[David Franklin]

This isn’t really the forum for it, but let me say to be very very sure you like the look of XD picture before you invest in a camera.

I work with stuff shot on XD every day, and I can’t tell you how the chip they use in that camera makes me long for an old-fashioned BetaSP camera, of almost any stripe.

To me, XD looks thin and brittle. (Oh, and the slow shutter mode is worse than laughable.)

Just my .02.

[David Franklin]

Thanks for the feedback. Several things have been funky lately. I’m thinking I may go for a clean install and see if it helps. Again, thanks for responding.

[David Franklin]

For some reason this doesn’t work for me. I signed in to the troublesome User ID, followed the steps you outlined (well, since I am using 5.1.4 there were slightly fewer files) and then relaunched. FCP made it past the AE stuff, and eventually asked me what easy setup I wanted. But once I selected, it went back to that old familiar “unexpectedly quit” screen with the three choices to “relaunch” “report” and something else.

When I log into my alternative User ID it still launches just fine.

Anyway, anyone who knows what to do with an Administrator ID you can’t erase because the OS needs it, but with which you cannot launch FCP, please let me know! My sad, sneaking suspicion is that I have to wipe the main harddrive and do a clean install of both the OS and FCP.

Anyone who thinks this is overkill please weigh in!

Thanks.

Made With Care In Brooklyn, NY

[David Franklin]

I struggled with this exact same problem for about 10 hours last weekend, and tried the same fixes you’ve suggested.

In the end, the only solution that worked was to create a new user, login to that user before launching FCP, then, once it launched successfully, re-build all my preferences while logged in with the new User ID.

The problem with this is twofold: First, my administrator User settings have to be retained to allow authorization of any higher level functions for the OS, even though I can’t launch FCP using that identity; and Second, I can’t retrieve anything stored in the documents folder for the administrator’s “user” when I’m logged in using the “new” identity.

So I suggest moving all relevant files into an area of your hard drive that is publicly accessible, then creating a new user and working from that.

If anyone knows how to “repair” a User ID that FCP doesn’t like, I’d love to find out!

Thanks for posting this.

[David Franklin]

Thanks very much Walter for your quick response. I tried this trick of bringing the levels down first, and it really helped. I’m able to use less layers of Colorista to get the same result now.

If I’m reading you correctly, you don’t see a problem with invoking multiple instances of the effect — for example if I already have two or three layers of Colorista and then needed to place two extra layers to create masks to bring down particular hotspots?

[David Franklin]

Thanks you two for running the benchmarks as well, now at least I know I’m in the same ballpark. Having opted for the slightly cheaper 2.66GHz machine may account for my slower times. (That’s how I’m interpreting the fact that my machine was the slowest of the three, despite having 6 Gigs of RAM.)

I’ll go back and try Nucleo Pro again and see if that’s any help. Or maybe I’ll just have to learn to work a little smarter by using proxies, etc.

Again, thanks for the feedback.

[David Franklin]

This is just a heads up to Wvladik, there is an ongoing discussion at the top of today’s threads that includes benchmarking the performance of CS3 / AE8 on Mac Pro towers. Since you suggested doing the same thing here, just thought you’d like to know.

https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/2/914104?pview=t#head

[David Franklin]

Thanks moldyboot for this link. It saves me having to upload stuff of my own.

SO…

I downloaded the file “TotalBenchmark_AE6” and opened it in CS3. It told me that the “Standard 3-D” plug in was not found. But the project opened fine and the comp called “Then Click the Render Button” looked normal. Or as normal as a comp made by someone else that I’ve never seen before can look.

I opened the render cue and directed paths for the two files in it, then hit render.

(I actually did all this twice. Once without Multiprocessing engaged, then a second time with it turned on.)

The results were interesting:

The 119 PSD frames, and 5 second long MOV file took a total of 8:27 without multiprocessing, and a total of 5:25 with multiprocessing. That’s 8 min., 27 seconds, vs. 5 minutes, 25 seconds. Not a huge bump in speed, but appreciable.

As for my settings, I have added 2GB of RAM to my system in the past week, so I’m now running a Dual Core Intel 2.66 GHz Mac Pro with 6GB of RAM. I set the Memory to the default 120% of 3GB, and the RAM Cache to 50% which = 1.5GB. I have the disk cache turned on and set to the default of 2000 MB — otherwise known as 2GB?

I left the settings the same for Multiprocessing (which works out for my machine because then the four processors are splitting 6GB four ways).

Anyway, long story short, I didn’t see a huge lag time when the multiprocessing render kicked in. I think this may be because I finally have enough RAM to make it meaningful.

But whatever the case, I’d love to hear what other COW users who have similar machines find from downloading the file and running the test. The whole thing took me about half an hour, so hopefullly it’s worth your time.

[David Franklin]

I tried the “free download” version of Nucleo Pro, but didn’t see any time improvement over my native AE renders. And I’ve been using Activity Monitor to watch what’s going on on all 4 cores, and except for the lag time that I discussed previously, they’re definitely all four getting used.

Maybe I’m just expecting too much? I do have bunches of layers, with complicated things like bezier warps, keylight, etc. going on. Maybe it just takes a while.

And while I believe that the benchmark test mentioned in the previous post is true, I’d love to have other people’s opinions about how this is working for them.

I’m not at my Mac right now, but anyone who wants to try benchmarking a common project can email me at artisanaltelevision (at) gmail (dot) com. I’ll send you a small project (with media) for a 7 second long shot that I remember taking a while to render. I was going to use Pando.com for the actual distribution as it can handle LARGE files. If anyone has a better idea, let me know.

Not sure if it’s kosher to give out an email address this way, but I don’t know how else we might exchange a file of this size.

Thoughts? Anybody else want to get in on this? Let me know…

[David Franklin]

This does not surprise me at all.

I have participated in previous threads with other MacPro users with machines like yours (and mine) that are excruciatingly slow given how much processing power they have.

Go figure, indeed…

Here are links to two previous discussions:

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_thread.cgi?forumid=2&postid=912045&univpostid=911927

https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/2/913534?univpostid=913328&pview=t

I’ve been too busy to set up the benchmarking that was discussed in one of these, but would be happy to participate if someone else gets to it before me.