Is it my Mac?

[Oliver Peters]

[Lance Bachelder] “EVERY plug-in does NOT have the same problem”

Calm down, I’m not arguing your point. I just think you misunderstand what I’ve been saying. Specifically this: “EVERY plug-in that uses an external pipeline to an outside engine has the same problem”

This is talking about plug-ins, like MB Looks and Sapphire Edge that send the image out to an external engine to apply the effect. That’s different than what BCC or the FxFactory plug-ins do, for instance. That’s all I’m saying. In addition, the more processes you apply in a single filter, the more sluggish it becomes. For example, a grading filter like DVShade, which also has diffusion and gradients among other things built in, does not perform as well as Yanobox Moods or Nattress Curves, which only deal with color levels.

Furthermore, Apple has their own secret sauce that deviates from their architecture for 3rd party developers. I can apply 5-6 instances of the Color Board and still have real-time playback, whereas I cannot do the same thing with 5-6 instances of any 3rd party color correction filter. And that’s the same on every Mac I used, including MBPs, iMacs and MPs.

[Lance Bachelder] “Although many plug-ins performed well even on my old Mac Pro with 5770.”

Just so we are talking apples-to-apples so to speak, which plug-ins are you using? I don’t doubt that you are having good experiences with many of them. I do as well. I just think we are comparing very different types of filters.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Tangier Clarke]

Was there a definitive answer on this? Is it just to buy a better machine? We have almost identical computers and my machine gets bogged down on even small projects (6-10 minutes). The iMacs with less RAM but equal VRAM in our office (i5 processors) scream with FCP X. I click wait, drag storyline clips, wait. The machine just can’t keep up.

Mac Pro/ Mavericks 10.1/ FCP X 10.1.1/ 2 x 2.26 Quad Core Xeon/ 16 GB RAM/ ATI Radeon 5770/ Blackmagic Multibridge Pro 2/ Drive bays running 7200 RPM Hitachi Drives / Always use Pro Res (optimized)

Tangier

[Julian Bowman]

This was my post. In the end I never really got any better performance on this machine. I have to close all other events down when one gets too big. I have sucked it up till the new mac pro came out and one is on order (feb) so hopefully my issues will come to an end, but it does also seem like the nicely spec’d iMacs did the trick too.