EOS C100 footage – Media pending nightmare

[Al Bergstein]

I bet you bought the lower end MBP? If so the lack of a suitable graphics card to do the job is likely the issue. I sold mine and upgraded to the higher end one with the professional graphics card.

I also assume you are running the footage out to a fast external hard drive. Likely USB3 or Thunderbolt based?

Al

[Morten]

No I bought the “middle” one. Works perfectly with same type of material in FCPX – no dropped frames, and lots of RT color grading. Edited a long Doc with AVCHD material on it…

– No Parking Production –

2 x Finalcut Studio3, 2 x Prod. bundle CS6, 2 x MacPro, 2 x ioHD, Ethernet File Server w. X-Raid…. and FCPX on trial

[Al Bergstein]

So what is the graphic card on it? And you are using a fast external drive, correct?

Al

[Paul Neumann]

Did you choose the sequence preset or let PPro decide for you? If you’re not sure just drag a clip onto the new sequence icon and let it set it up for you.

Funny, I’ve found AVCHD works more responsively in PPro than in FCPX. Though I’ve always run 16G of RAM and a 1G graphics card on my MBP. That and an i7.

[Morten]

512Mb Graphics – No need for external HD with AVCHD files (they are not big you know)

– No Parking Production –

2 x Finalcut Studio3, 2 x Prod. bundle CS6, 2 x MacPro, 2 x ioHD, Ethernet File Server w. X-Raid…. and FCPX on trial

[Al Bergstein]

I can’t remember if conforming is done with any of the graphics memory or not. I don’t know Mort, 512MB seems not enough, and I sold my MacBook Pro with 512MB to go to 1GB. It made a big difference. Also, you say that your AVCHD files are not that big. How big are they?

Why are you editing on the same drive as the OS? That’s always been a ‘worse practices’ situation. I would first try to move your footage to an external drive (usb 3, fw800 OR usb 3.0) and retest. With the laptop model you have and editing on the OS drive, you are sort of setting yourself up for poor performance.

I am also shooting C100 footage and have done some work on my Macbook, I would not describe my performance with 6.0 as “sluggish”. But I would say that if I loaded one of my standard C100 documentary shoots onto the internal drive, and tried to edit, I would expect it to be very sluggish.

I have no experience with FCPX.

Good luck!

Al

[Ryan Holmes]

[Morten Ranmar] “No need for external HD with AVCHD files (they are not big you know)”

This is problematic for sure. So you have 1 hard drive handling the core OS functions, Premiere render files, conform files, media playback (AVCHD), Auto-Save, etc. – and it feels sluggish to you….I’m kinda surprised it’s working at all. You’re essentially asking a 5400RPM drive (or 7200RPM if you upgraded) to handle several tasks all at the same time. The size of the files isn’t really the problem – you’re asking a drive to handle so many tasks that it can’t possibly serve up all the data necessary, especially once you start demanding 24 or 30 frames per second.

And with Adobe you can never have too much RAM or a more powerful video card. But I’d start with the HD first and progress from there.

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost

[Morten]

As stated before FCPX handles this with no problems. Yes it is the 7200 RPM HD.
My conclusion is that either PPr does not support the C100 flavour of AVCHD, or the program itself is bloated and sluggish, which confirms other posts from Mac users on this forum.

– No Parking Production –

2 x Finalcut Studio3, 2 x Prod. bundle CS6, 2 x MacPro, 2 x ioHD, Ethernet File Server w. X-Raid…. and FCPX on trial

[James Kumorek]

I’m using CS6 (but on a PC), and it handles my C100 footage pretty well. Premiere does occasionally flack out on AVCHD footage, which results in it sitting there for a while and then putting up a red screen in the program window. When it starts doing that, I need to transcode the footage into something else, like Cineform.