Mac Mini’s to the Rescue!

Early this year I started on a project to update some of the aging gear here in the GNC Studio. I had a number of machines that were still on Windows XP, and a few older laptops pulling duty in various ways. My studio as per say is relatively small, so often times things can get crowded.

So as I was researching replacing these machines, I wanted to be able to double duty them as much gear as possible, and reduce my footprint. The more I looked at gear the more the mac mini were appealing largely because they have plenty of power under the hood, plus you can easily stack them.

So far I have been able to reduce 5 PC’s down to 3 Mac Mini’s, and while I probably could have done a 2 for 5 swap much of what I am doing is requiring special wiring of the audio in’s and out’s and I would have had to add some switching gear to do a 2 for 5 swap. So now I am locked in here with 3 mac mini’s tucked away out of site from me and my wife, and I have succeeded in reducing power consumption significantly, reduced the PC foot print and in all likelihood be good to go now for at least another 5 years on the current configuration.

I have two final converters one SDI to HDMI so that I can use the Livestream Broadcaster in a production, and One SDI to Thunderbolt converter to allow the Mac Mini to get a HD Feed that I can re-push a secondary video feed. Those are coming from Black Magic Design to get the final configuration locked in.  I must say that the BMD folks should buy me lunch this year for as much business I have done with them and separately recommended.

The Tricaster XD855, Dedicated Audio Recorder from Saltwater, and the machine on my desk is all that remains of my Windows PC infrastructure, if you would have told me 5 years ago that I would have as many mac’s doing what they are doing I would have said you were nuts.