Motion Bogs Down (How Can I Fix This?)

[Winston A. cely]

I would look into getting an ATI card. Everything I’ve read said those were better for Apple’s Pro Apps. If it’s 2-3 years old, it’s probably time for an upgrade anyway.

Winston A. Cely
Editor/Owner | Della St. Media, LLC

Sound it out: Nu-clear, not nu-cu-lar.

Mac Pro 3GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon
4 GB RAM | Final Cut Studio 5.1.4 | Aja Kona LHe

[David Grimes]

Matt, you mention that in this project you are following something to Audio. What exactly do you mean…is this by you animating to the audio or are you having Motion do it. Motion’s audio behavior is very poorly done and can only do limited objects before it starts running into serious cpu issues. If you are using the audio behavior, remove it entirely until your project is done (don’t just turn it “off”), then add it and hope for the best. If not, consider shutting off your audio when you don’t need it. I find this can make a huge difference in performance.
Good Luck.
-Dave

[Matt King]

Here are pictures of what I’m seeing inside Motion lately:

-Matt K

FCP 6.0.4
Motion 3.0.2
JVC GY-HD110
JVC BR-HD 50
Mac OS X 10.5.5
Mac Pro 2 x 3 Dual-Core Intel Xeon 8 GB 667 MHz

[Matt King]

Okay interesting thing happened.

I started editing using the Standard Layout instead of my own layout and also (I think this is the big thing) I am using only one monitor when I am editing with Motion. Everything seems to be working like it should now. I have edited 2 projects this way and it has not done the floating beach ball on me at all.

Could it be something to do with the video card having a hard time sending stuff to two separate monitors? I don’t have this problem when I am editing with FCP.

Thanks for the suggestions folks.

-Matt K

FCP 6.0.4
Motion 3.0.2
JVC GY-HD110
JVC BR-HD 50
Mac OS X 10.5.5
Mac Pro 2 x 3 Dual-Core Intel Xeon 8 GB 667 MHz

[Winston A. cely]

[Matt King] “Could it be something to do with the video card having a hard time sending stuff to two separate monitors? I don’t have this problem when I am editing with FCP.”

Yes! The graphics card is splitting it’s own ram in order to power the two different monitors. Motion is very dependent on the graphics card’s ram, while FCP doesn’t really care about that graphics stuff.

Winston A. Cely
Editor/Owner | Della St. Media, LLC

Sound it out: Nu-clear, not nu-cu-lar.

Mac Pro 3GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon
4 GB RAM | Final Cut Studio 5.1.4 | Aja Kona LHe

[Matt King]

Another problem solved. I feel so much better now. Thanks for the help ya’ll.

-Matt K

FCP 6.0.4
Motion 3.0.2
JVC GY-HD110
JVC BR-HD 50
Mac OS X 10.5.5
Mac Pro 2 x 3 Dual-Core Intel Xeon 8 GB 667 MHz

[Jan Franzén]

To speed things up, one important thing is to check under the view button over the canvas to be sure not to use any of the render possibilities absolutely needed in the creation of your animation.Just uncheck everything.If you also under Menu: edit/project settings have the 32 floating point enabled and floatingpoint under the view button activated it will slow everything down. I just made a 3d animation of 6 different films in HD flying around and some lightning and turned all renderpossibilties off,turned the render quality to draft and using the resolution menu over the canvas to take down the resolution as low as possible.This was the only way to handle the animation work.Then activating again to see and adjust the final result.

[Raven Plenty]

I too am having major lagging in Motion 3. I’m running FCP2 on a new 8-core 2.26GHz “Nehalem” Mac Pro with 12 GB of RAM, doing simple animations, just keyframing a mask moving around. There are loads and loads of RAM available. The lags happen when I select or deselect objects and/or keyframe points. I understand the graphics card can be a weak point, but deselecting an object doesn’t seem very intensive to me. For what it’s worth I have the NVIDIA GeForce GT 120.

Do I really need a better graphics card in order to select and deselect objects, or should I just get After Effects instead (which is what I really want to do)? 😛