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Poor performance and advice, please.
As a recent emigrant from Windows based Edius to FCP I am finding that FCP is sadly lacking in realtime performance.
My system comprises FCS2 on the latest OSX running on a 2 X dual 2.66GHZ MacPro with 3GB RAM, OS Hard Drive plus two 500GB internal SATA drives in RAID 0 plus ATI X1900 graphics card. HDV is ingested as ProRes 422 HQ via a BM Intensity card.
An example of the poor performance is the application of the Unsharp Mask with only minor sharpness correction, this results in a slow, reduced resolution picture when played back directly from the time-line, rendering to the ProRes 422 HQ takes over six times the duration of the clip with the Activity Monitor displaying the following typical processor utilisation:
%User 66, %System 3.1, %Nice 15, %Idle 14
In contrst, a similar test with Edius running on the Mac via Boot Camp, full realtime playback without visual degradation is possible directly fromthe time line and rendering (for final ouput) takes less than real time.
This leads me to believe that FCP is not running optimally and there are various tweaks that need to be made to improve performance.
As a complete beginer on the Mac/FCP front, but not on the PC, can someone advise me if this performance is normal and, if not, either suggest tweaks that may be made (remember that I’m new to the Mac) or suitable books that describe how to achieve the optimum performance.
Thanks in advance,
Geoff
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4 Replies
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Geoff,
You’re running great hardware, but with minimum RAM and the minimum number of raided drives possible.
First install more RAM, 6 to 8gb preferably, then get yourself a third SATA drive and stripe three together.
David
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY
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David,
Thank you for your quick response, much appreciated.
As regards your suggestions, I quite understand that additional memory is desireable, but I’m still rather surprised at the general slowness of rendering a single 20 second ProRes clip having only the sharpness filter applied; in this case I would have thought that having a three drive SATA RAID is unlikely to make any difference since we are only dealing with one file.
I have tried using my three 500GB drives in a Mode 0 RAID, but the performance was not greatly improved when previewing or rendering a sequence of four (ProRes) Pictures in Picture over a background clip. At present the third drive is now used for capture when running Edius as this results in much better real time performance.
Are there any performance tweaks that are recommended for improving the performance of FCP?
Again, my thanks
Geoff
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Geoff,
I think the issues you’re having come down to the differences in the ways that RAM are utilzed in one program vs the other. Apple has optimzized the Intel Macs and FCP for high performance, based on the low cost of all the latest hardware. They expect pros to load the machines with RAM and hard drives. That’s all there is to it.
David
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY
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David,
I was just about to post about this and found this discussion on the way, so I have a question for you.
I just upgraded to FCS2 on my G5 dual 2.7 with (embarrassingly) 2GB of ram. At the time, I primarily work in DV. It seems that performance of fcp dropped a lot for me in the upgrade. Will a ram upgrade do a world of good for me since my machine isn’t intel based, or should I just dive in and upgrade the machine? I have 4 seagate barracudas in a raid 0 config so I don’t think that’s a problem.
Thanks,
Gary
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