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Improve Performance Questions
Hi,
I’m running an 8 Core Mac, 10.6.7 FCP 7
I’ve got a very large FCP project that I can’t shrink down any further – and it takes forever to load and crashes often.
I’m thinking about ways to throw more processing power at it to help it along.I know FCP7 is a 32 bit app and can’t use all of the cores and RAM, but was wondering if these ideas below could help overall performance – and by how much.
I current have 8 x 1GB RAM in the machine. Can I swap two of them out for 2 x 2GB sticks?
I know it may not help with FCP’s performance, but will it improve my Mac’s performance, especially if other applications are running?
[I read here a few times that each core needs to have x amount of RAM].If I replace the system drive with an SSD, will that improve performance of the OS and FCP? If so, by how much?
Thanks in advance,
Wayne
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3 Replies
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Hi Wayne,
I don’t think adding more RAM will really make FCP all that faster, since it already theoretically has access to the max amount of ram it can use at once. And FCP 7 is theoretically only using one core. Adding more RAM may improve your overall system performance, especially if you notice periods of unresponsiveness as you switch between apps. This is the system swapping virtual memory off the hard disc into ram (and visa versa).
The bottleneck to me sounds like your project. How big is it, megabytes wise? Can you delete any more old timelines? Do a “save as” and then try to clean it up more. Leave all the bins, since that won’t make things much smaller. Get rid of all the old timelines you don’t need any more. You can always access them in your previous project. I find that once a project starts getting above 100-200 megs, it becomes unstable.
All the upgrades you mention shouldn’t hurt in theory (I don’t have any direct experience w/ SSD drives, though). But they won’t really matter if the project itself is too bloated.
You should also make sure all your drives have enough free space on them (10% at least), for best performance.
You could also theoretically turn the still frame cache in FCP down to zero, so the app has a little bit more RAM to use. This will disable real time stills, so you have to be willing to work without those.
Hope this helps,
Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto -
Hi,
Thanks for the feedback.
The project is only 50MB with only one timeline, but it’s a feature-length documentary with
10 trillion clips and assets so it’s putting a major strain on FCP to handle.Drives are not full.
But thanks for the insight and have a great weekend.
Wayne
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Thanks Wayne, sorry the advice was not more helpful.
You could also try dividing the film into reels (2000 feet or ~20 min per reel). This might keep things more manageable for FCP. And sometimes the act of copying and pasting your material into new timelines seems to tidy things up, but YMMV.
Have a great weekend,
Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto
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