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Performance Issues?
Hi,
I’m a new Final Cut user (recently moved from PCs) am I’m a little concerned/disapointed with the performance of Final Cut 6 and Motion.
For example, in Standard DV what kind of true RT performance (not scaled down Extreme RT) should I get with a Dual 3 Ghz 4 core, 8gig RAM and Leopard?
Also should I be able to play in true RT basic Motion projects? at the moment absolutely anything I do in Motion needs rendering in Final Cut. The extreme RT does not work on Motion projects… is that normal?
As producers of TV commercial we’ve found that we need to go back to my Dual single core PC running Edius to get jobs out on time as the constant rendering on the MAC is painful.
How would I test to see if my hardware is performing as it should?
Any comments and suggestion most welcome
Sytem MAC Leopard 10.5 Dual 3Gig 4 Core, 8Gig RAM, Internal Software Raid FX4500 Video
Final Cut studio 2, Shake and Adobe Production Suite CS3 -
3 Replies
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The amount of RT high quality playback is really dependent on which effects you’re using. Not all of them are RT at all.
But you should get 5-10 streams of RT playback of things like picture in pictures… just for kicks see how many layers you can get if you don’t add filters to them. Then start adding filters… you’ll see Full RT begin to go down.
I’ve no experience with your PC apps, so don’t know how to compare them to FCS… but it’s pretty common to have to render motion projects if you don’t export the Motion project file as a QT instead.
Something that does help with this though, is a graphics card upgrade… THere’s a world of difference between using the stock graphics card in a mac pro and say the step up card (usually about a $200 upgrade)… especially with Motion and Color.
Jerry
Apple Certified Trainer
Author: “Jerry Hofmann on Final Cut Pro 4” Click here
Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D
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Drew…
You have what is know as memory problems. I had this same issue with my system last year when the Intel systems first became available to the market. Memory plays a HUGE role in performance on a FCP system, now.
The question here is… Where did you buy your memory AND is all of your memory in matched pairs from the same manufacturer?
Alot of people will say that I am blowing smoke but this was the exact situation that I saw last year. Not all memory made for the Mac Pro systems are the same. They could all be certified but your results could be spotty at best.
I purchased my system thru ProMax and they were seeing the same issues. I worked with them and they replaced all of my memory with Kensington memory (8 – 1gig bars). Since then, I have not had a single memory problem.
Also, Apple published a tech doc on just this issue. Take a look…
https://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304492
This is from the Apple doc:
Note: DIMMs must be installed in pairs of equal size from the same vendor. For instance, you must not have one or three DIMMs on either riser at any time. Additionally, two DIMMs from different vendors should not be combined and used as a pair.
We went further and made sure that the memory sticks were in sequential order of serial numbers, too. Whether that made an impact or not doesn’t matter. I just know that it works.
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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com
https://blogs.creativecow.net/waynecarey -
Thanks Jerry and Wayne.
I will take up these points with the MAC supplier that I purchased the system from.
It’s good to know that I may have a problem with the hardware (in a weird way) as a new user I only have my PCs to gage the performance. I bought the MAC system because I had head/read that they were fast and reliable.
I forgot to mention that I have a AJA Kona LHe card in the system. Could this be causing problems with performance? ie old/wrong drivers?
Sytem MAC Leopard 10.5 Dual 3Gig 4 Core, 8Gig RAM, Internal Software Raid FX4500 Video
Final Cut studio 2, Shake and Adobe Production Suite CS3
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