The Test System

A supplier came in with a test system I could punish for a week. 12 Gb RAM and 8 cores and a medium NVidia card.

Some functions really went a bit faster, when they worked that is. Because my older system also never functioned flawless, I was used to about the same amount of hangups and crashes.

Using Quicktime however, turned out to be a real bitch, because Apple doesn't seem to have a nice stable 64 bit PC version yet, or so I was told. I don't know what to believe anymore but I do know it caused problems.
I can't really do without Quicktime, because Quicktime with Animation codec is the only handy professional format to exchange video graphics with other systems and clients. My supplier said this all would be solved in near future.

I never tested reading from tape and writing to tape. When you create videos, you do that all the time. I did not test that since this never was an issue with previous systems. The new test system was not fully integrated into the studio because it came with a mini MXO2 from Matrox only, which has less professional options.

The supplier came to see my workflow and we both decided I would need a 12 core CPU, 48Gb RAM, Quadro 4000 equipped monster PC with a dedicated preview/scratch disk and a 5T raid 5 disk array.
In januari 2011 that was a VERY powerful machine, way above the needed specs.

I also should mention that some very handy hardware plugins were removed by Matrox because they claim nobody used them but me. I needed to buy Boris BCC and FEC in an attempt to compensate for the loss of the Matrox functions.

Everything was ordered and now the waiting began.

To be continued...