May 04

renderBOXX 10300? anyone have experiance with these?

Posted in: Hardware & Tech Talk
hey guys seems like you are all pretty knowledgeable here so i thought i would see if anyone had any experience with these? looking to upgrade the render farm and this was one company i was looking at.

TIA
ODA

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May 04

Buying new system – advice needed!

Posted in: Hardware & Tech Talk
Hey guys,

I am currently studying for my BA in digital film but hope to pursue a career in compositing and VFX. I am currently doing some roto and compositing work on 2k film scans, so far my iMac has handled it incredibly well (much better than I expected) but really feel I need a better system if I am going to continue doing this kind of stuff (as well as the freelance graphic design and editing I have been doing for a while now too). I am eligible for quite a good education discount from Apple (20% I think). and have about £3500 to spend.

I read in another thread that the 8 core is worth the investment, but I can only afford two 2.26 GHz quad-core’s at the moment (which I’m sure will be more than ample), but is it possible to upgrade the processors at a later date or are these a part of the machine that cannot be changed easily?

Obviously its always cheaper to upgrade RAM and hard drives after purchase, but what graphics card(s) is a good idea for working in shake 4.1 (and soon Nuke) as well as final cut studio?

I want to get 2 apple LED displays and I have been told that the geforce GT that is standard for mac pro’s at the moment supports mini displayport, but the much better radeon card does not. So am I right in understanding that if I wanted the best graphics card but Apple’s own displays I would need to get 1 of each card? 1 to handle the monitors and the other to provide the real power? Also, how easy is it to buy the mac-specific versions of these cards later on?

Any other suggestions of specs or ideas would be really helpful, I just want to get a general feel for whats the best use of the money I’ve been saving for this (been putting it away for a few years now to afford this system).

Thanks in advance,
Aidan

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Apr 27

Is this a good laptop for its price?

Posted in: Hardware & Tech Talk
I’m looking for a laptop for about a grand that can accommodate basic VFX software (Adobe CS4, After Effects, 3ds Max). What do you guys think of this set-up? Anything that I need to change (i.e., processor, memory, display)?

http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/sh…29_emailconfig

Operating system….. Windows Vista Ultimate with Service Pack 1 (64-bit)
Processor………… Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo Processor P7450 (2.13GHz)
Memory…………… 6GB DDR2 System Memory (2 Dimm)
Hard drive……….. 320GB 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive with HP ProtectSmart Hard Drive Protection
Graphics card…….. Intel(R) Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD
Display………….. 16.0" diagonal High Definition HP BrightView Infinity Display (1366×768)

I really appreciate the responses as I am planning to buy a laptop in the next couple of weeks.

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Apr 14

new confugation

Posted in: Hardware & Tech Talk
give a suggestion for buy new pc
i am working as freelancer.

software photoshop,max,maya,combustion,primier,adobe after effect

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Apr 11

XP and Gentoo duel boot questions

Posted in: Hardware & Tech Talk
im extremely new with any linux type OS, but i felt it was quite necessary, so i decided to install it on my laptop that has XP already installed.

I figured to do a duel boot.
Ive never done anything like this before.

so what ive done, is create 4 partitions
1. ext2 50mb, which is the boot
2. NFTS, 200,000mb, XP os
3. linux-swap, 2046mb, the swap
4. ext3, 100,000mb. gentoo installed

now, i did some reading and come upon, something regarding the 1024 cylinder boundary.
so putting my boot in the first 50mb was to be safe, not sure if that was necessary, but just incase any one was unsure, the xp OS did boot, after it was past the 1024 cylinder, or what magicpatition considered the 1024th (this is the program i used and it stated the partition with XP was pass 1024 boundary)

i just now installed Gentoo, so now having both XP and Gentoo, in there respected partitions, I have two questions.

1.what is the next step to make it so i am able to select the OS i would like to boot.
(gentoo boots and i have no option to select XP)

but the next question spawns out of the inability to log into gentoo.

2.during installation i made an exrta effort to write down the root password, user name and passwords, for log in.
So being 100% confident that the user name and password are correct, i am 100% unsure why it tells me they are invalid, lol.

any help is greatly appreciate.
this is my 1st post here, and i look forward to posting here more often, Thanks.

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Apr 05

What’s your hard drive setup?

Posted in: Hardware & Tech Talk
I was just wondering how people have setup their hard drives.
I just got my hands on 4 identical Samsung drives and want to experiment them.

So if you guys would list your drives, to what mounting points there connected and what you use them for and why. This will be a great help to people who just found out that hd’s are one of the biggest bottlenecks in a comper’s system.

To kick off here’s mine:
1 IDE Western Digital Drive, 320 GB, 16 MB Cache.
Contains root partition and a 4GB Swap partition.

4 SATA Samsung drives, 320 GB, 16 MB Cache.
Setup in RAID 10 for my /home directory where i have everything including a cache folder for Shake and Nuke.

btw i’m running Arch Linux 64 bit on a quadcore intel Q6600 with 8 GB ram.

looking forward to your entries.

Rio

EDIT: it might also be interesting to see which filesystems you’re using. I’m using ReiserFS on root and EXT4 on my RAID 10

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Mar 31

render farm?

Posted in: Hardware & Tech Talk
Hi guy i one question when it comes to satellite rendering, what would one need to connect all the comps together how is that done? what hardware is needed for simple render farm at home. Sp basically when one sets up a render farm with lets say 3 comps then those 3 comp will be used by xis to render each frame making the process faster then with one? If i decide to purchase Xsi advance how hard is to sed up simple render farm with 3 pc. Does cinema 4d after effects support satellite rendering?

Thanks

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Mar 10

Who’s got a new i7 processor?

Posted in: Hardware & Tech Talk
I’d please, ask for a render time of the scene you can find in this thread: http://www.vfxtalk.com/forum/new-com…se-t18858.html

I wanted to buy a new Ws, and I’d like to compare both results.

The first test was in a Dual Xeon Qcore 2.5 8Gb Ram Nvidia Quadro 4600, and the result was 13’23".

Thanks!!!

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Feb 22

False color overlay on video output

Posted in: Hardware & Tech Talk
EDIT:
I found out what it was. I have calibrated my monitor some time ago and the resulting colors are not applied to the overlay video mode. Bugger.

I’ve rendered out a camera mapping sequence from a jpg I found on flickr to practice camera mapping. The output avi has a very strong blue tint to it that I can’t explain:

This blue is being overlayed on a video source (this is a b/w film clip):

Now the same video source in a second player window:

The thing is, when I run the file twice with the first video player window open, the tint is gone. The second window also doesn’t use overlay, I can make a screenshot of it without trouble.

This happens with any video player, with or without codecs installed. Even when the first player was a different one then the second. I tried with VLC which gave me the same result.
The colors were correct in safe mode and when I uninstalled my geforce 8800 gts driver.

I never encountered this problem before. Anyone know how to fix it?

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Feb 21

needed help to make master workestation

Posted in: Hardware & Tech Talk
Hii i need advice from you guys on master Workstations. I am a VFX Artist and my main application goes with smoke and lustre
So i am planning to buy a master workstation named amd M3786em for my work and configuration is below:

amd Quad Core QX9300 (2.53Ghz, 12M L2 Cache 1066Mhz FSB)
4GB DDR2 1066Mhz
500GB Hard Disk
Nvidia Quadro FX 5600M, 1gb Discrete

So this is the config. which i choose. Is it sufficient for my type of work ? Looking forward to your suggestions.

Thanks,
vishal

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