My new computer kicks ass.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Hey, Sewalk, that’s a nice rig you put together. I was wondering about couple things, tho.

First, what’s the “Newtek Video Toaster” thing? The capture board?

Second, how is dual/multi-processor support for NLE apps? I just talked to a guy who owns a digital transfer/authoring/mastering company and he said that even on the Mac - y’know, the platform that’s supposed to be good for this kind of thing - he barely sees any performance advantage on his dual 800 MHz G4s (presumably over a single proc 800). I mean, especially once you have the Sigma card presumably doing your previews and/or renders in real time, is there any point to having dual procs? (Not that they’re not nice to have, I just don’t know if they’re actually supported for much of anything yet.)

22

Never mind that first question. Google and good grammar are both my friends. Unfortunately, I don’t use either one nearly enough at this time of night.

23

My old dinosaur does everything that I need it to do, so there.

And I’m going to keep telling myself that until I can afford to buy my new whizz bang system.:frowning:

24

Damn, think, I had Office Pro here on my desk! You were welcome to it had I known. oh well.

25

My computer kicks so much ass… it even has it’s own computer.

(sincere apology to Drew Carey)

26

(too bad it’s a Mac)

27

“As soon as I’d stick a
disk in the floppy bay, it’d spin up, keep spinning and eventually tell me that it was an imporper
format (but the drive woyuld work fine if it was connect via parallel.)”

I would try a new cable first, that usually works for me.

I notice the new computers come with really small cases which is nice. These big atx cases are too bulky.

28

handy, from the OP:

The drive worked fine when connected in parallel but not when in te component bay (laptop, remember.) We went through everything short of reformatting the HD. S’okay by me, except it seems that some of the stuff I had on my old system won’t transfer to the new one (mp3’s and such.) Bummer.

29

It does capture and also comes with a great software package. Check out http://www.newtek.com/products/videotoaster/features/index.html for more info. My friend’s an old Toaster user from the Amiga days and swears by it. I built his Amiga-based Toaster/Flyer machine seven years ago so he asked me to do his first PC Toaster.

**

SMP is mainly for Lightwave3D, NewTek’s modeling software. You can never have too much CPU when you’re rendering out 3D animations. The cost of adding the second CPU was less than 5% of the total in this case, so it was an easy way to get some cheap extra horsepower.

All the Sigma card is expected to do is MPEG2 encoding. He wants the capability to easily convert his existing project library to DVD with little hassle. A DVD-R is a planned upgrade, sometime in the next six months or so.