- This video is sponsored by Motion VFX
and their brand new mBundle Film tool set
for Final Cut Pro X users.
Stay tuned to find out more.
I'm Andru Edwards and you're watching Gear Live.
(upbeat music)
The brand new Apple Mac Pro is meant
for true professionals to get work done.
One of the main features of the Mac Pro
is that it is expandable,
unlike pretty much every other Mac in Apple's line up.
In this video I give you a look at how I made
my Mac Pro more pro and optimized it for video editing,
and show you how you can do it too,
by adding in some key internal components and upgrades.
What is going on tech squad,
Andru Edwards here editor and chief of gearlive.com
and as I mentioned today we are talking
about how to make the Mac Pro more pro,
by taking advantage of the expandability features.
And I'm talking about the expandability
that allows us to open up the Mac Pro,
and install specific upgrades and add-ons
to make it even better and more customized
for the work that we need to do.
Now obviously as your watching me right now
you know that I make and edit videos for YouTube,
for Instagram, Facebook, social media etc.
And so I wanted to optimize my Mac Pro
for that specific task.
So in this video I'm gonna show you the different
things I added to my Mac Pro and I did it all myself,
saving a lot of money in the process,
and creating an even better beast to get my work done.
Now as we go through these products,
I will be leaving links to everything I talk about
down in the description below,
so if there's anything you see that you wanna pick up
you'll find it down there.
All right so lets jump in with my first component
that I added into the Mac Pro,
saving a lot of money in the process
by doing it myself that being the RAM.
Now as is typical, RAM upgrades on a Mac from Apple
are pretty much the biggest rip off when buying any Mac.
For example if you wanted to upgrade
from the 32 gigabyte standard configuration Mac Pro,
up to 96 gigabytes adding in 64 gigabytes,
Apple will charge you an extra $1000 for that privilege,
for that extra 64 gigabytes of RAM.
However, if you go on Amazon and buy a 64 gigabyte
upgrade kit from NEMIX rather than paying $1,000,
you end up paying just $200,
and all you need to do is upgrade it yourself,
which is one of easiest things you can do to upgrade a Mac.
Now for the purposes of this video I wanted to max out
my Mac Pro and put in all the RAM that it can handle.
I usually have a ridiculous amount of tabs open
in both Safari and Chrome.
I've got Final Cut Pro X open all day,
and I've also got Parallels open and running
a virtualized copy of Windows 10 Pro,
so I'm happy to take all the RAM that I can get.
Now Mac Pro configurations
with the eight, 12, or 16 core processors
are able to accept up to 768 gigabytes of RAM.
While the 24 and 28 core models
support a whopping 1.5 terabytes of RAM.
Now since I have the 16-Core Mac Pro
my machine is able to handle 768 gigabytes of RAM,
so I opted for 12, 64 gigabyte RAM module.
Now let me tell you how much money I saved here
by doing this myself.
If you're buying the RAM from Apple,
the cost for a 768 gigabyte system using 12,
64 gig RAM Modules is $10,000.
which is obviously a ridiculous amount of money.
That is more than the cost of the Mac Pro
itself at its base level.
Instead I was able to get 12, 64 gigabyte
NEMIX RAM Modules from Amazon for a total of $3,567,
saving $6,433 dollars off of Apple's price
for the exact same end result.
That is insane.
Now having this amount of RAM results in all sorts
of speed any where I need it,
like I said virtual machines,
I can run multiple virtual machines now.
I can have all the tabs that I want
open in Chrome or Safari.
I can be doing video encoding, I can have Compressor open,
I can be editing a video all of this at the same time,
with no slow down particularly for apps
that take advantage of RAM.
All right, so once I had the Ram maxed out
I then needed to find the next upgrade to optimize
the Mac Pro for my video editing needs.
So the next thing I needed for video editing
was to add a very fast internal PCIE SSD storage card
and I did that with the OWC Excelsior 4M2PCIE card.
Now the OWC Excelsior 4M2 is a PCIE storage card
that comes in one, two, four, and even eight terabyte sizes.
And it spreads your data across four built in SSD Modules.
The reason that I like it is because it can reach speeds
of over six gigabytes per second in Raid 0,
which is incredibly fast when editing 6K footage
which is exactly what I record here
on the Panasonic Lumex S1H.
The unit plugs into a full height half length
X8 or X16 PCIE slot on the Mac Pro
with no need for drivers to get things going.
Now I also turned off Mac OS Journaling
on this driver particular to further optimize it
for video editing and it just flies incredibly fast.
I'm using the eight terabyte model which costs $1,999,
but you can also choose the $529 one terabyte model,
the $679 two terabyte model,
or the $1,099 four terabyte unit.
Now before we move on to the next addition
that I did to make my Mac Pro more pro
for video editing in particular,
I wanna thank this video sponsor
and they're the perfect sponsor
for a video specifically about the Mac Pro
and video editing, that would be Motion VFX.
If you do video editing on a Mac
then you've likely heard of Motion VFX.
They make great looking easy to use plug-ins
and templates for Final Cut Pro 10,
After Effects, and Premier Pro.
Recently they bundled several of their products
into a collection called mBundle Film,
giving you a set of tools that are dedicated
to making your videos more cinematic.
You get mFilmLook which includes 60 cinematic Pre-sets,
and 30 LUT color grades, mFlare 2,
which gives you a 100 lens flare pre-sets,
The mLUT Loading Tool, mLUT Film, and mLUT Film 2,
which gives you a total of 55 Professional LUTs.
