New ProMax One+ PC Supports 16 Cores, 256 GB RAM, and up to 24 TB of RAID on Board
Video pros who want to run OS X on a full-sized workstation were left cooling their heels at NAB, as Apple declined to make any announcements related to its long-in-the-tooth Mac Pro platform. That spells opportunity in the PC market, where Windows boxes are becoming more sophisicated, attractive, and powerful. One of the companies taking advantage is ProMax, which used NAB to launch the new One+, an upgrade to the ProMax One workstation that was announced at last year's show.
For the record, we did speak with Apple at this year's NAB, and the company once again reiterated that some kind of major update for the Mac Pro line is on tap for 2013. And, to be fair to Apple, the show floor featured implementations of Thunderbolt technology that make MacBook Pros perform like full-sized workstations in many ways. But ProMax is aiming at the desktop computer jockey who wants a big box with CPU oomph to spare and massive amounts of storage right under the hood.
The top-of-the-line One+ is called the Hero, and it's built around a 16-core Intel Xeon E5-2687w CPU running at 3.1 GHz with 40 MB of cache. (The Edit system has a 12-core 2.5 GHz Xeon E5-2640 CPU, and the On Set system has a 16-core 2.4 GHz Xeon E5-2665.) Every One+ configuration has 16 RAM slots, supporting up to 128 GB.
The One+ is built with eight PCI slots, including four 16-lane PCIe 3.0 slots, compared to the six PCI slots sported by the original One. There's also an LTO option for archiving. And, again, the eight-bay RAID system is built in, supporting up to 24 TB of internal storage. The system supports up to four different boot SSDs, allowing you to keep system backups, or just to boot into different application environments — for example, you could keep your Adobe editing environment on one drive and your Avid environment on another, booting the appropriate drive for a given project.
ProMax CEO Jess Hartmann told us another popular application for a well-loaded ProMax One is raw and uncompressed workflows in Da Vinci Resolve. One claim that ProMax couldn't make for the system? It's not exactly portable, despite the handles. The company's website says the One+ weighs in at 65 pounds in its base configuration.
And the biggest shortcoming for Mac fans? It runs Windows 7. (Please let us know in the comments if you've gotten a version of OS X to run on one of these.)
Shared Storage for Small Workgroups
The One workstation line seemed to get the most attention at NAB, but ProMax was debuting another new product, the Platform Studio shared-storage system. It's a portable version of the company's existing Platform system that's designed to be kept near a desk, carried on set, or taken to other remote locations. The system is modular, meaning you can buy new functionality to suit your needs, enabling transcoding, rendering, archiving, and asset management functions.
Hartmann said the Studio is ideal for two- to four-user workgroups who connect directly via Gigabit or 10-Gigabit Ethernet. A 16 TB version starts at around $8,000, but the system scales to a max of 64 TB.
For more information: www.promax.com
Sections: Technology
Topics: New product nab 2013
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What complete utter NONSENSE. Not VIDEO pro need that kind of computing power and/or RAM. This is a machine for extremely high-end CGI or scientific applications. The only advantage for modern NLEs above and beyond what even AN IMAC can offer would be a larger/faster GPU at best. Any “pro” claiming he needs some BS *TOWER* for editing needs to retire or move into the 21st century already and catch a clue.
…said the 15 year old canon rebel owner who edits his skateboard videos on his ipad.
But since that would make me both older AND more professional than you aside from more successful, you might want to lower the bar to not embarrass yourself even more.
I guess you don’t edit 4k footage then, eh? Not on an Imac you don’t.
Consider that pro’s do, and it takes extreme space, time, ram, speed, and power to do that within an acceptable timeframe.
Consider that 4k footage is also the small end, we’re seriously looking at better than 10k footage becoming a norm now.
What then?
I mac won’t touch that now, and doesn’t do well with 4k.
