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After months of research and still a lot of unanswered questions I took the plunge and bought a mac mini server. The main aim is to run final cut faster than my old 1GHz mini computer.
My first job was to set up the raid 0. This caused my first problem. As my computer is linked up to a HD ready tv (not full HD) Leppard don't seem to like the fact it runs at 1360 x 768 over HDMI. This caused the screen to be drawn larger than the tv hiding the menu bar, so I missed the option to go to the disc utility when first installing. Found it on the second attempt. The raid is a bit quirky as you have to drag both the drive into the setup to raid them together. I went for a 125kb stripe size. The second install seemed to be quicker...
Once up and running the next step was to install final cut. Went for a full install of almost 50Gb which is not a problem in the nice new 1Tb partition. The problem was, for some reason, the installation took over 6 hours!
Not sure if this was a problem with the USB transfer speed from the external LG DVD drive but it would start of saying something like 8 minutes to install, then go up to 200 hours and take about an hour per disk.
Still this gave me time to set up some if the server preferences, watch two football games and a movie while waiting. Also found I could not share the network connection with my old mac like you can with normal OS X. Apparently there is a way but a bit more complex, so I left that alone for now.
With final cut motion was unticked by default but I installed it anyway to see if it works. On my previous mini both motion and color would not work, so I was hoping they would with the new server.
Finally after a very long wait it is installed and I restarted and gave final cut a quick run...
Unfortunately none of the Final Cut apps would run at the highest resolution I could get out of my machine and eventually got my machine into a state where my tv could not display the output. So a reinstall was in order. Fearing another 6 hour reinstall of Final Cut I was happily surprised to see that the reinstall just replaced the OS files and left all the Final Cut app on the machine.
Leaving Final Cut aside I set about transferring all my apps over and setting up the web servers, mail, iTunes, video tools and Googel's Picasa.
Everything is fast and snappy and
Picasa crunched throughout 35,000+ photos and grabbed the faces in an impressive time.
I have a feeling Final Cut is going to work like a dream when I get my new monitor tomorrow.
Sunday 21 February 2010
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Well I have been using the new mini server now for a few months so time for an update…
Let's start with some of the resolutions.
It was not hard to convince myself that the first thing I needed was to get a nice Full HD monitor. This was a task in it's self. After doing the research and shopping around online I found PCWorld, who have a shop 15 mins walk from me, were selling a nice Samsung monitor at the right kind of price. Popped round just after pay day as the website showed them in stock. Not in stock, some in a shop less than 25 miles away but would not ship them to this store as they were end of life. OK, any other Full HD Samsung monitors? The 'sales guy' goes to terminal and checks the website. "Err no". Then check their intranet. "Nope". So ended up ordering it online and got it the next Saturday just before 9:00am. That was a fun day.
The USB speed problem persisted and finally got round to digging into the problem and the solution was a simple PRAM reset and since has been working fine.
So while waiting for the new monitor I ran computer through a comprehensive test. Copying files over from the old one, setting up the website, php and database, crunching some video.
Everything still seems nice and nippy and quite happy with the speeds. The one big thing I did find out is the raid hard drive is more than fast enough. The CPU is still more of a bottleneck and it's unlikely you will be processing enough data through the CPU to need a faster drive. So the sales advice of you would be better getting a normal mac mini and an external raid disc seems over the top. I do think this was the perfect solution for a small, energy efficient, quiet computer with a 1TB hard drive and powerful enough to run Final Cut.
All the Final Cut software works. Have played around in Colour which is nice and I need to spend a bit more time on that to master it.
This is my fist video graded using Colour
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJh6elZL6hg
My next video jobs are a music video with about 16 takes and a 4 track live concert. I have started the music video in HD and have the tracks in and synced up. Maybe about a third of the way through the edit and so far no problems at all with the performance or stability. I would say this is a missed market for Apple, load this with the normal OS raid the drives and sell it pre loaded with Final Cut and iLife (which you don't get with the server version). This would then be the ultimate creative console. I guess they are just trying to get everyone to buy one of their more expensive boxes.
You get a podcast creator software but no iLife, which means no Garage Band, iPhoto, iMove or (thankfully) not iWeb. With Final Cut you get quite good audio tools that can almost replace Garage Band and there are open source alternatives. iPhoto is easily replaced with Picasa and you don't need iMove when you have Final Cut especially since they really messed up the interface.
But this is not the only thing missing. The box has the little hole in the front for the remote control sensor but there is not sensor! So this would not make a good media centre.
The server OS is a mixed blessing. While it has some interesting tools like the Admin centre and the media tools like the podcast thing, which I have not played with yet. It's a server and changing that one setting can suddenly throw the whole machine into an alien beast and be careful which setting you disable or add. But it's the cheapest way to learn the server and there are a lot of Apple quirks to learn.
Over all though very happy with the new little machine with a big punch.
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