FCp on 8-core Mac Pro

[Walter Biscardi]

[kchannar] “Is the speed realtime on most things?”

Realtime effects are still almost wholly dependent on your graphics card and the media array, especially the media array. The faster your media array, the more realtime you get.

For instance I’m testing a SATA array that’s running approx. 500MB/s. For that I can run 9 streams of DVCPro HD 1080i/50, 3 Way Color Correction on each stream and Gaussian Blur on each stream. All in realtime.

That’s on a Mac Pro Quad 3.0 with the AJA Kona 3 and an ATI 1900, but it’s the drives that are giving me the realtime.

The extra processors speed up your renders.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.

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[Eric Jurgenson]

This is remarkable. 9 channels of gaussian blur and color correction in HD is a lot to handle, even for an 8-core processor and an x1900. Is this in preview mode?

[Ernie Santella]

Walter,

Which ATI 1900 card are you using? I just checked the ATI site and they make no mention of the Intel Macs being compatible?

Ernie Santella
Santella Film/Video Productions
http://www.santellaproductions.com

[Jim Finn]

It is fast. I was editing DVcam footage on my Macbook Pro, which was fine but when i switched to HDV, it was painfully, 1990’s-ish slow. With the octocore, things are cruising right along. I have 4gigs of RAM and the Radeon x1900 graphics card.

macbook pro intel dual
Sony HDV-V1U 24p

[Ernie Santella]

gnomebard,

The ATI Radeon X1900 XT card is getting horrible reviews. How are you guys getting good results? Almost every customer comment below says they lock-up and have to be replaced about every 6 months!!

Apple Customer reviews

Ernie Santella
Santella Film/Video Productions
http://www.santellaproductions.com

[Jan Bliddal]

You can buy it from Apple or an Apple Reseller as an upgrade option. The version Apple sales is the same version you can buy as an cto option for the Mac Pro. It will of cause cost more to buy it later than build into a CTO Mac Pro, but you will have 2 graphics cards . I personally decided to stick with the standard card waiting for a card upgrade sometime in the future.

Let the machine work for you. Not you for the machine

[Devin Crane]

The 1900 xt has been smokin for me, I think were people miss it a lot of times is Ram, once it fills up things will get really slow. I’ll turn on the Activity Monitor to watch it and once it gets full, performance turns to molasses.

Quad 3ghz Mactel 4gb ram Xraid.

[Ernie Santella]

I’ve asked this question before, but no one seems to be able to explain what the benefit of a better video card is? Will a 1900XT card give me faster renders of EFX as it takes the burden off my Intel Pro’s 4 core processor with 7GB RAM?

Then, I read your post and it says it slows down when it gets full. Please explain what exactly slows down and what causes it to get full?

Does anybody have a link to a good explanation of what are the improvements gained by upgrading to a 1900 card?

Ernie Santella
Santella Film/Video Productions
http://www.santellaproductions.com

[Devin Crane]

The new FX Plugins that FCP and Motion share run off of the Graphics Processors not so much off of the Main CPU Processors. CPU Processors do a lot of guessing in it’s formulation while graphics processors use 32bit float precision processing. The faster the card the faster the Rendering. Not every Effect has the same scripting, only the ones that share between FCP and Motion, these are the ones that benefit off of the Card. You can check this out at the FCP site.

[Jim Finn]

The card i bought was the middle option on the MAC PRO, not the multiple cards or the one that cost $1000. It has worked fine but i’ve only had the computer for 3 weeks. I edit HDV and use lots of subtitles and some motion effects in FCP. I do titles in Motion and bring them in and i want to learn Color soon to mess with that. This computer has been great so far. Not sure exactly what is doing what: processor, ram, graphics card though.
yours, jim

macbook pro intel dual
Sony HDV-V1U 24p