A tale of two Macs....

If you're a regular ScreenCastsOnline viewer, you might have seen this weeks episode "SCO0191 - Project: Mac Pro Update" in which I relate the tale of acquiring a second Mac Pro to add to my production rig. It was quite an intense process to put this show togther as it's probably only 40% screencast, the rest is narrative which I try to illustrate with graphics etc,. Takes a long time to put those type of shows together but based on the comments on the ScreenCastsOnline forum and via email, it seems to have been worth the effort!

One of the downsides of it taking so long to put together is that I had to skip one section on some of the utilities that make using the multiple monitor setup more effective. Since putting the show together, I've also had to make a slight change to the configuration.

I describe in the show using three monitors, one for each MP and one that is shared between both using a KVM switch. I originally wanted to use a single mouse and keyboard with the setup, and again, this was facilitated by the KVM. The problem was that the mouse (a Logitech MX revolution with Steermouse drivers) seemed to be misbehaving when shared via the KVM.

The problem was the the top mouse button along with the tilt wheel didn't work via the KVM. I also noticed that the mouse when switched to the left hand MP, occasionally froze. Not good.

Despite experimenting using the mouse USB dongle in several different ports in the KVM, I couldn't fix it.

The only option was to plug the USB dongle directly into the MP bypassing the KVM. This of course meant that I needed a second mouse for the 2nd Mac Pro, and brought into service my spare laptop mouse. The keyboard worked perfectly, so switching via the KVM allowed me to switch the central monitor and the keyboard.

After a days usage, it became apparent that the dual mouse configuration actually produced some benefits.

Each directly connected monitor is the main monitor for the connected machine and is intended to be on permanently so I can see the menu bar and the dock of each machine. If I want to use one machine and monitor something on the other, I can just make sure the app is viewable on the main screen on the "unswitched" machine and all is well. If previously I wanted to activate something on the "unswitched" machine, I had to manually switch across, click something, and switch back. Now I can just move to the second mouse and click.

Much simpler!

So I'm now glad the mouse didn't work properly via the KVM.

I'll blog about the utilities I use to enhance my usage of the multiple monitor setup tomorrow.

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Phew....

The Apple store was down again on Wednesday and I received a couple of messages telling me so.

Oh no!

After spending out on the new Mac Pro last week, I have to admit, I was a bit anxious as to what was the reason behind the downtime as there hadn't been any recent rumours flying around.

Much to my relief, the surprise launch was for the new iPod shuffle... phew!

Never really had the need for a shuffle although the new voice technologies looks pretty smart.

Actually, looking into it, it isn't new technology at all. I wondered how they'd managed to cram the voice synthesis into such a small device. I also wondered why the voice on the shuffle was different if you sync'd via a Mac rather than with a PC?

D'oh!

Looks like all the heavy lifting is done on the computer end using the voice technologies built into OSX or Windows. Your computer generates the track information using the OS voice technologies, then transfers it back to the shuffle.

What a very neat idea!

PS Don't know why so many people are upset that you have to use the supplied earbuds. Apple have moved the controls to the earbud lead. Surely most people buying a shuffle are buying it for the convenience and not because they are audiophiles.

Sheesh!

PPS Looks like third party manufacturers will be coming out with new, higher quality earbuds to support the Shuffle.

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First Compressor Job!

So here we are after less than a week of fiddling to get the two Mac Pros running nicely together. This is a screenshot of MacPro-01 and MacPro-02 running the first encoding job as a virtual cluster. You can click on the icon to see the full size image.

On the right is MacPro-02, I submitted a batch of screenflow exported movies to compressor to convert them to AIC format, prior to editing. Mac-Pro-02 has passed some of the encoding job across to MacPro-01 automatically. The image is the CPU monitors in iStat menus showing all 16 cores kicking in and blasting through the encoding process.

Sick!

The encoding jobs are raw files for this weeks show all about the new setup.

Damm - it's finished, I'd better get on with editing!

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A quandary....

Just received the last piece of the puzzle is setting up the new rig for ScreenCastsOnline. If you've been following me on the blog and on twitter, you'll know that I recently bought a second "end of the line" Mac Pro to incorporate into the ScreenCastsOnline studio setup.

It's been a really interesting week and I've learnt a lot configuring the second machine. I've also taken the opportunity to make some changes with the way I do things and also revamped the configuration of the original Mac Pro.

The quandary is what to do for this weeks show!

