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Which will help most – more RAM or more dirves?
Hi all
I have settled down well with my new FCP suite doing short-form offline work – commercials and promos. I am running Final Cut Suite 2 on a MacPro Dualcore 2.6 with 4 G RAM, AJA Kona and running media (at ProRes) from an internal 1Tb SATA drive.
The size of the jobs I do does not tax this set-up unduly but I am looking for small spend which will reduce the amount of rendering I have to do while I am working.
Generally I am working with 3-4 video layers and often some media in the timeline which doesn’t match the sequence codec and so have to mini-renders just to get things to play satisfactorily after I have moved them around for example.My question is this:
Will I speed up my workflow most by:
1. Adding 4 more Gb of RAM
OR
2. Adding 2 or 3 more internal SATA drives and striping them togetherAny thoughts would be gratefully received
Cheers
Rod -
5 Replies
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Faster drives always improve realtime performance. And not just adding more single drives, you need a RAID of 3 or more drives to really see any difference. Our RAID’s are 8 drives in a single enclosure striped at RAID 5.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
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Drives will help a little bit, but FCP is not a real time compositing program. When working with 3-4 layers and filters/effects, it’s just a fact of life that you will have to render.
You can try turning the rt quality down to medium in your sequence, that should give you some reduced quality, but real time previews of your footage until you are ready to render.
Also, another trick is to render in 8bit for your previews and then do a final render in 10 bit at the end. That will speed up render times considerably.
Also, mixed formats will require rendering. You can convert the mixed format to match your sequence in compressor before hand to help streamline to process.
Does all that make sense to you?
Jeremy
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Thanks for that Walter
Would in your opinion having 3 1TB SATA drives inside my MacPro and then RAIDED together (is this a verb?) perform less well than an external 3 drive RAID? Heat issues a factor?
Am I right in thinking I can do this without buying a RID card for the MAc?
Rod -
Thanks Jeremy
I will definitely consider conversions of mixed media in the future. Excuse ignorance but where do I choose 8 vs 10 bit rendering?
Rod -
Command-zero for sequence settings > render control tab.
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