The $499 imac mini

[samsc]

Will this work with catalyst?

Well it has the right graphics chip. the radeon 9200.

Its performance will be just slightly less than the latest g4 laptops.

So it should work ok with a single video layer.

I ordered one.
it hasnt arrived yet.

It is only 2inches high.

http://www.apple.com/macmini/

[samsc]

imac mini replacement drives benchmarks.

http://eshop.macsales.com/Reviews/Framework.cfm?page=/Benchmarks/12705/minihd.html

they also have an image of the inside of the mini,

http://eshop.macsales.com/Reviews/Benchmarks/12705/large.jpg

[samsc]

Another mac mini review

http://www.macintouch.com/macmini/review.html

http://www.barefeats.com/mini01.html

[peppe]

I ordered one.
it hasnt arrived yet.

It is only 2inches high.

http://www.apple.com/macmini/

Did get my today, the bigger one with airport, will test it with Catalyst
later. Very slim and quiet! Wish they have them with G5 2x2.5Ghz and twin dvi outputs.

[peppe]

I did know it,I should know it, MiniMac could be so cool for having a tiny show or great for 2 layers (one video and one mask) or dissolving between
2 clips. The truth is, no way.

It can handle one layer with a little luck, adding any movements or rotating on video or stills take the breath out of it.

Trying the 3 layers version,trying a older version same results.

Sorry to say, It could been very cool!

[samsc]

did you try with the internal drive or an external drive?
laptop drives never worked very well.
try using an external firewire drive with a sata raptor.

what screen resolution did you use?

[peppe]

I just have a 23" Cinema display so thats not the best, and it was with the internal drive.As soon as I can I will of course beat the death out of it and checking with FW drive and so on.....

Maybe with some time spent on it it can work?? yes??
I wont expect to much of it, but it looking so great!!

I remember my Cube and the very nice design that was.

[samsc]

a 23inch display is going to beat the crap out of a 32mb 9200 chip.
these things dont have much graphics woomph.

you need to try something more normal like 800x600

4200rpm laptop drives arent great either.
they have crappy latency, and they stop and take a break every 30secs.
there might also be sleep settings that need to be changed.
also running content from the same drive as the os drive causes dreadful problems even on a g5

and you might need quite a bit of memory between 512mb and 1gb to keep down virtual memory cacheing,

[peppe]

I will get back a 17" monitor soon, and I will give it a serious try!
You bringing me hope, maybe it can work?! We will see!

I keep you updated with this.Will check dv & my standard Mjpg codecs on
same material on it.

PS. I have 512Mb and will connect it to a FW drive (the one we used last time in Istanbul) but going on FW400.

[samsc]

try at a low resolution 800x600 and work upwards.
your firewire drives will give a better idea of the performance you should expect.

[peppe]

Test 2:
With a 17" screen and a 400FW disc (LaCie extreme) it can play (express)
2 layers fine (24-25fps) rocksteady!!
800x600

This is cool, seems to work for small installations.

[Spam Butterfly]

You could get 10 of them for $5000 odd and build a render farm for Cinema 4D...

Hugh

[samsc]

Test 2:
With a 17" screen and a 400FW disc (LaCie extreme) it can play (express)
2 layers fine (24-25fps) rocksteady!!
800x600

This is cool, seems to work for small installations.

cool - thats great.

[peppe]

You could get 10 of them for $5000 odd and build a render farm for Cinema 4D...

Hugh

That would be handy for C4, but the G4 is about 8 times slower then a G5 2x2Ghz
in render times and have more problems with some plugins.
We made some serious test with mixed renderfarm G4,G5´s and we see a major improvement with the G5,and for the release9 of C4.
I had Minimac´s in my mind for Kiev gigg, but I will go for that with G5´s.

[samsc]

the best playback would be putting a sata raptor drive in a fw400 case.
i think thats just about possible.

[samsc]

these guys replaced the slow internal laptop drive in side the mac mini, with a faster 7200rpm laptop drive.
resulting in 55% greater disc performance over the standard 4200rpm model

this might still not help catalyst playback much, because running media from a separate drive helps virtual memory disc hits.

http://www.macsonly.com/index.html#71

[samsc]

My mac mini arrived.

No problems. Everything seems to work.
Dont have time to run any benchmarks