I'm wondering if I should do a special project based show this week, describing the process I've gone through to set things up, what changes I've made and how I've finally got everything settled down. Now I know very few people will ever need to setup two Mac Pros, (in fact very few people need two Mac Pros!), but there are some apps and techniques I've used that some people may find interesting. User migration, backups, syncing folders, RAID configuration, multiple monitor setups, networking configuration, KVM switches, lots of interesting stuff

Plus it also gives me the opportunity to justify what appears to be, on the face of it, an expensive harebrained scheme, to the ScreenCastsOnline audience, or would that be to myself all over again!

What do you think?

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The Dirty Deed is Done......

Amazing how quickly things move on......

You'll have read all about my inner turmoil yesterday, being tempted by the new Mac Pro and the realisation that my plans for a new development machine based on a new Mac mini had to be put on hold whilst I considered using an iMac as an alternative.

I'm fortunate to already have a Mac Pro, one of the 8 cores introduced in Jan 2008, which is my main desktop machine and video production workstation. I wanted a second Mac to both act as a Snow Leopard test bed and also as a potential dedicated screencapture workstation.

I'd figured on getting a Mac mini for this, but the price differential between the maxed out Mac mini and the iMac was a mere £350 to get a much more capable machine plus a 24" glossy screen.

Well, I was happily working away yesterday afternoon, with one eye on my Twitter feed as normal, when I spotted a tweet from @leanda with the news that she'd just had a great offer on the now "end of line" Mac Pro from her local Apple store. A significant discount off the usual price of a Xeon Quad Core 2.8Ghz Mac Pro - £400 off in fact!

Hmm, now that's a development machine.

Curious, I rang my local Apple store and lo and behold, they also had a couple of the same machines with the same discount (for business customers).

The bottom line was that could get a Xeon Quad Core 2.8Ghz Mac Pro with 2GB RAM for just under the price of a new 24" iMac. In all honesty, I didn't really need the display on the iMac, and with the Mac Pro, I'd have the ultimate in flexibility and more than enough raw computing power for a long time to come. Besides which, if I had a second 8 core Mac Pro, I could combine both machines at encoding time using Virtual Clusters in Compressor and all 16 cores should be utilised to the max, reducing my current video encoding times by half.

Now my current Mac Pro is currently configured with 10GB RAM and potential "other' Mac Pro has only 2GB. Apple memory is out of the question but a quick search at OWC showed I could upgrade both machines to 16GB RAM for approx £400 including shipping. A quick trawl at ebuyer showed 4 x 1TB drives would set me back another £280.

So in effect, I'd be getting an Xeon Quad Core 2.8Ghz Mac Pro with 16GB RAM and 4TB disk (and upgrading my current Mac Pro to 16GB RAM in the process) for approximately £600 less than buying a base model of the new Mac Pro.

Bargain!

So yes, I scuttled off to my local Apple store and did the dirty deed!

So now I'm the owner of two "End of LIne" Mac Pros with more horsepower that I ever dreamed possible. I've not set up the other beast yet as I'm waiting on the other bits to arrive.

One thing I'm going to test out is "teaming" the dual gigabit ethernet ports on each machine using link aggregation

Link aggregation allows you to aggregate or combine multiple physical links that connect your Mac to a link aggregation device (a switch or another Mac) into a single logical link. The result is a fault-tolerant link with a bandwidth equal to the sum of the bandwidths of the physical links.

In effect, this would give each machine a huge fat fast pipe between each other which again, should speed up the video encoding and enable me to pass the huge video files I create between each machine with ease. I need to do some more research on this as I think you need a special type of gigabit switch, but I'll keep you informed!

I'm also seriously considering setting one of the machines up as just a dedicated video production machine, optimised for video production and not to be fiddled with or experimented with.

So that's the end of my justification to myself reasoning behind what some people may think as crazyness (looking at you Allison) but it really is a business tool. I spend countless hours in front of my rig editing and encoding, so it's an investment in technology to help smooth out the process and also another learning experience to share.

With GrandCentral in Snow Leopard, I'm fully expecting more and more applications to become multi processor aware, so over time it's not just the video encoding side that will benefit.

Finally, it's always good to remember when investing in Mac kit, just how long the kit both lasts and is supported. I fully expect these machines to be earning their keep for many years, not just for me. The resale value of Macs is significant, so when the time does come to upgrade to the next level, both machines should still attract a pretty decent price, recouping a significant amount of the initial investment.

If I can ever bring myself to part with them!

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