Hey folks….. long time vsl guy and vepro too….. I have a dilemma…. I was working from a 2013 Mac Pro with 32 gigs of ram. Thought it was time to upgrade and bought a 2019 MacBook Pro with 32 gigs of ram. Much to my dismay, 32 gigs today just isn’t enough and there’s no way to upgrade the MacBook Pro. However, I still have the 2013 Mac Pro….. I would like to use the 2013 Mac Pro as a slave with vepro but I have no idea how to set it up…. I started the process a few months ago but gave up due to the complexity of the project….. do I need separate monitors, mouse, and keyboard for the slave? My vsl libraries are on external SS drives. So many questions. I’ve been told this is easy…. Haha!
The other question would be if I just use VEPRO on the same 2019 MacBook Pro as my studio one software, am I conserving ram that way as well?
Maybe you folks know someone that I could hire to set me up.
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Networking two macs
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Hello michaelft77,
Your initial setup question by using the old 2013 Mac Pro as a VEPro slave should be easily doable. The only “issue” would be connecting the two computers via Ethernet which is only a slight pain with the MacBook Pro as you’ll need a USB-C to Ethernet adapter if you don’t already have one. You’ll also need to either assign each computer a static IP address or have your router assign each of the computers a static IP (leaving the machines to get their IPs via DHCP).
The only complication here I can foresee is if you wanted to skip the router part of the equation and just directly connect the two computers via Ethernet. This can fairly easily be done but you’ll need a “special” Ethernet cable (or a normal one with an adapter). And what you need to get is either a crossover Ethernet cable or a normal Ethernet cable with a crossover adapter on one end. This will allow the two computers to talk to each other without needing a router/switch between the two handling traffic. In this setup you must set up the two computers manually with static IPs and manually assign subsets, but nothing to complicated (a google search should answer any questions to may have).
And then as far as seeing what is on the other computer (and remote controlling it), that also should be fairly easy once the two computers are connected on the same LAN. Apple has a built in utility to remotely connect and control another Mac on the same network. You’ll just need to set this up and then connect. Unfortunately I haven’t used this feature in quite some time so the particulars of setup I can’t really walk you though but this, again, should be something that is moderately well documented and should show up in a google search. And if you choose this route you won’t need an additional monitor/keyboard/mouse to control the remote (slave) computer as you will be controlling/viewing/inputting it with your host (DAW/MacBook Pro) machine.
To your final question. Depending on your DAW running VEPro locally on your machine can significantly improve RAM usage (in my experience) when compared to loading down your DAW with a template (like you would run in VEPro). Additionally you would only need to load the VEPro template once and then you could switch between many projects without having to wait to let the VI’s load into RAM each time (beneficially if you are using the same template for your sessions). So even if you were using something that is more VI friendly like Logic Pro I would still recommend running VEPro locally on the machine as it can greatly reduce the time needed to switch sessions/projects. This may not “conserve” RAM but it could use it more efficiently.