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It’s been a week since I tracked down the Fedex truck and met the driver on the road just before he entered New Jersey. Confused?

I was expecting the new system to be delivered Thursday of the previous week. That day came and went and there was no delivery. Not a big deal. I checked status late that evening and much to my surprise the driver made an attempt to deliver the box. The site log stated “Delivery Exception.” I was here all day. Needless to say I became suspicious.

The following day at 5 PM EST, according to Mike the doorman - three Fedex trucks made stops here at my high-rise complex. No delivery. At 5:15 EST I checked status. “Delivery Exception” for the second day in a row. I immediately got on the phone, or should I say iPhone, and called Fedex. The representative logged all the necessary information and pledged to call back ASAP. I would be lying if I stated here that I believed her. Much to my surprise, within ten minutes I was back on the phone with Fedex.

I’ll spare you the details as to why the driver could not find my building. In any case, the Fedex agent instructed me to get in my car and track down the Fedex truck that was about to finish up its daily route and eventually head back to New Jersey. Luckily the New Jersey border is only a few miles form my building. If I was unsuccessful, the box would have most likely been reprocessed or sent back to California. Why this entire Fedex transaction originated from a New Jersey depot is beyond me.

This saga did in fact have a happy ending. I was able to flag down the driver who was alerted by the helpful Fedex agent. A short distance from the expressway service road, the driver placed the 60 pound box in my car and I was on my way …

Besides the obvious enhancements in processing performance, two issues have been solved: limited internal storage and sluggishness with graphic intensive applications like Apple Motion and Color. More on Color in a moment …

The MacPro replaced a Powermac G5 [dual 2.0 Ghz] with 3 gigs of ram and the ATI 9800 Radeon SE [128 meg] graphics card. The G5 was a rock solid performer for just about three years. However I was never able to work comfortably in Apple Motion. I sort of came to terms with the lack luster performance and simply made the best of it. When it came time to run Motion 3, now bundled with Final Cut Studio 2 - forget it. Performance was extremely poor. The new system has the ATI X1900 XT 512 meg video card installed. This upgrade along with 4 gigs of system ram presents me with an entirely new experience when running Motion. The application is now extremely snappy. RT effects creation and compositing is no longer an arduous task.

Hard disc expansion support is quite an experience with these new Macs. The stock drive occupies one of four internal bays that offer trouble free integration of additional hard drives. You simply remove an available slot bracket, screw the hard drive on to it, and slide it back into the slot. No cables required.

One of the most incredible additions to Final Cut Studio is Color. This is a professional color grading and color correction utility that was formally known as FinalTouch, distributed by SiliconColor, and recently acquired by Apple.

You may find this hard to believe - depending on specifications, Final Touch previously checked in at prices ranging from $7000 to $20,000. The fact that Apple decided to bundle Color in Final Cut Studio at no additional cost solidifies my assertion that Final Cut Studio is the deal of the century within the professional production community. The caveat is that like Motion, it’s extremely taxing on a system. The new MacPro handles it well, and performance is excellent. At this point I’m not quite savvy with it due to lack of previous exposure. I’ll be integrating a wonderful set of filters created by my good friend Graeme Nattress, and working to develop a comfortable level of proficiency.

My main audio tools are operating at enhanced levels of performance. I’m speaking of Soundtrack Pro 2 and Bias Peak Pro 5 XT. This includes associated plugins like iZotope’s Ozone and various tools provided by Wave Arts. I’ve decided to say goodbye to an old favorite, Motu’s Digital Performer. I never bothered to pay for the $200 upgrade that is in fact a Universal Binary. The fact of the matter is that Soundtrack Pro 2 now supports native tracking and DP is no longer necessary. As far as Final Cut Pro, performance on the old G5 was quite good. Needless to say things have improved here as well.

In closing I’m thinking about using the G5 as a server, or possibly as a processing/encoding node. Selling it on eBay is also an option due to the exceptional level of value this particular system has managed to maintain.