I edit 4K almost daily actually, sorry! But yeah… let’s just make stuff up when we run out of any *real* arguments, shall we? 😀 Better than 10K the norm? LOL… sure. It was just ALL OVER NAB, right? :-))))
And yeah, my quad-core i7 is a total snail. My 32GB of RAM not anywhere *near* enough? My 16TB TBo RAID *way* too small and only faster than fibre channel… so totally useless, I know. You really set me straight. 😀
Oh, and you might want to let people like Dean Devlin or Sam Mestman know that they’re doing the utterly impossible… of course, because *you* said so.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9MLGaiJOZY
OOPS… is he using an iM…. nooooo, impossible. It’s all a fake and he’s just a noob that doesn’t know what he’s doing. He should talk to a REAL pro… with manly PCI slots and stuff. Tsk tsk.
:-))
You just keep defining yourself by your hardware without rhyme nor reason. That is truly “pro”, yes. 😉
It’s amazing to see the younger generation think that their iPads are computers. Yes, they do what most home users want to do very well, but… The home market is not the market we’re talking about here.
I do statistical modeling on my 2008 Mac Pro. A recent model took 21 hours to converge. I ran it on my i7 iMac, too, to see if the newer CPU—despite being a consumer device—outperformed the older Xeon with that kind of task. It did not.
Pro users are not dumb or old-fashioned; we just have different needs!
Bummer though that the iMac outperforms a Mac Pro *overall* by a landslide (whereby the difference in CPU speed is *marginal*) and the fact that you can get the top of the line iMac for not even HALF the price of a medium sized MP and you still don’t have a screen for the MP… oh gee, oops!
But thanks for making MY point… unless I missed the memo on when “statistical modeling” became a VIDEO production technique.
A “top of the line iMac” is basically laptop hardware stuffed behind an LCD panel. A Mac Pro is a *real* computer, with replaceable GPU, upgradeable RAM, capable of running more than one internal HD, etcetera.
Now take your FUD and stick it where the sun doesn’t shine, trollboi.
The anger is off-putting. The point is OK.
An I mac is not going to outperform a mac pro in processing 4k or better footage,
regardless of what format it’s finished in.
EASY…
It was an easy call…
And what if you have a slew of visual effects or multiple layers and don’t want to wait for renders? Some of just do more than just cuts and dissolves. And what if you want to edit natively with Red files? You need that kind of horsepower that an iMac just can’t deliver.
The moment you grasp that 95% of what today’s NLEs need to do today they do via the *GPU* not the *CPU* will be the moment you realize how irrelevant a machine of this caliber is for editing. VRAM and RAM are key.
And I’m *already* editing RED files natively, so I have no idea what you’re talking about. Even though *editing* (as opposed to *finishing*) with raw RED files is nothing but a bs fallacy for people to act as if they are that much more “pro” without rhyme nor reason.
Vitriol. You make excellent points. Really. Why is there so much anger behind your wisdom?
With 16 slots + you can get more GPU in the box.
Is that really so bad?
Fiber connections and 10G ethernet tend to be a bit challenging still to hang off an iMac with thunderbolt breakout boxes. Sometimes those card slots come in handy still.
Baloney. Been working via fibre on a TBo Mac since day one. Outperforms the Mac Pro next to it.
Bugati Veyron is fast and powerful. But where can you drive it?
The crap filmmaking that is going on could be done on a 386. Speed is not quality.
Pay for talent, real talent and rent the render power.
Best advice yet.
I’ve come close to doing business with Pro Max for years. Each time, changing my mind at the last moment and staying reliable to my local Seattle vendor. As that vendor continues to trip over it’s own you know what, Pro Max looks better and better. I’m not in the market for a new work station but, when the z800 gets a little longer in the tooth and my Rorke storage system inevitably turns on me, I think Pro Max will be my new solution provider.
I got Snow Leopard running on an HP workstation just to see if it could be done.
If Apple would licence Mac OS for high-end workstations like ProMax’s, they’d have more time to focus on phones and pads. Their unceremonious killing of all their high-end software makes their objectives clear.
With Avid, Adobe and others running fine on Windows, that’s how we’re going where I work.
Hooray for you. Too bad you clearly are so clueless on the subject of OS licensing and too young to know what BS that has resulted in in the past.
“killing of all their high-end software” LOL… love it. Keeping the brainless memes alive! 😀
I’m a little late to this party, but since I’m in the process of working out the financing on a One+ OnSet (not Hero) thought I would weigh in.
