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Compressor & Snow Leopard trouble
Hi everybody,
I’m a regular user of Final Cut studio 2.
I run iStats menu to keep an eye at the performances on my Mac pro 2x quad core2,66 Ghz (2009).
Since i’ve upgraded to Snow Leopard, Compressor which actually was my best friend on mac until now, seems to run much slower.
On Leopard every 16 process were in use while encoding, but now Compressor uses only 8 and the global performances are obviously slower than it used to be.
Here’s a little capture of my iStat menu bar
Hope someone will help me figure out what’s going on… -
8 Replies
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Older software not maximized for the latest OS. That’s my guess.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” now in Post.
Creative Cow Forum Host:
Apple Final Cut Pro, Apple Motion, Apple Color, AJA Kona, Business & Marketing, Maxx Digital. -
Have you tried setting up a virtual cluster? That should improve things, but if raw speed is what you want, then take a close look at Matrox’s MAX technology. The HD card for your tower would speed things up for an H.264 job.
Also if your install of Snow leopard wasn’t clean, and your install of Studio wasn’t over that clean install, I’d suggest this may be part of the problem. SL doesn’t slow things down at all, and I”m not seeing slow compressions here on it.
Also check settings… What were you encoding from/to? Post the settings you used in Compressor too. I’ve not looked at it specifically, but do know that turning on frame controls may well be part of the problem if they weren’t on before for example.
Jerry
Apple Certified Trainer
Author: “Jerry Hofmann on Final Cut Pro 4” Click here
8-Core 3.0 Intel Mac Pro, Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D, AJA Io HD, 17″ MBP, Matrox MXO, CD’s
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Thanks for answering Jerry
First of all, I made an upgrade of my latest OS.
Should I erase and format my Macintosh HD and boot from the Snow Leopard CD to make a clean install?
Or do I need to install Leopard first and then install snow leopard on top of it?I’m a kind of newbie in Mac World (or at least I’ve never been into the upgrade/install thing)
Plus my main concern is understanding why my computer acts as if i only have one quad core instead of two.
Even in the monitor activity window (from utilities) it only shows one single processor…
The speed and performance, I know can be tweak via Qmaster and other ways…
But first things first.Big thanks anyway for your explanations
P.S: I’m not quite ready to buy any extra card right now even if i know the Radeon is not the best solution for encoding tasks.
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Well, setting up Qmaster is a snap and is about the only way to make all those cores behave and tow some weight.
Open it from the Apple Control Panel, then turn off sharing if it’s on.
Next, Select “QuickCluster with services”
Then in the options for the selected services choose 4 cores… You can try more, but it will really tie them up, and you should go with 1 core per gig of RAM you have too. Seems it gets diminished once you go over 4 anyway… least it does on my machine.Then turn sharing back on. When you submit in compressor, choose the quickcluster instead of this mac… and then go.
Point is, you’ll not see those cores chug until you do this..
Jerry
Apple Certified Trainer
Author: “Jerry Hofmann on Final Cut Pro 4” Click here
8-Core 3.0 Intel Mac Pro, Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D, AJA Io HD, 17″ MBP, Matrox MXO, CD’s
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Ok
I’m gonna try this.
Curious thought that Compressor didn’t need this tweak with Qmaster to use every core (physic and virtual) under Leopard.Thanks anyway for your most detailed “tutorial”… Very handy!
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[Jerry Hofmann] “Well, setting up Qmaster is a snap and is about the only way to make all those cores behave and tow some weight.”
QMaster is always a bust here. Has been on every system we’ve tried it with. Compressor works great with it for a few days, maybe a few weeks, then it just locks up one render and it never works correctly again.
We just avoid it altogether now.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” now in Post.
Creative Cow Forum Host:
Apple Final Cut Pro, Apple Motion, Apple Color, AJA Kona, Business & Marketing, Maxx Digital. -
You should try it again then… it works fine here and has been since February. (last time I rebuilt the system) and have since done it again with the release of FCS (2009).
Jerry
Apple Certified Trainer
Author: “Jerry Hofmann on Final Cut Pro 4” Click here
8-Core 3.0 Intel Mac Pro, Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D, AJA Io HD, 17″ MBP, Matrox MXO, CD’s
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Qmaster working OK here to. It will stop working every now and then, but I can get it up and running again by hitting ‘Stop Sharing’, Option clicking on ‘Start Sharing’, which changes it to ‘Reset Services’, and then starting it up again.
Rob Tinworth
http://www.1021.tv
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