After seeing Instagram pictures of me grading, a lot of readers have been asking about my personal Resolve setup. Well, I’m in the middle of redesigning my living room so I can put most of my equipment in a closet, out of view. So no pictures. But here is the configuration “on paper” if you will:
Updated: Aug 10th 2013
2009 Mac Pro
2 x 2.26GHz (8 core) OS X 10.8.4
40GB RAM
4 x 2TB Western Digital Caviar Black in bays 1-4 in a software RAID-0, which gives me 8TB of storage with Read/Write speeds averaging 425MB/s
120GB SSD Boot – OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G
LG Blu-Ray Burner
PCI Slot 1: GTX570 2.5GB GPU from MacVidCards
PCI Slot 2: empty
PCI Slot 3: Blackmagic Design Decklink Extreme 3D+
PCI Slot 4: CalDigit USB3/eSATA card
1TB external (connected via eSATA) with various clones of my SSD Boot drive – 10.7.5, 10.8.3 and 10.8.4. When I’m in the middle of a project, I will clone my SSD Boot drive daily. When I’m not working on projects, it’s every few days. I keep most of my current projects on Dropbox so I get an automatic offsite copy. I used to have Crashplan, but cancelled the service.
1TB external drive connected to Airport Express for Time Machine backup of Mac Pro and MacBook Pro.
4TB Guardian Maximus (2 x 2TB RAID-1 mirror, connected via FW800) for iTunes library and a 2TB Guardian Maximum for my photo library. These used to be connected to my MacBook Pro server until it crapped out last month. When I get a new laptop, my current laptop will move to server duty.
4TB Touro external USB3 drive for daily backup of 8TB RAID-0. I never let the 8TB RAID get more than half full so it stays fast.
Closet (and safe deposit box) full of bare hard drives and LTO tapes.
Euphonix MC Color (Avid Artist Color) Grading Board (connected via Ethernet to Port 2 on Mac Pro)
Monitor 1: Gateway 24″, got a great deal on this years ago, but it’s starting to show its age. I need to replace this.
Monitor 2: Apple 20″ Cinema Display, even older than Gateway but this thing just doesn’t age and it looks great!
Grading monitor: Don’t own one at the moment since most of my work lately has been at Brain Farm on a Dolby PRM-4200. Occasionally I will rent a FSI 24″ or just grade on the Apple display if the project is for web. I do own a Sony 14L5 CRT monitor that I use as a secondary monitor and for interlaced projects.
Audio: 12 year old Sony 5.1 Receiver (it’s a tank!) connected to Mac Pro via optical, Tannoy Reveal monitors
UPS: Cyberpower CP1500PFCLCD – sine wave quality for half the price
Software:
Davinci Resolve Lite 9.1
Adobe Creative Cloud
Final Cut Studio
Carbon Copy Cloner – daily clones
Evernote
FileFinder – for searching Hard Drive and LTO backups (may switch to NeoFinder)
Pomodoro – 20 minute working bursts. Helps control my ever worsening ADD
Handbrake (currently nightly), RipIt, MakeMKV and Subler for getting my DVDs and Blu-Rays on Apple TV
MKVtoolnix – putting authored Blu-Ray files into MKV container for testing on devices
Magic Bullet Suite
Office for Mac 2011 – I seriously can’t believe I still need to use this. Ugh.
Name Mangler – bulk file renaming
Neat Video – noise reduction plug-in
Redcine-X Pro
TotalFinder – Finder with tabs!
TuneUp – for cleaning up iTunes music library
I’ll update this page regularly as my main computer setup evolves.