• Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

  Brand new 8-core, why all the rendering?

  Posted by Micah Etter on August 13, 2007 at 10:18 pm

  Greetings Cowheads.

  After trying out an 8-core Intel Mac Pro at my local Apple Store a few weeks ago, I was amazed at the way it handled rendering. As in, basically none was required. I loaded up a piece of test video (HDV) on their machine and layered about a dozen effects on it before it turned “red” and asked for a render before playback. Fantastic!

  So I bought one. But to my great disappointment, mine asks to be rendered just as often as it did on my older G5 Quad. I’m running FCS2 (upgrade version) and have all of my playback settings at “Dynamic”, so what’s the deal?

  BAH! I HATE WAITING FOR RENDERS!

  Todd Gillespie replied 19 years ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Todd Gillespie

  August 14, 2007 at 5:01 am

  The deal is that you watched the demo where the Mac was connected to a really fast array.
  Real-time playback is more about array through put and media access, than processor speed. The 8 core will really speed up ‘rendering’ and encoding.

  Good Luck,

  Todd at UCSB
  Television Production
• 

  Todd Gillespie

  August 16, 2007 at 4:23 am

  [StDave] “Yeah but if you’re doing HDV (25mbps or 3.6MB/Sec) then processor counts more.”
  Only to a point. HDV is a very processor intensive codec, so it uses more processing power.
  But the bandwidth to the media is a much of a factor for realtime playback as the processor. If you have a 8 core, but only a Firewire HD, you’re NOT going to see much of a boast in RT-because FCP is already accessing as much as it can through the FW HD.

  [StDave] “I have the 8 Core as well, and it’s plenty fast with RAW P2 DVCPROHD footage…which is 100mbit/sec.”
  That’s great. You didn’t mention you’re harddrive setup. Secondly, DVCPro HD is only pulling 11.75 MB per second-so it’s not as processor intensive as you might think.

  Todd at UCSB
  Television Production

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