-
Shouldn’t this be fast?
Hello all,
My company recently upgraded from a souped up G4 to a brand new Mac Pro:
(2.00 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon, 4 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT, 2x LaCie Firewire d2 Extreme – one for Project Files/Media and the other for Backup, 1x FANTOM 500GB Video drive)
We’re running the latest version of Final Cut 5.1.4 and FCP Studio 1.
My question to the Cow geniuses: shouldn’t this setup be smoking fast? Don’t get me wrong, it’s much faster than the G4, but I don’t find it too much faster than my personal Single Processor G5!
Any system optimization techniques I am missing?
Thanks!
-
11 Replies
-
What are you doing that’s not so fast?
-
Sorry, I guess I should have clarified that. Basically, I was surprised at how slow the render times were. I would think RT Extreme would especially be faster.
-
Render times of what, to what kind of codec and with what kind of effects?
RT extreme also has a lot to do with your scratch drives (of which, none of yours are particularly fast). If you had at the very least a two drive SATA array (even striped within your MacPro) you will see some increase in speed.
Your computer should be rendering faster than a G4, if not perhaps you have something wrong with your shiny new machine.
-
[InfoManBri] “I would think RT Extreme would especially be faster.”
Not with those harddrives you listed. You’re running fairly slow FW800 drives. RT is wholly dependent on drive speed. Run a very fast SATA or Fibre Channel array and you’ll have a ton of RT effects. We’re purchasing a pair of SAS/SATA arrays that top out at almost 500MB/s and give us a ton of RT, even in HD work.
Also, if you upgrade the Graphics card to an ATI 1900, that helps RT as well, especially for FX Plugs.
Processors kick in for faster rendering times, not RT Extreme.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.All Things Apple Podcast! https://cowcast.creativecow.net/all_things_apple/index.html
Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi
-
That’s the thing, we’re just working in SD, with some fairly complex Motion projects mixed with video on the Final Cut timeline.
-
[InfoManBri] “That’s the thing, we’re just working in SD, with some fairly complex Motion projects mixed with video on the Final Cut timeline.”
Doesn’t matter, RT Extreme is based on harddrive speed. Uncompressed SD has larger file sizes than DVCPro HD for example so you would actually get more RT running DVCPro HD than Uncompressed HD.
If those Motion projects have Alpha Channels, that’s not realtime.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.All Things Apple Podcast! https://cowcast.creativecow.net/all_things_apple/index.html
Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi
-
There also seems to be a bug in rendering Motion Projects from the timeline in FCP6.
Search this forum for Motion render and you will see all the problems.
-
Thanks, I will remember that as I have recently purchased FCP Studio 2 for myself! But what about in Final Cut 5? At work we are using FCP 5.1.4 w/ Motion 2. Shouldn’t this combination run smoothly?
-
So, what’s a good hard drive speed for better RT results? Isn’t 7200RPM the standard issue with Mac Pros?
Thanks for all of your help!
-
[InfoManBri] “So, what’s a good hard drive speed for better RT results? Isn’t 7200RPM the standard issue with Mac Pros?”
That’s just the RPM. Drive speed is the data rate transfer as in 50MB/s, 100MB/s, etc….. The faster this speed, the better the RT in any version of FCP.
A single drive will be very slow compared to a SATA or Fibre Array that contains 5 – 14 drives all striped together. Our arrays will be 8, 1TB 7200 RPM drives striped together for almost 500MB/s, that’s two streams of uncompressed HD or 16 streams of DVCPro HD.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.All Things Apple Podcast! https://cowcast.creativecow.net/all_things_apple/index.html
Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up