G5 PowerMac Slows down in FCP

[David Roth weiss]

How much RAM is in your machine?

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[John Watts]

The machine has 3GB RAM.

If i shut down FCP then re open it, FCP runs fine. However i do not see this as a solution really.

[John Pale]

How much free space is on your system and media drives?

[David Roth weiss]

John,

3Gb of RAM is just barely over the 2gb minimum that FCP requires. If you are running anything other than FCP and the OS, and you are using stills and/or graphics, you’re not going to have any overhead and that 3gb RAM is going to start using virtual RAM (i.e. read/writes on your hard drives), which is much slower than the RAM in your system.

David

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Rob Alexander]

Are you using a blackmagic card by any chance?

[John Watts]

Hi, yes i am using blackmagic.

Am i sensing that you can cure this problem?

[Rob Alexander]

Well not exactly. It appears that a lot of blackmagic users (including myself) are experiencing slow down issues on their Final Cut systems. There’s a thread over on the blackmagic forum and they say they’re looking at it. Are you using the latest drivers? One workaround I’ve found (which isn’t great but does make life a little more bearable) is to close down the sequence you’re working on and then reopen it when the machine slows down.

[Anders Haavie]

We are experiencing the exact same problems on all our g5’s. The quads are much worse than any of the others. Memory and free space on the mediadisk has nothing to do with this. Changning from RT to Unlimited RT in the timeline fixes it for a little while. This bug has been haunting us since. hmm. well.. version 6 I think.

(we all use decklink cards)

Xraid-Xserve-Xsan-Xeverything

[Anders Haavie]

So I swapped out the decklink HD with a AJA Kona LHe and ALL the problems are solved. NO SLOWDOWNS !!!!

IT IS the decklink that is causing the problems.

Anders

Xraid-Xserve-Xsan-Xeverything

[Rob Alexander]

Perhaps you could check whether you’re using the same version of the decklink driver on all the systems or whether the ones that aren’t displaying slowdowns are a different (older) version?

I posted a question over on the blackmagic forum to see whether there are any updates from blackmagic but haven’t had a reply yet.