Walter Biscardi has a pretty thorough write-up on the ONE Hero (not the One+ Hero) and while he thinks a good deal of editing could be done on iMacs (and I don’t think anyone here disagrees) there are plenty of good reasons to still be thinking “big iron”. (here is the link: http://magazine.creativecow.net/article/promax-one-looking-at-the-hero)
I work for a smallish ad firm. We do most of our own production work, though we hire shooters, lights, audio guys etc. We aren’t yet RED users, but do a ton of 5D and F3/FS700 work with some GoPro—at 2K because I like to be able to recrop—stuff thrown in. Regardless, of what Adobe tells you, this is not stuff you can just drop on a timeline in multiple layers, combine with linked AE precomps, and cut together with no waiting. At least not for my current MP (or my high-end MBP). So I end up doing batch of transcoding to get everything to play nice together, and I have to export all the AE stuff as QT with Alpha. This works fine, but it adds time (which we have to pass on as cost)
My current Quad Core Mac Pro with a Quadro 4800 and 32GB of RAM takes 5 minutes to render out a 15sec 1080p AE comp featuring a camera flying through Element-3D-created text (ray traced of course) for a single 15sec TV spot. That doesn’t count all the waiting around I do for RAM previews, turning on draft-mode to get my timing close only to realize that the lights are too bright or in the wrong spot when I go back to adaptive view, etc. This render then gets dropped in a timeline for the VO and audio bed, then exported to the station specs. A 15 sec spot can end up taking a half-day—and that’s if I get the VO timing right in AE.
With CS6 and going forward, the speed of computing is going to matter more than ever. Pushing the rendering to the GPU frees up the processor(s) to do other work. Having the ability to add another GPU (or three!) and all their extra CUDA cores extends the life of the machine immeasurably. For half the price of a new iMac, I can add a Tesla card to my spec’ed Quadro 5000 and run in a Kepler config. If I want to run C4D to create the 3D, and bring it into AE, no problems!
Plus, in a RAID 5 config, with 16TB array built in to the box, Biscardi was getting “1100MB/s Write and 1300MB/s Read” speeds. Right now, Promise Tech is justifiably proud of the throughput of their Pegasus R6; but MacWorld’s review shows a throughput of 543.2MB/s Write & 650.3MB/s Read. No offense, but that’s not even close. It’s a clear case of “you get what you pay for.” The cost is admittedly not cheap. My 16TB array with controller card comes in at $3665; that’s right-at twice the amount of the tested Pegasus ($1728 6TB model) for 2.5x the capacity and 2x the speed. Wait a minute, that’s a pretty good deal.
My box is also spec’ed with an internal LTO Tape drive so I can back up project files and footage for long-term storage. I’m sure lin2log will argue that TimeMachine is good enough, and I can only hope he never needs to actually use it to recover the scattered files that often result from client projects that span multiple job folders, drives, and years.
Like it or not, Apple has redirected it’s efforts from (pro-level) content creation to more consumer-oriented items. I don’t fault them; I love my iPhone & iPad, I love my MBP. However, I never bonded with FCP X very well (my fault maybe), I have a hard time using Lion in a production environment (stop hiding by stinking files!), and I can’t wait anymore on a production-class heavy-lifting machine. Since CS6 works cross-platform, and we spec OTF for all new projects, my machine **should** work with the existing art dept boxes seemlessly.
I don’t relish the idea of learning Win7, but I’ve used it a lot recently, and don’t hate it nearly as much as I thought I would. It certainly is nice to have the “real” MS Office instead of the cripple-ware that their Mac division foisted on us. I don’t love the reality having to stay on top of virus definitions and patchWednesdays either. I think Win8 will be discovered to be an elaborate prank (like WinMe?) one day, but I’m not being forced to use it.
Oh, and my ONE+ has the ability to boot from any of 4 drives. If one drive fails, or if a patch hoses CS6, I just boot from one of the other drives. Sweet! No downtime.
Now that I’ve been at this for a while (I mean being an designer/editor/illustrator/animator/producer although I could easily just be talking about how long this post has gone) I realize that it’s pointless to base income streams on OS loyalty. These are big companies. They make decisions that make stockbrokers happy and the interests of Wall Street and the average Creative are not always aligned.
