSD, and maxed out the (very expensive, non-upgradable) factor RAM at 16GB. But, they included a new touch bar nobody needs or wants. Great. Give me a touch screen darn it, not some useless touch bar I have to look down at to use.
Final Cut? You mean iMovie Pro? Apple actually killed the Final Cut code base, then put the same name on a bigger version of iMovie.
As to the case mod in the OP, it has something that many mac desktops don’t; flat space on top you can actually set stuff down on, unlike the Kleenex dispenser mac, or the current, outdated fanless Mac Pro. I’m tired of form over function - Apple at its best makes form function wonderfully well. At its worst, it looses all sight of function (hockey puck mouse). The mod in the OP has cool form and it’s upgradable. The desktop mac is, well, fancy shape for no good reason, and lots of down sides.
I feel for you, in 1990 I had to buy a $200 math coprocessor for my $2000 12mhz 286 clone to be able to do cad, I’m so glad I no longer need bleeding edge for my work. But recognize you guys are a minuscule part of the desktop market, which is a tiny part of the PC market, which is now (including tablets & phones) a tiny part of the personal computing market. Check out this graph, lots of food for thought about the ephemerality of the “personal computer”:
I agree. While a lot of HTPCs are for gaming too, but if you are just watching video you only need storage, optical, and a mediocre computer with 2-4Gb RAM. With processors including GPU specific functionality built in just using on board graphics is enough to watch stuff in HD. For ~$300 you can get something that works extremely well that can be taped to the back of a TV and never seen again.
FCPX is an excellent NLE circa v10.3 (late 2016). Fast to work with, powerful, stable, with strong third party plugin support, as well as the best handling of specific features like multicam sync and metadata organization, if you ask me. It’s even been deemed good enough for exactly one (01) mediocre Hollywood feature film so far, and if that’s not the gold standard I don’t know what is.
Yeah, Apple screwed up by launching a v1.0 back in 2011 that was more like a v0.1: lacking important features, with no backwards compatibility and no fucks given to the user base. It’s come a long way since then. And that meme-worthy abandonment of legacy code for a new paradigm no one asked for (magnetic timelines, etc) does have advantages in retrospect.
Of course, all modern NLEs are very good and nearly interchangeable, more a matter of preference and/or whatever the workplace is used to (to Apple’s loss when FCP7 users found Adobe Premiere to be a perfectly fine “FCP8”).
But I personally wouldn’t go back to the clunky Avid-clone FCP7 interface I learned to edit on. Or Premiere for that matter, even though it’s the best I know for some use cases (After Effects round-tripping and final export to broadcast standards so far).
I would, however, consider using more of DaVinci Resolve if they keep improving its usefulness as an editing tool as well as the finest color grading one around. It’s still not as good as FCPX for my workflow in that regard, but the fine folks at Blackmagic Design pull no punches. Let’s see in a few years.
I just hope I can afford a DaVinci Resolve-worthy computer until then.
Damn right we’re niche. But we’re not going anywhere. Someone will have to cater to us PC weirdos even when everyone else has moved on, as willed by The Ghost of Steve Jobs. Those tech bloggers who rave about switching to iPads or whatever are just the tip of the iceberg, but they seem to forget not every computer job starts and ends with writing, coding, web research and Slack.
Only the foolish rich will pay for an impractical design with a ridiculous amount of hand labor. The rest of us can choose wisely from the dross available, or if you’re not willing to make such a time intensive work for your own pleasure, make a practical case with far less labor, which I have actually also done for my fanless bookshelf HTPC. Sorry, no pics, but it’s black lacquer finish wood and perforated brushed aluminum.
