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SSD and FCP speed.
I do tons of editing from our shows that we shoot with a NewTek Tricaster HD model. I’ve always used my macbook dual core with 4gb ram and 7200rpm hard drive and FCP 6. I’ve produced and edited tons of video content over the years with this set-up, and still do.
So, last week I added another machine to my studio to help speed things up. I paid a little over $3,800.00 to get an imac quad-core i7, 16gb of RAM, 256 SSD for my Apps plus a 2TB hard drive. My apps are on the SSD and I write to the 2TB hard drive. I can honestly say I see no noticeable difference with render times and/or encoding. I was told Apps would launch instantly on an SSD, but again, no noticeable difference opening up FCP. I’m not upset, as the machine is beautiful, but I think I may have drunk the ssd, ram, i7 cool aid.
Wondering if anyone else who does this work has found this to be the same. I feel like I would have the same performance with a bottom of the line imac. Where am I suppose to see this increased performance?
Cheers guys!
~Dylan Haley
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25 Replies
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I’m finding just the opposite with an SSD in a 17″ MBP.
Jerry
Apple Certified Trainer, Producer, Writer, Director Editor, Gun for Hire and other things. I ski. My Blog: https://blogs.creativecow.net/Jerry-Hofmann
Current DVD:
https://store.creativecow.net/p/81/jerry_hofmanns_final_cut_system_setup8-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 MXO2 with MAX – Cinema Displays I have a 22″ that I paid 4k for still working. G4 with Kona SD card, and SCSI card.
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What I found year after year is that after installing systems are a real mess.
Run Diskwarrior.
rafael -
Render times don’t seem to be tied to HD performance in FCP7. I’ve noticed the same, SSD, software RAID, standard HD all produce (within 2%) the same render time.
Applications will load a little faster, but nothing that significant. But as far as render times, no difference regardless of where I set the scratch disk. Maybe I haven’t done a render larger enough to exceed 2GB limit of FCP7 32bit address space?
Cinema4D can render pretty fast on my same MacPro and utilizes 4 cores, FCP7 sequence renders only use 1 core. Qmaster only works with compressor which doesn’t help FCP7 sequences.
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Render times are totally dependent on what you’re rendering. If it’s an fx plug class filter it will use the GPU. If it’s not that, then it uses the CPU. Not much use of the drives at all.
Apps load about 3 times faster here on an SSD, and the MBP will boot in about 15-20 seconds after the chime. Large project files in FCP 7 open a lot faster if they’re kept on that SSD. Any disk intensive task is about 3 times faster, but CPU, GPU tasks are dependent on just how fast your graphics card is or your CPU.
Jerry
Apple Certified Trainer, Producer, Writer, Director Editor, Gun for Hire and other things. I ski. My Blog: https://blogs.creativecow.net/Jerry-Hofmann
Current DVD:
https://store.creativecow.net/p/81/jerry_hofmanns_final_cut_system_setup8-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 MXO2 with MAX – Cinema Displays I have a 22″ that I paid 4k for still working. G4 with Kona SD card, and SCSI card.
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Thanks Rob. I’m coming to the same conclusion. Compressor is where it probably shines, I guess I was just hoping for something more dramatic. My shows are around 30gb a piece when I start editing and I’m finding the time to be comparable. I think I did drink the SSD cool aid. This machine was expensive and seems to perform like my macbook pro, but hey, at least the design is sexy;-)
Thanks again guys.
~Dylan Haley
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Hi Dylan,
The iMac 17 quad is the faster computer ever have ran FC.
From a Core2Duo/4GbRAM to an i7 quand-core/16GbRAM you should see a HUGE vamp in performance in FC.
Also with a SSD HD every system application should open much faster.
Again, optimize your system.
If your system is crap, FC won’t run fast whatever the computer the money you spend in computers.
rafael -
Jerry, do you set up fcp scratch disks to write to your ssd or another hard drive? I was told to not write to the ssd, only to keep your apps on there.
Thanks again for your time.
~Dylan Haley
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Thanks Rafael,
Do you set your scratch disks to the SSD or to another HD? I was told to just run my apps off the SSD but to write/set my scratch disks to another hard drive.
Thanks again for your time.
~Dylan Haley
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Don’t use your OS drive for scratch.
Chris Tompkins
Video Atlanta LLC -
[Dylan Haley] “Do you set your scratch disks to the SSD or to another HD? I was told to just run my apps off the SSD but to write/set my scratch disks to another hard drive. “
Sure, at least the media and renders always on another HD.I’ve insisted in optimizing your System because after a perfect installing the (I mean the MacOS system), is very far from being in good conditions to works.
Two days ago I’ve erased and installed everything on a MBP i7.
After installing and updating SL I’ve ran DiskWarrior and shown “32% of the Items out of order”.
I rebuilt directories and repaired permissions and got it with “0 items out of order”.
Then I installed FCS3 (no contents) and after finishing I ran DW again.
That time shown “14% of items out of order”.
With the system like that Is impossible that any application can run as should do.
rafael
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