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FCP 7 / Multitrack on Yosemite?
Hi folks,
In reply to my previous posts and questions, many of which were nicely answered:
It appears that the drive speed is an essential factor. Up to a few days ago I was using 4TB LaCie drives, one for the ProRes converted media, the other for render files and original media storage, and despite the much faster iMac, playback in multicam was bogging. My drives were connected via USB 3, previously on the MBP via FW800.
So I splurged 350 bucks on a LaCie 4TB Thunderbolt drive, sacrificed one port and hence one additional external monitor (that I could always try to connect with USB), hoping thunderbolt would make the difference.
IT DOES NOT! In fact, FCP multicam works better on the previous drive! The thunderbolt drive takes longer to restart playback once it’s bogged (sound keeps rolling and it eventually catches up) than hitting the pause button twice to get playback rolling again in sync. I am tempted to send the damn thing back. I cannot afford 350 bucks for lousy experiments anymore.
What does work in multicam is setting your RT playback to medium quality and half-frames when multicam playback is checked and unclicking auto render! The playback is of course stuttery, but for the 1st editing process it works, even on the 9-angle set-up. Once you uncollapse your multicam clip for decent preview, effects etc… then you can uncheck multicam playback and you see what you deserve. So that’s ‘satisfactory’.
Q1: Do I understand correctly that the thunderbolt drive being a typical 7200 rpm drive is not substantially sped up by the thunderbolt connection and that my investment was to little to no avail?
Q2: Does all this mean that for better playback conditions in multicam (9 angles) I have to move on to an SSD drive? The financial aspect is frightening.
Who can keep my going on this before I give up?
Thanks for your invaluable support!
Michael Brown
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30 Replies
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You need a RAID Michael. The rule of thumb is, every time you double the number of drives in a RAID array you double the throughput. A single spinning disk is only theoretically capable of approx 100MB/sec – nine streams of ProRes running at 21MB/sec each exceeds that limitation by a factor of almost 2X, do it makes no difference what your connection speed is. So, a 2-drive RAID is the bare minimum required.
FYI, while an SSD drive would have enough throughout, SSDs are not really great as media drives, as moving huge amounts if data in and off an SSD drive will fairly quickly ruin the drive’s performance. SSDs are better suited for use as boot drives, because starting apps and storing document files does not move that data on and off the drive as is the case with media drives.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los AngelesDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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David, long time no read. Many thanks. Just had a conversation with a nerd in California who confirmed that I’d be better off with a raid. I’ll have to give it a try. Can I raid more than 2x?
Will keep you posted,
Best from Hamburg
Michael Brown
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another, less expensive approach would be to media manage your footage down to a smaller frame-size,
you’ll get a lot more data through-put.edit with that until your are satisfied,
then re-conect to the larger files.nick
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“FYI, while an SSD drive would have enough throughout, SSDs are not really great as media drives, as moving huge amounts if data in and off an SSD drive will fairly quickly ruin the drive’s performance.”
David, are you saying if you move large amounts of data on and off a SSD, it will permanently ruin its performance???
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Yes Bobby! The way SSDs are rated is by the number of terabytes of data that can be moved on and off the drive before performance begins to degrade. As I mentioned earlier, using a drive as a boot drive does not degrade the drive as quickly as using it as a media drive, because you’re not constantly moving huge files on and off the drive, as you do with media drives.
In addition, SSDs are also rated according to the amount of “over-provisioning” that drive comes with from the factory. Over-provisioning is the number of extra gigabytes you get when you buy, as data is constantly being moved from bad or failing cells on the SSD is constantly being moved to fresh cells. Better SSDs can come with many gigabytes of extra cells, thus extending the life of the drive. However, because they still get so much more than spinning disks the best SSDs are not cost efficient for use as media drives, because they lose performance too quickly.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los AngelesDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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I see, David. Thanks. I just bought a retina MacBook Pro with 512 GB of flash storage, but I don’t ever use my boot drive for storing media files. I always use an external HD.
Also, do you know if it makes a difference if I run FCP 7 on Yosemite compared to El Capitan? My new rMBP came with Yosemite and it’s asking me if I want to get El Capitan, but before I install FCP 7 on it, I wanted to know if FCP 7 runs better on one of them over the other one. Thanks!
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Stick with Yosemite… I’ve tried El Capitan and there’s just nothing about it that’s so wonderful that anyone should feel compelled to update to it from a perfectly working NLE.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los AngelesDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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Okay. I just read somewhere that El Capitan boots faster and makes programs start up a bit faster, but I don’t really know how much faster it is.
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Well I’ll be damned, David! Just tried it on a small 4-angle section of my project and set playback to dynamic, and off they go like a herd o’ turtles!
I’ll try later on a 7-angle part and keep you guys posted, but thanks David, you may have made my day!
Michael Brown
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Hey David, if someone constantly downloads and deletes movies on their SSD boot drive, will this eventually ruin the drive’s performance? Or is it only when you transfer large media files back and forth from the boot drive and an external?
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