pinwheel on Leopard/FCP 6.0.4

[Joe Procopio]

do we need more ram than required by the FCP specs for Leopard?

Broadway Video, NYC
AVID/FCP editor/engineer

[Walter Biscardi]

[Joe Procopio] “we bought a third FCP system, 8 core intel, 4bg ram etc etc…w”

You should have a minimum 1GB RAM per core, so 8GB RAM would make for a better system.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

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[Joe Procopio]

i initially read that…have 1GB per core, then read only need 4GB for uncompressed HD regarless…didn’t state which CPU that was for. Our other 2 8cores only have 4GB and they run fine, so I think it is somehow related to Leopard. Now, we have noticed in DVD studio that the pinwheel shows up frequently as well…that would point to either a ram issue, or Leopard issue.

I have an additional 2GB of ram…4 512 chips I can add to the system to see if that helps…(I know they have to be even numbers of chips per memory card, so an additional 4 chips would work, but that will only give it 6GB)…I’ll see if there is any improvements.

We seem to have some other issue directly related to the system though…FCP locking frequently on rendering, where our other systems render the same sequence fine…

Broadway Video, NYC
AVID/FCP editor/engineer

[Miriam Moran]

I’m running this version on Leopard, what I experience is random pinwheels, and after a bit of investigation my issue turned out to be a feature of Leopard that regularly polls your drives for Finder indexing – I have a number of external drives that are slow for that type of accessing. I can improve my speed if I remove my externals when I don’t need them. You can also configure the OS to not look at your disc as often or as thoroughly as it likes to, I didn’t go that far as removing the hard drives helped a lot.

[Joe Procopio]

is this likwe the spotlight thing we had to turn off on tiger? or is it exactly spotlight? if not, what program are you talking about? we can’t remove external; drives, that is what our media is on, lol.

connected via ATTO SCSI UL5D I believe…we are also connected to a SAN, but never have both mounted when working…either or….

Broadway Video, NYC
AVID/FCP editor/engineer

[Joe Procopio]

hey walter, where can I find that it states 1GB for processor? i see FCP requires 4 for uncomped HD, but no where on Apple that says 1 per…

I am using a Kona card which states it needs 4GB for uncomped HD as well, but is that in addition to the 4GB for FCP? which would bring the total to 8GB for the system…

TIA

Broadway Video, NYC
AVID/FCP editor/engineer

[Joe Procopio]

yeah, that sounds like Spotlight…you can go into sys prefs and spotlight and throw your render folder in the privacy section so Spotlight doesn’t index it while rendering…what it doesn’t help is multiple projects, multiple render folders, multiple locations…you would have to add each render folder to the privacy tab…it could get pretty messy in there…

these pinwheel holdups don’t seem to happen on our Tiger machines…i’ll check to see if anything else in in the spotlight privacy folder…maybe we can add anything that has to do with FCP…

Broadway Video, NYC
AVID/FCP editor/engineer

[Joe Procopio]

also, I noticed slot config is different for Leopard

apparently Leopard loses the Expansion config, and has fixed slot speeds…graphics and Kona needs o be slots 1 and 2 respectively, and storage (fiber or SCSI) can be 3 or 4…that seems to help the pinwheel so far…

Broadway Video, NYC
AVID/FCP editor/engineer

[Joe Procopio]

so far this is what I have done, seems to help somewhat…

found correct card placement for a 2008 Mac Pro…graphics card was correct in slot 1, but when the system was built, the card placement from the 2007 Mac Pros was used, which is incorrect for a 2008 Mac Pro…

correct card placement for 2008 is as follows (for those that don’t know)
Slot 1 Graphics
Slot 2 Kona 3
Slot 3 Storage
Slot 4 Storage

this is due to the 2008 Mac Pros having a fixed slot config, no more PCI Expansion tool…that is only for older Mac Pros…this 2008 came preloaded with Leopard, and since you can’t back rev the install because Apple makes that impossible, we had no choice to run Leopard (I wanted them all to be the same, our other 2 8-core Intel Mac Pros both run Tiger…

so, that helped…I also installed an additional 2GB of Ram I had lying around, 4 512mb DIMMs, 2 on each card to even it out…we will be upping all 3 of our 8 cores to 8GB real soon, but since I have the 2, I wanted to see if that eliminated the pinwheel…it seems to at this point…we’ll see when we start our next project…

thanks for the answers…!

Broadway Video, NYC
AVID/FCP editor/engineer