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Poor FCP performance on 8-core?
Hey, I was curious to see if my FCP performance is on par with others experiences. I’m rather disappointed by FCS2 performance on my (early 2008) 8-core, 8GB RAM, and several two drive SATA and FW800 RAID 0s. It’s taking my machine about 4 hours to render a simple 30 minute two video track 720p ProRes project. During render, no more than two of my cores are very busy and drive IO is pretty low at 20MB/s. (I’m monitoring system performance via iStat Menus)
I guess I’m expecting more system activity during a render.
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5 Replies
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I think the speed of rendering on any given Mac will vary a lot depending on just what you are rendering.
I can render a 55 minute project whose filters are the 3 way cc filter in about 1.5 hours… but something with a lot of effects will take longer.. Hard to say if you’re experiencing a problem, but FCP rarely will use all 8 cores to the max if ever. I also think that the OS is part of the “problem” and not just FCP. However FCP is carbon code, and that may be slowing it down. I know just enough about that issue to make me dangerous though… LOL.
Either way, don’t think FCP will speed up tremendously until it’s totally rewritten in more modern code.
That all said… check out rendering in FCP, Motion, and Compressor and AE all at the same time. All of a sudden those cores will be crankin’… That is where I see huge improvement with all the cores in play. Not so much on a single app rendering.
Jerry
Apple Certified Trainer
Author: “Jerry Hofmann on Final Cut Pro 4” Click here
8-Core 3.0 Intel Mac Pro, Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D, AJA Io HD, 17″ MBP, Matrox MXO, CD’s
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You say it’s a simple two track video.
How simple is it?
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What format are you shooting in… HDV? Stay HDV. ProRes 422 files are huge. There’s no need to bump formats on capture. Your machine should be able to render that same HDV footage in 20 min. I assume you bumped the format because I don’t know of a cam that captures ProRes.
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Wayne, the post you are replying to is two and a half years old. Whilst machinery has changed, hard drives are much cheaper and the rationale in converting to ProRes is still a more solid workflow. Search this forum if you want to hear all the pro and con arguments.
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Thank you for pointing that out. I am not too certain about the benefits or working in ProRess as I work mostly on corporate video projects that are 10 to 15 minutes in length, and find I don’t have to render everything I do, and am more than likely to chunk work together, and fully render before output. Usually a 20 minute penalty. Most of the work I produce goes from HDV to 960×540 hd (progressive) wmv file and out to the web. If I were producing for the big screen I may look at alternative work flows, but wouldn’t sacrifice the quality of HDV to ProRess conversion regardless of all that is said about it. From my understanding it’s a conversion of utility. I will give it a try again, but must say that at the time I wasn’t worried about cost, but time (which costs.) ProRess took hours and hours to render fully from HDV before compression to DVD. HDV to HDV to DVD not so much, and I believe that still applies today.
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