• Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

  Do I need a New Computer?

  Posted by Wade Threadgill on September 20, 2006 at 5:34 pm

  I have a Dual 2GHz G5 with 2.5 GB of RAM. I use 2 Cinema Displays (19s I think)
  I shoot in HD and am using FCP 5.1.1. My problem is once my videos get to about 10min on the time line things start slowing to a crawl. I have the RT set to SAFE and the Video Qulity set to LOW. I am not doing anything fancy, I lay the clips down and then lay 2 text clips (These are POP Warner football games so I have one text for down and togo then another text for score and quarter)
  So the big question is am I just over the limits of what my system can handle?

  Tom Meegan replied 19 years, 11 months ago 3 Members · 5 Replies
• 5 Replies

• 

  Bouncing Account needs new email address

  September 20, 2006 at 6:21 pm

  Your basic computer is just fine.

  How are you capturing?

  Internal HD?

  Do you use a second internal drive for capture and render (and not the drive with the OS and FCP app on it?)
• 

  Wade Threadgill

  September 20, 2006 at 7:03 pm

  I capture from an HD camera over firewire to an external 500GB drive.
  I have used a second internal SATA 250GB drive with no noticable diff.
• 

  Tom Meegan

  September 20, 2006 at 9:19 pm

  Set RT to Unlimited RT.

  Set Playback Frame Rate and Playback Video Quality to Dynamic.

  Close every other app while you are in FCP.

  Go to Final Cut Pro > System Settings and then to the Memory and Cache tab. Pull down your application memory to between 85 and 90%. This is a counter-intuitive move, but seems to give the OS a little more play, and makes my systems run a little smoother.

  Does that help?

  HDV is tough on systems because so many of the frames (14 out of 15 in most cases) are virtual (not I-Frames.) If you are mastering to DVD, you might consider editing in DV anamorphic instead of HDV. Most HDV cameras will do this down-convert as you capture, or you could do the conversion of the captured files in your computer.

  Here is a nice article by Larry Jordan

  https://www.uemedia.net/CPC/hdvroadshow/articles/printer_13088.shtml

  Here is a tutorial on one way to do the conversion

  https://www.lafcpug.org/Tutorials/basic_hdvxdv.html

  Here is an article from Apple on the same topic

  https://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302965

  Use Google and do some research and you will discover a work flow that will work for you.

  Best of luck.

  Let us know how it works out for you.

  Tom
• 

  Wade Threadgill

  September 24, 2006 at 6:01 pm

  Thanks for the tip,…It appears this resolved the issue. It seems as the biggest help was adjusting the memory down. I would have never guessed that in a million years!
• 

  Tom Meegan

  September 25, 2006 at 9:04 am

  You’re welcome. I’m glad it helped.

  Tom

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