1-2 minute clip with Primatte Keyer Pro – 30-60 minutes – 8 core Mac Pro?

[Elijah Lynn]

I am on the phone with Apple trying to get some insight as to what is going on. Pretty much hit or miss with their customer service.

I am amazed at how hard it is to talk with someone who really knows how to use these machines. I feel almost like I am being punk’d. I just thinking that anytime now they are just going to say, “haha we got you, of course we know how to use these computers”.

The most intelligent people I talked to (3 of them) were PRE-SALES. My sales rep let me talk to 3 guys about storage and raid. They really knew what they were talking about. I emailed her after the sale asking where these guys were. No reply, 3 weeks and waiting.

Everytime I have tried to talk to Apple I literally get someone with an attitude and/or extremely unintelligent.

The guy was questioning me as to what “slow” meant by only using 20% of the processor. He said if you think it is supposed to just zip through the render then that’s not the way it works and that the computer decides what it needs to do. I swore I was being punk’d for a minute.

I talked to a guy before him and he wanted me to send him a screenshot of the “bar thingy’s”, that’s when I said I was sorry and I need to speak with someone else. He said there was nobody else. I said I need to speak to your supervisor, he said, “you are at the supervisor level” and the only way to talk to someone else was to call back.

I am not sure what is going on. Is this how Apple works? This is my first experience with these godly Macs and I have a bad taste in my mouth. I told the guy I should have just bought a dual-core and he said something along the lines of, “well maybe you should have.”

Frustrating.

Please help me figure this out.

I just disabled primatte keyer pro and just did a render with a garbage matte and it went up to a nice 20-30% but a long ways short of using this to it’s full potential of hopefully 100%.

[Dean Sensui]

Do you have After Effects? AE makes use of all eight processors and it will pull off a render a whole lot faster.

You might check on your Qmaster settings and see if “options for selected service” is set to the maximum number of “instances”. In your case it should be eight.

Dean Sensui — Hawaii Goes Fishing

[Elijah Lynn]

Hey Dean,

Thanks for replying. No we do not have after effects. Do you use Final Cut Pro? What percentage of cpu usage does it use form most people?

Thanks

[Mitch Ives]

We use Primatte as well. In the archive you’ll find a thred with all of the issues we were having on our 2008 8-core MacPro. It worked like a dream on all the other machines, including the MBP. We had to disable the Kona output to get it to work. It turned out o be something caused by FCP 6.0.2 and QT 7.4.5. When 6.0.3/7.5 came out everything worked again. We have refused to install 6.0.4 and 10.5.4 because of these problems.

Primatte Pro does take awhile to render, but I never got that long a render… but I wasn’t using the animation codec. Ours was DVCpro HD footage, and a 28.5 minute program did take a few hours to render the whole thing… but to be fair it was many layers of composited items, all of which had transparency adjustments.

This keyer works better than anything I have ever used, and I own a lot of keying software. One tip I will give you is that we occasionally got strange results using a garbage matte. Not all the time, but in the process of testing, we discovered that Primatte doesn’t need one. Even with green screen that is really uneven, Primtte nails it. We came to the conclusion that it was the garbage matte causing the problem, because at that point, anything from Apple (Livetype, their keyer, etc.) that had an alpha channel was causing the problem.

So in the end, the 2008 8-cores always seem to have some problem that none of the other machines have, and two, everytime Apple changes QT, we seem to have issues in FCP with something. As I’ve said on many occasions, we need two versions of QT… one for the pro apps and one for the iToys.

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.
mitch@insightproductions.com

[Dean Sensui]

Elijah….

I’m using FCP but not for compositing. As for the Mac I’m using, it’s a 2×2.8 Quad-core running OS 10.5.4, FCP 6.0.4 and Quicktime 7.5.

Dean Sensui — Hawaii Goes Fishing

[Elijah Lynn]

Hi Mitch,

Could you please do me a huge favor and find that thread of your problems. I do not have a Kona card. We are using a garbage matte because there is a microphone on the edge of the screen.

This thing is so slow I am losing my mind. Our sales rep still won’t return her email and Apple still has not returned my phone call like the customer relations guy said they would.

Thanks for your help Mitch