FCP6.04 running very slowly

[Dale Suffridge]

I also forgot to add two possibly important facts:
–All the footage and elements are housed in an external 88 firewire 1.5 TB Drive.
–The scratch disc is now located on the Towers Main HD.
Don’t know if these matter or not, but wanted to add them.

Thanks.

[Paolo Mugnaini]

Hi,
Yeah it seems a little excessive…..
Have you tried to check the render settings in your timeline settings window?
Also how many plug ins, if any, do you have on your video?
If everything is native you should not have any issues.
Before you started the new project did you do an easy set up?
I can’t think of anything else, I hope it helps.
Paolo

FCP 5.1.4 – PowerMac 2.2 Dual – 4.5 Gb Ram
1Tb G-Raid2 – 2 1Tb Lacies- CUBASE SX3

[Dale Suffridge]

Thanks Paolo.
If you meant the sequence render settings, then yes. I have tried lowering them, but it only seemed to make it take longer.
I don’t have any plug ins. But the HD elements from Digital Juice are mov files that are from a different size (1920×1080) and compressor setting (animation) than the recorded files from the P2 cam (960×720 and compressor DVCPRO HD 720p60).
As for the easy setup, I think I did. I set it to DVCPRO HD 720p60. But I have been through what I know of the settings with a fine tooth comb since them.
I am still hoping that there is something that I do not know about in the guts of FCP or the Mac that will facilitate a better speed.

Thanks,
Dale Suffridge
Video Producer
Kennesaw State University

[Walter Biscardi]

[Dale Suffridge] “–All the footage and elements are housed in an external 88 firewire 1.5 TB Drive.
–The scratch disc is now located on the Towers Main HD. “

Never EVER set the Scratch disc to the Macintosh HD. This should ONLY be assigned to a media array.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

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[Lawrence Gray]

Hmm… I have an irritating Mac as well. It seems very slow. My problem I’ve been told is the way I’ve set up my four terrabyte system… I just did it as one big Raid volume. Apparently a dumb idea. You need a separate System Disk and as the man said above, move the scratch disk to a separate disc.

I haven’t got round to reformatting and reinstalling everything yet… boy am I looking forward to that! But essentially if after doing that and i’m still having problems of this nature, it means the Mac isn’t working as it should.

Since all the tests i’ve done indicate the Mac is OK, then everything points to the disk configuration.

Lawrence Gray

[Michael Sacci]

Dale,

One thing that I would recommend putting into your workflow is to convert all the DJ clips to the same settings as your seq/footage. You can do it in the background with Compressor and then bring in those clips. That way every time you make a change to the sequence where those clips are they want have to be rendered. I bet they are also the wrong (different frame rate).

Did you change the scratch disc settings?

[Dale Suffridge]

Michael,

Changing the DJ clips to match the vid clips and sequence setting (DVCPRO HD720p60) was the idea I came up with late yesterday. But after using Compressor conversion set to those settings, I ran into a problem when plugging them back in to the timeline. Compressor had taken away the alpha.

I have the least experience with Compressor of all the software I work with. In my initial look through Compressor 3.0.3, I could not find a setting that would give me both the settings I need – DVCPRO HD720P60 and Alpha. Do you happen to know of a way to get both those settings?

NOTE: The DJ files are native .mov files. But those native files do not come in with alpha. You have to use the “Juicer” from digital juice to render them. And it only gives you the following settings to choose from:

and

But can Compressor do the work that the “Juicer” is doing, but with more choices (with hopefully one of those being the DVCPRO HD720P60 and Alpha)?

Or do I have any other options to get these files into the same format before getting them into the timeline?

Oh, and yes I did change the scratch disc. Thankfully, even though I had never heard not to have it on your main HD, I had always been keeping it on an external drive. And I had only changed it yesterday to see if it sold help speed things up. But now I know never to do that again. 🙂

Thanks so much for any more thoughts you might have.

Dale Suffridge

[David Cheok]

Change your sequence settings to Prores422.

[Dale Suffridge]

Hi David.

That was the first change I made when the whole problem arose. But it did not help. I will try again and see if anything else I have applied in the meantime might have helped that scenario.

Thanks,
Dale

[Mike Weber]

Dale –
This is a long shot, but it could be a RAM issue. I was experiencing performance problems with my brand new Mac Pro where I was having to render things that I didn’t on my G5 or iMac even.

I began to suspect my RAM. As it turned out, I had enough RAM (Two 2 GIg modules = 4 GB total), but this did not match Apple’s recommended configuration. Take a quick look at this Apple document:

https://support.apple.com/kb/TS1957?viewlocale=en_US

The Mac Pros have 2 “risers” inside, and Apple is recommending that each riser has either 2 or 4 DIMMs, for a total of 4 or 8 DIMMS, all of equal size. I installed four 2 DIMMS, two on each riser, and suddenly it’s like my hands were untied, and my performance improved immensely. I now have 8 Gig of RAM, though I suspect if I had four 1 Gig modules installed, for a total of 4 Gig, my problem would’ve gone away as well.

So I don’t know if this helps your situation, but something to look at.

Mike