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Smooth scrolling in the CS5.5 timeline
Thanks in advance for any insight you all might have…
Running CS5.5 on a 2009 MacPro 3,1 Dual Quad 3.2 GHz Zeon with 10 gigs of RAM (No Cudda card yet just a stock ATI Radeon HD 2600) My raw media is on an external SATA drive along with the media cache stettings directed there as well. (I can RAID but I have not at this point.)
I also have a 27″ i7 iMac but it has the same issue below.Working with a mix XDCAM EX and DSLR footage on the timeline and I cannot for the life of me get smooth timeline scrolling. When I try to drag my playback head through the timeline it works for a few seconds nice and smooth and then just jerks to single frames from there. Does not seem to change whether the playback resolution is at full, 1/2 or 1/4… FCP, as bad a it was speed wise, ALWAYS had great timeline scrolling and I realize now how much I have come to depend on it.
I know my system is a little long in the tooth and I need to upgrade, So…. can anyone tell me what to upgrade first that will allow the timeline scrolling to work well all of the time?
Which do you recommend? Cuda graphics card? more RAM? Fast RAID? A complete new system? (kicking around the idea of a new Z800 workstation) All of the above?
Does anyone get smooth timeline scrolling in CS5.5 on a Mac?
Thanks again for any light you can shed on this for me.
All the best,
Richard Cooper
FrostLine Productions, LLC
Anchorage, Alaska
http://www.frostlineproductions.com -
5 Replies
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[Richard Cooper] “Does anyone get smooth timeline scrolling in CS5.5 on a Mac?”
I do.
2009 8-core macpro, 16gb ram, Nvidia quadro 4000, 8TB Raid5.
I can mix Sony F3, Red 4k, you name it….smooth as butter scrolling.
Your storage setup appears to be the weak link.
If you want a non-laggy system, with mixed codecs these days, you have to RAID.Try raiding…should make a huge difference.
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Thanks Chris, I will build a RAID and see what that does. Makes perfect sense. What speed are you getting out of your RAID5?
I see the other big difference in our systems is the Quatro 4000. I think that is on my short list as well so I can take full advantage of the Mercury Playback engine. I am sure I will see great improvements in other areas with this card.Thanks for your input.
Richard Cooper
FrostLine Productions, LLC
Anchorage, Alaska
http://www.frostlineproductions.com -
It’s fibre channel connection, so very fast.
Read: 335 MB/sec
Write: 437 MB/sec
The Quadro 4000 is highly recommended and definitely worth
the investment.You can do some amazing things in real time playback Unrendered
(a perfect HD 1080P key with premiere ultra keyer for example)When I saw that I was blown away.
Until the mercury engine with CUDA came out, you had to spend
tens of thousands on a Flame/Inferno to get that kind of real time unrendered performance. -
Richard,
For a single machine, you could start with an CALDIGIT HDElement. (Around $1800.00 for 4TB, includes card).
You’ll get around 400 MB/S reads / writes. It’s very solid hardware as well and you can’t beat the price/performance.
We have both an HDPro and HDElement and they’ve performs flawlessly for many years.
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
I have a caldigit HDPro and HDone as well, they are
both great low cost Raid solutions.
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