Poor Motion Performance with pretty good graphics card??

[Noah Kadner]

On what sort of material? Motion bogs down no matter what once you get to high def stuff or lots of layers, especially with particle effects. 8-9 FPS is not the worst I’ve heard.

Noah

[Paul Nevison]

just messing about with some photoshop layers…it does seem a bit random…the footage is 8bit SD and DV with photoshop elements….i guess they must really stack their demo’s and have secret smoke and mirrors operating when they bandy about HD footage on the apple roadshows!

that’s right 57 layers of 720p etc…. send no money now 🙂

G5 DP 2.0
2.0G RAM
OS 10.4.4
QT 7.0.4
FCP 5.0.4
BMD Decklink Extreme 5.4.2
PAL Land

[Bob Woodhead]

I did the same, and also got poor framerates until I turned OFF video output (in my case, AJA IO). Went from 11 frames/sec to 29.

[Jim Kanter]

Also check your bit depth settings. 8-bit moves better than 16-bit. Float can be R-E-A-L-L-Y S-L-O-W.

Any other programs running simultaneously?

Hooked into a network?

All these things can slow down Motion as well as external video display and things like particles and replicators.

Jim Kanter,
Digital Film Institute
http://www.dfilminst.com

[Doyle Rockwell]

Good pointer, Bob! When video output is turned on, Motion has to read each image back off the GPU (which is a slow process) and then use Quicktime to pipe it out of your capture card, so it really slows things down. Also, try turning off the audio preview (the little speaker button next to Play), as that can also slow down playback.

[Paul Nevison]

thanks for the pointers guys….i did have external video selected via my decklink extreme card….however i couldnt acutally get it to output to my monitor!

turning it off did help….though i would like to see if that option actually does work with the decklink card….so far it doesnt seem to want to output the canvas.

G5 DP 2.0
2.0G RAM
OS 10.4.4
QT 7.0.4
FCP 5.0.4
BMD Decklink Extreme 5.4.2
PAL Land