Experience with new Mac Pro

It would be interesting to hear from forum members about their experience good or bad. I had a few issues when starting up or restart in the beginning. This problem has not occurred again. Everything is running smoothy and fast. FCPX opens in seconds. My configuration is 6 Core 16 GB RAM, Double AMD FirePro D500 graphic card, 512 GB disk. Externals, LaCie Porsche Mobile 1TB for backup and LaCie d2 Thunderbolt & USB 3.0 for my FCPX media. This suits my needs perfectly. The only bottleneck if any is my brain.

Makki

8 core, 32GB RAM, D700s, 1TB SSD, 16TB 4 bay P2 RAID.

Only 2 issues. WiFi is much slower that 2008 MP and 2013 rMBP.
When a drive goes to sleep, all Spotlight index info for that drive is completely lost. Not sure if this is MP or Mavericks.

Otherwise, amazing edit bay.

Just completed a performance test comparing several Macs for macProVideo (I'm not the author, just a tester), and was very surprised. H.264 was handled faster by rMBP then MPtube.

That is disapointing to hear. Apple claimed that FCPX has been tailored to take full advantage of the power of Mac Pro. But something seems to be missing. I found that play stutters over un rendered clips in high quality mode but with 5-6 overlays clips and effects. Something that I did not expect, or maybe that is normal. But I do not regret the investment.

Here are some performance tests we did.
www.fcp.co/forum/hardware/19653-fcpx-per...st-hardware-encoding

Just got mine earlier today. So far, so OK. The drivers for BlackMagicDesign crash the system hard. The intensity shuttle won't work at all and causes the system to be in a constant state of rebooting. Not surprising as Black Magic Design is not known for their adept software programming skills. I have no idea what to do with the Intensity Thunderbolt Shuttle. I need it to capture HDMI footage but it doesn't work at all and I bought it brand new. Well the hardware is probably fine but the software makes it useless.

This is also my first time using 10.9. I have been using 10.6.8. I don't like 10.9 very much. Where is the info at the bottom of every finder window showing me how much space is on the drive, how many files are in the folder and how many I have selected? I miss that! The notification Center is horribly annoying. Had to shut that off. I may even try to uninstall it. It's awful.

As to the computer itself, it's fast but sometimes the OS seems to hang, like maybe because of a flash read/write holdup. That's my guess. Sometimes applications take a while to quit. And I can't get the HDMI out to work in Final Cut Pro X. Is the HDMI port on the new Mac Pro 4K only or something? I don't want 4K out I want 1080p out. I can find no information anywhere on the internet on how to get this working.

Redifer wrote: This is also my first time using 10.9. I have been using 10.6.8. I don't like 10.9 very much. Where is the info at the bottom of every finder window showing me how much space is on the drive, how many files are in the folder and how many I have selected? I miss that!

You must have enabled that on your old system at some point, I don't think it's been default since around 10.1 or 10.2. To turn it back on: Finder → View → Show Status Bar, or ⌘/ in Finder. It should be on for all windows, and the setting should persist. Unless you turn it off again.

The notification Center is horribly annoying. Had to shut that off. I may even try to uninstall it. It's awful.

Awful? Hmm. For the most part, I find it takes things that were always annoyingly in-my-face and shifts them to the corner of the screen, out of the way. They no longer interrupt. It's worth paging through the settings to configure it to your liking - I turned off a bunch of tools which were offering things in Notification Centre that I prefer to receive elsewhere. I also have it set so the centre itself appears only when I explicitly click the menubar button, not on any swipes or corner mouse moves.

Sounds to me like you were very comfortable with your old system, to the point where you've forgotten how much you'd customised it from the out-of-the-box defaults. 10.9 doesn't do many things much differently from earlier versions, apart from memory management (which is dramatically better). Take the time to go through system and application preferences and configure the new Mac to your liking.

As to the computer itself, it's fast but sometimes the OS seems to hang, like maybe because of a flash read/write holdup. That's my guess. Sometimes applications take a while to quit. And I can't get the HDMI out to work in Final Cut Pro X. Is the HDMI port on the new Mac Pro 4K only or something? I don't want 4K out I want 1080p out. I can find no information anywhere on the internet on how to get this working.

That's all odd. The only SSD-based machine I have experience of is my Retina MBP, which continuously amazes me with how awesome it is. I've had problems with HDMI on that, but in every case it's been either a bad HDMI cable or a broken projector/display. I think it's HDMI which is a bit finicky, not the Mac HDMI as such - it's a bit like the bad old days of VGA projectors in random conference rooms refusing to talk to Macs, which happily is a rare occurrence these days but used to be the bane of the touring trainer's life.

I turned off notification center. It's only active for one minute and I'm always asleep for that minute. Now it no longer tells me "SHARE SUCESSFULL!!!" every time I export something from FCPX 10.1.1. Or do anything else for that matter. I'm just sad that there is no ON/OFF switch for Notification Center and instead you have to go out of your way to configure it weirdly.

Anyway the computer is certainly much faster than my Mac Pro 1,1 but I iwsh I could find a way to keep the external drives awake 24/7. I downloaded a script which accesses a hidden file on the drive every 90 seconds. I leave the computer on 24/7 (always have). When I came back this morning the external had to slowly spin up. I don't let the computer sleep. I only tell it to turn off the display after 30 minutes of inactivity.

EDIT: Nevermind I had an option in the prefs set wrongly. My fault.

OK I'm starting to get all of my ducks in a row (what does that even mean?) Got the Blackmagic issue sorted out and this also solved my issue with the HDMI port being another monitor. I just output via the Blackmagic shuttle and I have a single computer monitor where my cursor never gets lost.

One setting that I found can reek havoc with some apps is "App Nap" which is new in Mavericks. To find the setting select an app... Right-Click app icon and chose "Get Info". In the first pane "General" at the bottom there is a setting called "Prevent App Nap". This should be checked if you want certain apps to run in the background at "full speed". If not the app will slowdown to a crawl while doing other tasks on your computer such as checking email, surfing the web or working in another app.

Also on the Photoshop side there are a number of plug-ins that need app nap off in order to run properly and not crash Photoshop or the whole computer.