• Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

  FCP 6.0.6 Maximum Memory Allowance?

  Posted by Pedro Marin on January 15, 2010 at 12:23 am

  Hello,

  I have a MacPro with 16 GB of RAM installed. I’m working on a short filmed on varicam and the footage re-compressed to ProRes (HQ). I have more than 450GB worth of footage and I’m seeing freezes on my canvas when I play the main sequence. How can I take advantage of the 16GB I have? is there something I can do? or I waisted money on that 16 GBs?
  I look at an article that says that FCP only utilizes 2.5GB.
  I have a 500GB G-RAID whit all the ProRes footage and my renders are going to one of the internal drives on my MacPro. I know that is not the best way to go but that what I can afford for now.

  Thanks.
  Pedro

  Mac Pro 8-Core 3GHz 16 GB Ram OS 10.5.8
  Cinema 30′ Cinema 23′ NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT
  FSI 2450W Monitor Kola LHi G-Raid G-Speed Drives
  FCP 6.0.6 Motion/DVDSP/Comp/Color CS Production Premium CS4

  Pedro Marin replied 16 years, 7 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Zane Barker

  January 15, 2010 at 1:08 am

  FCP is a 32 bit application and therefor is limited to using 4gb of ram. FCP reserves 1.5GB ram for drivers and framework thus leaving the 2.5 ram that you refered to.

  However I don’t think your issue is ram related. It sounds like you are getting dropped frames on play back and that is usualy caused by your hard drives not being fast enough. For the format of video you are editing.

  ProRes HQ is really only recomended for 4K footage and is overkill for anything else. The higher data rate of ProRes HQ is probably your problem. I recomended using regular ProRes.

  Also tell us more about your media raid. How is it conected to your computer?

  There are no “technical solutions” to your “artistic problems”.
  Don’t let technology get in the way of your creativity!
• 

  Pedro Marin

  January 15, 2010 at 5:08 am

  Thanks for helping me out.

  I have the drives connected to my computer via eSata. I have a PCI card installed to handle 4 sata drives. I only use g-tech drives but I\’ve been wanting to upgrade to something that has fibre channel capabilities but at the same time affordable. I know their not cheap though. I want to know what is the best setup I can make with what I do. The last project that I did was editing a 2 hour concert multicam on HDCAM of course I didn\’t had any issues with that one since I made an offline multicam and at the end batch capture on HD for output to tape. Now I\’m working on short films shoot on Varicams DVCPro 720p but I think I don\’t need to do an offline since there are not many angles involved. What do you think?

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