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Need for speed…
Hi all,
I have a MacPro quad core xeon at 3Ghz with 7gb of RAM. I am using the stock display card that came with the computer (NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT).
Editing in FCP, Motion, or AE brings this machine to a crawl, even if I set everything to lowest quality preview. Layering a few tracks of effects with Alpha channel causes a “click then wait 10+ seconds, to see what the click did” kind of workflow.
The question is, would a faster display card speed things up? (I don’t really understand if the slowdown is just the computer trying to figure out how to draw the update on the display, or if it is busy crunching numbers).
If so, which upgrade card seems to be the most reliable? Cost isn’t as much of an issue as time.
Thanks for your advice,
MattTalkingbox Digital Media Group, Inc.
http://www.talkingboxdmg.com
(203) 327-6617 -
6 Replies
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[Matthew Abourezk] “The question is, would a faster display card speed things up?”
No, a faster array will. What media array are you using?
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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And what sort of the footage you are working with? Uncompressed HD? ProRes? DVCPRO HD? DV?
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
Hi Walter and Shane,
Regarding Array…
(gulp) No array, just four internal hard disks. (and about 10 terabytes of G-Raid drives…. bought one at a time as needed… formatted for use as single hard drives). I guess the time has come to hot rod this puppy.I have such a massive amount of files that I (like many of my peers) are scrambling to try to find a way to keep up with the current work as well as to archive project assets for a reasonable amount of time…. Devoting a couple of drives to an array seemed like a waste of valuable space… guess I need to get over it, stripe two of the drives as an array that I use only for current editing?
Your thoughts are appreciated.Regarding project footage…
Again, I am probably in the same boat as my peers, but I am receiving every conceivable file format under the sun and combining them into a single timeline. HD 720, 1080, DV, DVCPro 50, DVCPro HD, Animation files, as well as Illustrator vector images, PSD files, 16 megapixel still photographs, etc…. Rendering every time I touch anything is now my reality. I don’t remember the last time I got to drop clips in a timeline and experiment freely without having to render constantly.I probably need to take a course on file format workflow in FCP and Motion. The situation has gotten pretty overwhelming, very quickly.
Matt
Talkingbox Digital Media Group, Inc.
http://www.talkingboxdmg.com
(203) 327-6617 -
[Matthew Abourezk] “Regarding Array…
(gulp) No array, just four internal hard disks. (and about 10 terabytes of G-Raid drives…. bought one at a time as needed… formatted for use as single hard drives). I guess the time has come to hot rod this puppy. “You’re running as slow as you possibly can when it comes to media.
[Matthew Abourezk] “Your thoughts are appreciated. “
Get a fast SATA array, four drives minimum, more are better. We run 8 drive SATA arrays from MaxxDigital and are about to upgrade to 12 bay arrays. We’re getting over 500MB/s in RAID 5 which gives us a ton of speed and the protection of a RAID 5.
Use a SATA enclosure and simply move your media off your main array onto the SATA enclosures for archive.
Maxx makes some really nice SAS/SATA enclosures starting at 4 drive bays. maxxdigital.com
[Matthew Abourezk] “but I am receiving every conceivable file format under the sun and combining them into a single timeline. HD 720, 1080, DV, DVCPro 50, DVCPro HD, Animation files, as well as Illustrator vector images, PSD files, 16 megapixel still photographs, etc…. Rendering every time I touch anything is now my reality. “
You can’t mix and match all of that in a single timeline and expect any sort of performance, even with very fast drives. Some of that will mix and match in realtime, but not much.
That’s why we have an AJA Kona 3 in all our suites so we convert everything to ONE format BEFORE we start editing. Animation codec is not support for realtime playback no matter what you do.
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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Walter speaks the truth. You gotta convert the footage into one format if you want good performance. Mixing formats is fine…to a point. And if you want good performance, you need a reliable RAID array.
Listen to all of what he said. Hobbling together a system with firewire drives and internal drives, then mixing all sorts of formats and no doubt all sorts of frame rates (gotta have a UNIFORM frame rate too…multiple frame rates in a sequence is never recommended) does not work well on that sort of system…as you see.
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
Images don’t need to be any bigger than your sequence settings unless you are doing pans and zooms. And in that case just resize the image to only be as big as you need it to be. A 16 megapixel image in your timeline is massive resource hog. Not too long ago another editor I work w/was complaining about his machine because rendering a specific logo was taking forever. I looked at the logo in the Browser and it was around 4k size and we are working in DVCPro HD timelines. I was like, no wonder it’s taking so long!
-A
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