You get mTransistion Shade for 71 final cut transitions,
and you get mTitle Cinematic,
which gives you a set of 50 cinematic final cut titles.
Now separately these tools would cost you $594
from MotionVFX, but bundled together
you get it all for $299 bucks.
It's almost half price you're saving $295.
A lot of the titles and effects you see in my videos
are actually made by MotionVFX and MotionVFX plug-ins.
And I highly recommend them if you're looking
to add some extra personality and pop to your videos.
If you're interested in the mBundle Film package,
I will leave a link down in the description below,
and once again big shout to MotionVFX
for sponsoring this video.
All right now that I have my RAM maxed out,
and I have one of the fastest drives
that I can find for video editing,
I also wanted to find a way to get a large amount
of internal storage inside the Mac Pro.
With my iMac Pro, I had several external hard drives
plugged in and I wanted to consolidate everything
into one huge drive if possible inside the Mac Pro
to clear off some desk space,
and to just not have everything
spread across multiple drives.
This would allow me to store things like old video projects,
exported videos, and just anything else
I wanted to use for mass storage.
The product that I found is the Pegasus R4i from Promise.
The Pegasus R4i is 32 terabytes of RAW hard drive capacity
in the form of an MPX Module,
housing four, eight terabytes 7200 RPM Drives.
Each Mac Pro supports up to two MPX modules,
and you can install the Pegasus R4i
in either of the two MPX bays.
The R4i supports Raid 0, 1, 5, 6 and 10
and I opted for the Raid 5 configuration,
which ends up giving me a protected 24 terabytes
of internal hard drive space.
Which is again perfect for storing old video libraries,
old projects, and old exports as well.
It's also fast enough for 4K
and high resolution video editing, and creative work flows,
so there's nothing stopping you from using this
as a production drive if you wanted to.
The Promise Pegasus R4i is available now,
and you can find it for $2,299.95.
And last up on the upgrades I did to make my Mac Pro
more pro is another product from Promise.
This time I wanted something internal
that could handle my hourly Time Machine backups.
So I didn't want to have an external drive
handling backups either I wanted everything,
everything as much as possible basically,
to be on the inside of the Mac Pro.
And one thing that the Mac Pro has,
isn't internal SATA connections,
but you do need to buy this particular
Promise product in order to use it.
And that is the Promise Pegasus J2i,
eight terabyte internal storage enclosure.
Now the Pegasus J2i is a two drive internal enclosure
that shifts with one three and a half inch
70 to 200 RPM eight terabyte hard drive.
Pre-installed in one of the drive bays and it includes
a space to add a second hard drive of your own,
along with SATA and power connection cables
to connect it to the Mac Pro mother board.
Now it should be noted that the Promise J2i
uses a SATA connection so you're not gonna see
the fastest PCI speeds that you would get using SSD Drives
and some of the other slots.
But again, if this is just for Time Machine backups,
that's fine we don't need to have the fastest storage
in that spot 'cause were not really doing anything with it,
we're just letting Time Machine do it's own thing,
and backup my main four terabyte Mac Pro solid state drive.
Now another tip on this Promise says that this is
only compatible with 3 1/2 inch hard drives
that is actually not true,
3 1/2 inch hard drives fit into it perfectly,
but you can also use 2 1/2 inch SATA SSD drives,
they just won't fit in as snugly,
they'll be a little more loose,
but that's fine because they're super light
and that gives you solid state through SATA,
giving you less moving parts and less heat as well.
In fact my one main complaint about the Promise Pegasus J2i
is the fact that they only sell it for $400
with the eight terabyte hard drive,
which I imagine most people don't want.
We just want the enclosure, sell us the enclosure for $100,
keep your hard drive, let me put my own drives in it,
and everybody would be happier.
Well probably with the exception of Promise
who gets to charge you for an eight terabyte
spinning disk that you probably don't want.
Now again, links to everything will be down
in the description below
that will be links to the Nemix RAM
that I purchased to max out the RAM on the Mac Pro.
A link to the OWC Excelsior 4M2 PCIE SSD storage card
that gives you speeds up to
six gigabytes per second read and write.
The Pegasus Promise R4i MPX module
giving me 24 terabytes of internal fast storage.
And of course, the Pegasus J2i
which allows me to add in a couple more drives
to handle Time Machine in particular.
And of course shout out to the sponsor of this video,
MotionVFX and their mBundle Film Toolset.
I will leave a link to that in the description as well.
Any questions you have about my Mac Pro upgrades,
or upgrades you think I should do to the Mac Pro
or that you wanna hear about
that I should try for the Mac Pro,
let me know down in the comments below
and I will meet you there for further discussion.
If you wanna hear even more thoughts on the Mac Pro
and work flows in particular,
be sure to subscribe to the Geared Up podcast.
Geared Up is a show I do each and every week
with Jon Rettinger,
where we take a look at the latest
in tech, gadgets, and games.
All you need to do is search for Geared Up
in your favorite podcast player,
you'll see us pop up
and you can subscribe to us right there.
Oh and by the way, I did do a video showing a mistake,
a blunder a blooper I made,
with my original order of the Mac Pro
if you wanna see that I will also leave that link
down below as well as up here, if you wanna check that out.
But thank you so much for watching,
thank you so much for commenting,
and thank you so much for sharing.
As always guys I appreciate your support,
I'm Andru Edwards and I will catch you in the next video.
(upbeat music)