As creatives, we must make decisions that work best for us. That means being willing to move to better solutions as they become available. Whether it’s going from PC to Mac (and Quark to InDesign) in the late 90s, Nikon to Canon in the early aughts, FCP to Adobe in the tweens, whatever infinitum.
At any rate, I’m looking forward to having a bleeding-edge machine again…if only for a little while. 😉
I’ve been using FCPX on a 2011 Quad Core i5 Imac for a solid year now, and while it is fine for basic editing of short videos or trailers bound for the web, I would never consider it a professional machine. I use it because it’s all I could afford.
Beyond the Thuderbolt, FW, and USB ports, there is no expandability, which is a problem. I know you can do a lot with a machine like this, but I can see how it would not be enough for professional environments.
In a professional environment, I could imagine using it as an auxiliary computer for sound editing or photoshop, or maybe even motion graphics, but not as something to be used as an online edit or render machine for uncompressed HD video.
And the amount of problems in the FCPX software is scary. I experience a crash every time I use FCPX, and find myself having to do a lot of things to fix little bugs in the software. I would be worried about trying to meet a deadline with this type of system.
By comparison, I use Pro Tools LE 8 for sound editing on the iMac and it never crashes.
Now, I can edit movie trailers very easily on it, and it’s database integration with the other Mac apps make it really fun to use on little projects, but FCPX is not a reliable professional app.
And Motion and Compressor are very slow on this iMac. Compressor I regret buying at all. Motion you can do a lot of cool stuff with, but it lags on this iMac.
I will probably buy the Media Composer 7 software when it comes out, and continue using the iMac, but if I had a bigger budget, and were working professionally as an editor, I would be looking to buy one of these super workstations. At the least something comparable to a Mac Pro or a PC equivalent. And if I were working all the time and traveling, I would invest in a Macbook pro, but I would not count on it for my main computer.
For what it’s worth, I am a sound editor and designer, and my interest in video editing is mostly so I can work better with editors and make my own little projects so take my opinions for what they are worth.
Whatever anyone chooses to use, it is their own satisfaction with it that matters in the end though, so good luck to everybody in that regard.
Brilliant. Always extremely useful to get the opinion of an AUDIO editor on an NLE. LOL. Especially one that doesn’t even have a decent computer to work on, but blames FCP for the bad performance nonetheless whilst actually comparing it with A DAW. My hero. MC7 is NO DOUBT going to be a breeze with the same computer!
I especially LOVE the bit about “Beyond the Thunderbolt, FW, and USB ports, there is no expandability”. Hilarious. Funny how there’s all that lamenting about it’s still missing so much to be “pro”, but not a single mention of WHAT that ominous something might be… 😀
But yeah, he must be right. All those beginners out there such as Dean Devlin, Magic Feather Inc, Sam Mestman of Lumforge etc. etc. etc. are just way too NOOBIE to know better than some hobbyist audio editor. 😀
Multiple PCI ports with connections that are solid. Ability to have the computer in a different (climate controlled) room than you and your monitors. The list is too long, and really I don’t care about proving any point to you. I had an opinion, and I made it without insulting anyone, which is something you should probably learn how to do if you ever want to work with anyone.
PCI PORTS??! 😀 For WHAT exactly?? (and again, just blanket statements, no specifics… gee, wonder why?) Some outdated legacy hardware? Sorry if the world keeps revolving without you, we’ll work on it. 😀
And why would you need to put ANY current Mac in some “climate controlled” room exactly? What is this, the 80’s?? :-)))
If THAT’S your definition of “pro”… wow… get ready for a big disappointment with the next “pro level” Mac.
Who the hell crapped in your corn flakes? As an editor/business owner that hires others to work with him, I can guarantee that you would never get a job from any of the people I work with.
If you have a valid point, why not make it without any animosity? Your rants add nothing to the discussion. Go away.
Aside from being on the hiring side of things in an L.A. studio, sorry, I wouldn’t take a job from some putz that thinks he can judge someone by some random posts in some random thread, so thanks for sparing me… wow.
So yeah, I’m really worried now… 😀
please…stay…in…LA.