RT Extreme and graphics cards

[Paul Hawke-williams]

Hi Paul

The filters in FCP are either FXPlug or old-school scripting. I know that the FXPlug filters are an offshoot from Motion and so should be using your graphics card more than the standard scripting filters so if you did upgrade the card it should give you better realtime playback (that’s if the card is listed as supported on the FCP tech specs page of course).
As for profiling, you may find that FCP unexpectedly quits on the first launch after installing the card as FCP will be expecting the old card and may have an issue. All that does though is flush the preferences and it should re-profile when you open FCP the next time. You could always get rid of the FCPprofcache file from the preferences (~library/preferences/fcp user data) and it should force it to profile again.

Hope this helps
Paul

Paul Hawke-Williams
http://www.macguruwales.co.uk
Media Trainer – Mac Support – Video Production

[David Roth weiss]

[Paul Maunder] “I’m looking to improve playback performance in both Motion and Final Cut Pro. My question is, does the graphics card have an effect on RT Extreme in Final Cut, or is it more down to the CPU?”

Neither! You’re barking up the wrong trees Paul.

RT performance is directly related to hard drive throughput. You need a RAID of some sort. Even just a 2-drive firewire raid will give you about 2X more RT performance than a single firewire drive. However you will find that most pros use 8-drive SATA RAIDs for good reason, and it’s not because we’re all rich and drive Ferraris. We have them because we want to get rich and we want to have more time to drive those Ferraris when we do get them.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

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EPK Colorist – UP IN THE AIR – nominated for six academy awards

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.

[Andrew Kimery]

A beefier GFX card will improve performance in Motion and Color but not so much in FCP.

3.2GHz 8-core, FCP 6.0.4, 10.5.5
Blackmagic Multibridge Eclipse (6.8.1)