Darren Roark
Forum Replies Created
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[David Mathis] ”
The only thing about Motion is the lack of a parent feature and no expressions. Sure parameters are useful but expressions are much more powerful, not to mention flexible. Then again for the price Motion is a very solid piece of software and really comes in useful. Being able to create a title, lower third or effect saves a huge amount of time.”I agree with that. This is the main reason I have been using Motion less and less. It used to be so easy! I hope they bring that back. I do like the way you can make your own plugins and bring them back to FCP X, but I’d much rather have the round trip back. It’s the only major advantage CS/CC users still have and it’s easier to get an FCP X project in to AE than Motion.
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[Andrew Kimery] “As an example, one of the show’s I’m talking about is a multi-editor setup (8-10 editors and a couple of AE’s) sharing media on an ISIS, using a traditional offline/online workflow (finishing is done out of house) and each project contains about 30,000-35,000 pieces of media. No, I’m not exaggerating.”
The new library structure introduced in 10.1 just over a month ago makes that type of collaboration possible. You can make a library that points to that many files. A doc I am working on has over six thousand mixed format files and I am able to pass a library over dropbox to the other editor with no problems. 10.0.9 and older FCP X would slow down if the event had more than two thousand clips. Since bringing the doc over from FCP7, I’ve been able to find clips much faster after tagging everything. The more tagging I do as I go, the easier it is to find what I’m looking for.
I’m going to make a massive library that points to 30K+ clips and see how well it performs.
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It has a lot of positive reviews from mac users. For $20 you can’t really go wrong considering if it goes south, you can always buy two so you can have a backup.
I’ve had cheap firewire/usb cards outlive the tower it was added to, and ones that died within a few months. It’s the warranty I spend money on at this point and an extra $20 for the piece of mind that you can get up and running again.
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[Fabrizio D'Agnano] ” Which one would you suggest?”
I have had good luck with the CalDigit cards. If you do some research about which controller chips work best in OS X, you could find less expensive ones if you want to put in the time.
They have a four port card for $140 and a two port card for $79.
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The 2008 MP hot rodded with used parts hunted off ebay can be turned into a more than capable machine without breaking the bank.
If you are going for FCP X and the Creative Cloud version of PP, a made for Mac 7950 is a great deal. (The CS6 version relies on CUDA for the realtime performance) Assuming you have at least 16GB of RAM as Alban said, the GPU is the most important thing to upgrade if you want FCP X to run well. If you ever get a newer tower, you can just move it to that one. This should be a good card for the next few years.
If it’s not already dual processor, you can pick up used CPUs on ebay for really cheap now which makes a huge difference. If you have ever built a PC, this isn’t that tough of a job.
Used RAM that’s been tested and from a reputable seller is a good way to save some money. (some would disagree) The RAM for that tower can be really spendy.
Get a good USB 3.0 card (they are not created equal) and you should be in great shape.
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[Lance Bachelder] “I wonder how this effects all the iMac owners? They’re stuck with nVidia…
“Can you run the Luxmark test without getting an error? That was my first clue my GTX680 wasn’t fully working.
The weird thing with some PC nvidia cards is that OpenCL needed to be enabled by patching the drivers if they have more than 2GB of memory. My GTX 570 with 1.2GB of ram never had any OpenCL issues and FCP X ran great.
For my 3GB 680, once I installed the CUDA drivers and added them in the txt docs, AE and PP CS6 ran like greased lightning. FCP X was awful until I patched the drivers. Then after an OS update, I’d have to do the whole thing again. I switched to the 7950 before Mavericks so I don’t know if this was Mountain Lion only.
My rMBP 15″ has the nvidia 650m GPU and runs FCP X great as do the iMacs I work on for clients. What little information I could find in benchmark tests was some nvidia cards have much better OpenCL support than others to favor CUDA capabilities.
Running a single 7950 in the 2008 MP, AE and PP work great and FCP X is a rocket. Other than realtime ray tracing, (which I don’t do) I am doing as well or better than I was with my GTX 680.
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[Lance Bachelder] “GTX 760”
Got it. I had a PC GTX 680 and had to tinker with the drivers to get it to work well in FCPX in a 2008 MP, but it was great for Premiere & Resolve out of the box. The fix kept breaking with updates so I switched to a 7950 and FCX now works great. Without the fix it was unusably sluggish like you said in other posts.
I’m interested to know if your card has the same issues with FCPX than mine did.
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Hi Lance,
What GPU do you have in your Mac Pro?
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[Andrew Kimery] “If 8 years from now you needed to open a PPro 6 project in PPro 6 you should just download it from Adobe for $20 (if you weren’t already a CC member). Not really a horrible of a trade off compared to saving every installer/disc and every serial number forever, IMO.”
It was a music video I directed that I needed an HD copy of as it was posted in SD but shot in HD. This may sound like anal retentive overkill, but I archived that project with spanned DVDs in Toast with a DMG of FCS and a text doc with the serial. I got in the habit of that after I was burned in a different situation.
Although Adobe does have most older CS versions available to download if needed, there is no plan at the moment to ensure future compatibility with CC for old projects. It is nice to hand off the work and go home, but my reel of personal work has greatly benefited from being able to spruce them up by opening the original projects and making new masters.
If there was a guarantee from Adobe that any version of a CC will work as long as my subscription is current (and I’m on a compatible OS, computer, etc) I would feel better about it. As of now they don’t. I’d even be willing to toss them an extra $20 for that.
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I completely agree with you on this.
I recently had to go back to an eight year old project (FCP 5) and had to install on a snow leo partition because 7 had problems updating the project. Had I not saved my old install disks and serial numbers I would have been SOL as there was no other way to create an XML so 7 could open it.
I can’t imagine why people aren’t going bananas over this. The prospect of being unable to open older work does my head in.