Any happy users of FCS2?

[Drazen Stader]

Hi everyone,

Sounds optimistic…I am on the verge of installing the FCS2…will get in the couple of days…in the meantime solving some issues with the RAM (reseller didn’t send as specified) and doing some test with my new macpro quad 2,66 (sold a week ago my old g5 2,7ghz and made a switch to intel – which for the moment beeing regret a bit – but I am sure it will get more stable) to make sure is working nicely (used geekbench, member, and similar)….anyway enough about me and my setup…glad to hear some good news and looking forward to share some of my experiences good and bad…

keep milkin the cow…milk it really good

Drazen

http://www.staderzen.com

http://www.honeymoonthemovie.net

drazen

[Will Griffith]

Overall – Impressed
Overall On Quad Intels (3ghz w/ATI 1900) – Super Impressed.
Overall On Quad G5 2.5 – Impressed, but miffed about ProRes Capture

FCP – Seems even more solid, love the multiformat timeline and other little things
Motion – Really starting to come into its own. Tracking tool needs some work.
Compressor – Love the new layout but Qmaster and multi machine rendering is JUNK.
(#1 thing I want fixed)
Soundtrack – haven’t messed with it much yet
Color – Wow. Absolutely screams through uncompressed 1080p stuff we have. Love it.

It just irritates me that something we’ve been waiting on (Compressor render farm) is
just not there yet. We could be using this NOW, and I really wish they could get it right.

[Kevin Monahan]

So Far, I am quite pleased. We are using Dual G5 2.0 & 2.5. The open media
time line is huge for us, mixing HD and SD. Audio Gain Nomralization within the app.
I have wanted that since day 1. We have large and small projects and I really have not
skipped a beat since upgrading from 5.04. We have not worked with capturing in Pro Res
but we have for rendering with good success. But we have also kept the same workflow
we were using before and that has only gotten better for us.

[Steven Gonzales]

The people without problems are probably happy, and they don’t need to post. Those that post a problem are looking for help, or alerting others to new quirks in specific situations.

The more specific the post, the more useful it is to those people that are happy or unhappy.

[Rj Miles]

I’m impressed with FCP 2. I’m also impressed with the 8-core Mac Pro.

Having lived with a G5 2.0/DP for awhile, it’s easy to feel the extra power.

I have noticed a few more spinning balls on the 8-core. Sometimes popping up during a disc cloning or one time when I dropped a VO element into a FCP 6 sequence.

In all of these cases, force quitting the programs and eventually the finder did not help. A hard re-boot was required.

I believe I will refrain from doing anything else while cloning drives, and all other problems appear to be totally random. There might be something going on with the Sonnet e4p eSATA card and the drive bay, which is not quite ready for 10.4.9, because I have seen the same disc cloning challanges on the 8-core and G5 setups.

I will be getting into some heavy AE7 work on the 8-core early next week. I’m looking forward to the speed boost. Not running AE-CS here.

While I did not upgrade to FCP 5.1.4, instead sticking with 5.1.2, FCP 2 seems totally stable so far.

[Herb Sevush]

Tom –

In general very happy with new release – the biggies – multiple codecs in the same timeline and timeline auot-confrom to first clip – work as advertised. However …

2 big problems —

Render times – render times (at least with my G5 Daul 2.5)have gotten incredibly long – by factors of X100 or more, unless rendering is reset from “best” to “normal”, in which case artifacts and aliasing can be seen. There are numerous threads discussing this issue.

Re-Linking media – under some situations (the conditions haven’t been isolated yet) you have to re-link media 1 file at a time – the check box for “reconnect all files in relative path” is not functioning. This can be very onerous if you need to share a project with two editors, or simply have the need to move files from one drive to another.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions

[Oliver Peters]

Herb,

[Herb Sevush] “Render times – render times (at least with my G5 Daul 2.5)have gotten incredibly long – by factors of X100 or more, ..”

Are you rendering in Apple ProRes422? I think this codec is best optimized for the Intels and not ideal for older machines.

Sincerely,
Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Tom Daigon]

MAJOR render time issues! G5 Dual 3.0 , 10.4.9. QT 7.16. SD NTSC sequence with Motion 3 embedded clip (2 supers and simple particles). 7 sec. clip took about 10 secs. to render in Motion and about 20 minutes in FCP6. Totally unacceptable.
Im just glad Im putting the software thru its paces before suggesting we replace our Avid
systems with it…not at this point in time.

[Oliver Peters]

Hmm… not what I’m seeing here. Maybe the particles, RAM or video card are the issue. I just did a quick render using two of the Motion Templates in FCP6. One was the Brush Stokes (2D) and the other was the 3D Atom Strand. These are each about 16-18 sec. long. I dropped four 1080/24p XDCAM-HD clips into their image wells and rendered the sequences as DVCPRO HD / 59.94. That should be pretty taxing. The 2D template took about 1 min. to render and the 3D template required 5 minutes. This is on a dual 3.0 Xeon (4 cores) with 8GB RAM and an ATI X1900XT.

Sincerely,
Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Tom Daigon]

Maybe its due to the Universal Binary Code. All I know is when I did this same scenario with
FCS1, rendering times for a Motion embedded in Final Cut were much faster on my setup.