new mac pro & fcpx = slow?!

[Michael Garber]

Try optimizing and then re-render. I remember reading somewhere that Neat Video worked better with i-frame footage than long-gop or camera-orig h264s. The slowdown is almost certainly neat video. But keep in mind, even after transcoding, your renders could still be slow. Neat Video is great but just, ya know, just a little slow. Lock ‘n’ load shouldn’t be a slow render. I find it to be very fast even on my iMac.

Michael Garber
5th Wall – a post production company
Blog: GARBERSHOP
My Moviola Webinar on Color Correcting in FCP X
My Moviola Webinar on Cutting News in FCP X

[James Culbertson]

I’ve got a similar setup to yours except a Promise Pegasus 2 instead of your RAID.

That render (even with unoptimized footage, and no 3rd party plugins; currently for me, AVCHD) should only take a couple of minutes.

You might want to test the same render without the 3rd party plugins.

[Marcus Moore]

Yeah, it’s Neat Video. Great plugin, but a pig for rendering, and probably not optimized for the MacPro yet.

[Darren Roark]

If you contact the Neat video guys they have an unreleased beta that works with the cards in the nMP. It works great after that.

In case you didn’t know, go into the hidden optimization settings to enable the GPUs.

[Andre Van berlo]

Thanks Michael Garber, James Culbertson, Marcus Moore, and Darren Roark!

I’ll get that beta for neat video and redo the render.

“In case you didn’t know, go into the hidden optimization settings to enable the GPUs.”

I assume the hidden optimization settings are in neat video right?

In any case I’m going to do the above and report back here. I was pretty scared seeing that beachball time and time again, hopefully we’ve found our culprit… Thanks again!

André

[Andre Van berlo]

hi Darren,

you were correct about optimization settings not being enabled. However, it didn’t make much difference. Even after enabling both D700’s and all 6 cores the render was as slow as you could get.

Digging in I found that each time when I use neat video I see “protranscodertool not responding” in my activity monitor.

After enabling my gpu’s in optimization settings, still slow renders and stil the “protranscodertool not responding”(25%).

Then I exported a simple project without neat video and it exported fine and “protranscodertool” was working great.

Then applied neat video to a clip within that project and export went bad again, “protranscodertool not responding”.

I just send them an email asking about that beta. There is something about neatvideo that is messing up this “protranscodertool”.

Thanks for letting me know of its existence 🙂

André

[Andre Van berlo]

Hey Darren,

I got this message back from neat video guys:

“protranscodertool is not part of Neat Video, so its behaviour
should not be affected by any adjustments in Neat Video
settings.

protranscodertool is a part of FCPX and I can see other people
reported a similar problem on Apple support website:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5808115?start=0&tstart=0”

Personally I’m not convinced that neat video isn’t causing the protranscodertool not responding. Whenever it is enabled fcpx turns into a snail, when I remove it the render is done in a minute…

[Keith Koby]

[Andre van Berlo] “I got this message back from neat video guys:

“protranscodertool is not part of Neat Video, so its behaviour
should not be affected by any adjustments in Neat Video
settings.

protranscodertool is a part of FCPX and I can see other people
reported a similar problem on Apple support website:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5808115?start=0&tstart=0“”

Hey Andre,

Be aware that sometimes when a process is “not responding” in activity monitor, it just means, the process is too busy to be bothered to respond to activity monitor’s badgering it to give a status. It might not mean that something has crashed or is not working. I would bet that Neat is making the protranscodertool so busy that it just can’t reply. Hopefully a new release will fix that.

Keith

[Tony West]

[Marcus Moore] “Yeah, it’s Neat Video. Great plugin, but a pig for rendering,”

Just wanted to double this…

I love what the program can do but it’s so slow I hesitate to use it. I hope they are able to improve it in the future.

[Marcus Moore]

Really, you should only need to use something like this over an entire timeline when something has gone horribly wrong on set.

If the client complains about rendering time, then tell them to get a better shooter next time! Unless you’re also the shooter, then it’s your mistake. 😉