FCP7 on Yosemite!

[Nick Meyers]

“Q1: when I add more than 4 or 5 clips to the TL (overlaying due to syncing several cams), the sections that include the stereo studio mixes need audio rendering”

up your RT audio playback in your FCP user preferences
default is 8 tracks, default is crazy low.

“Q2: multiclip playback bogs down exactly like on the MBP… I assumed the issue was Processor speed, RAM and graphics cards”

drive speed comes to mind.
you might need to work off raided drives?

nick

[Michael Brown]

Hi Nick,

Q1: silly me! I tried, that’s it of course! I’m sure I’d been there before, just didn’t pay attention in setting up my user prefs 😉 Great!

Q2: I remember reading a rather old thread response in which one of you guys claimed dividing media over 2 drives helped solve that problem. So last night I cleared some unneeded footage from my media drive (it was pretty full – almost 3-1/2 TB out of 4), and that seemed to help this morning when I rebooted the whole gizmo.

Later today I realized that when the viewer is set to 4 angles, it ran very smoothly! All 4 angles had a camera applied. When I switched to 9 angles in the same sequence (hence with only 4 angles occupied), it started bogging again. I wondered whether FCP maybe couldn’t handle the information conflict of not having all angles used, so I created a multiclip with 6 angles and opened it in 9-angle view, but unfortunately it bogs as well. Now my Lacie 4TB via USB 3 has 850 Gb available. I have been told that USB3 is just as stable and faster than FW 800. Should I try running on FW via Thunderbolt instead? Is there a difference? And if I do, I sacrifice one display, since both externals use up the TB ports.

Does that make any sense? Any ideas?

Best greetings from Hamburg 😉

Michael Brown

[Nick Meyers]

“you guys claimed dividing media over 2 drives helped…. So I cleared footage from my media drive”

i dont understand, did you spread your media over more than one drive, or just clear some space?

Apple white paper:
“The target data rate of Apple ProRes 422 LT is approximately 102 Mbps at 1920 x 1080 and 29.97 fps”

another source:
“USB 3.0 has a maximum bandwidth rate of 640 MBps”

while that may seem like you can run 6 steams of ProresLT, i guess your real world experience shows otherwise.
maybe you’ve hit the limit of the spinning disk itself.

“Should I try running on FW via Thunderbolt instead?”
FW 800 is slower than USB3, so no.
Thunderbolt is faster than FW, but a FW drive hooked up via Thunderbolt wont get magically faster.

a Thunderbolt drive is faster than a USB3 drive,
but if you’ve hit the limit of the spinning disk that might not help

in which case if you could be bothered, you could try to put angles 1-3 ion one drive, and 4 and up on another,
but 2 dives RAIDED together (as RIAD-0) will have the speed of two rives, and appear as one.
which would be a lot simpler
you can buy drives with 2 drives inside that can be set up like this.

i jsut read this:
LaCie 6TB 2big Thunderbolt 2 Series 2-Bay RAID
“Max. Data Transfer Rates of 360 MB/s”

so maybe this wont work? this isn’t my strong point, sorry

another approach would be to media a mange your 1920×1080 down to 1280×720, or even SD
you;d get more streams that way.

nick

[Michael Brown]

Hi Nick,

You may have nailed it. As I posted seperately:

[Nick Meyers] “but if you’ve hit the limit of the spinning disk that might not help”

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.

[Nick Meyers] ” i dont understand, did you spread your media over more than one drive, or just clear some space?”

In reply to this: I freed space and have been running only 1 drive for my media, but I made a note and if all else fails, I will try your idea of splitting my media onto 2 drives.

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.

Thanks for your invaluable support!

Michael Brown

Michael Brown