[David Roth weiss]

[Shane Ross] “A single SSD drive is not fast enough. You need at least a 2 drive RAID, Thunderbolt connection. Firewire won’t cut it either.
“

Shane is correct, except I think he’s recommending an underpowered RAID, as two spinning disks just aren’t going to provide enough throughput for editing RED 6K. A 6, or preferably 8-bay array is the minimum I would recommend.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

I’m pretty sure Neat is not optimized for GPU acceleration, and the video you’re editing is very processor intensive. When you combine the above with a plugin, such as a noise reduction tool, which calculates or recalculates virtually every frame at the pixel level, (every pixel pretty much changes from frame to frame throughout the entire project), it’s gonna take time to render.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

You did not mention anything about your media drives… The hard drive subsystem is as important to seamless playback as any of the components you did mention. You have to divulge the type of drive (Thunderbolt, esata, usb 3, etc), how many are striped together, etc. before anyone can give you the help you’re looking for.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

Well, you too should call me tomorrow Andrew… We can compare notes on our systems to determine what’s different and why yours isn’t up to snuff.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

Not enough information… What type of media are you editing? Codec? Bitrate?

If you’re editing h.264, mp4, or some other MPEG variant from a DSLR or newer camcorder, you can’t edit those in FCP legacy, especially with a plugin like Neat.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

[Steve Connor] “That’s not particularly fast, I wouldn’t expect to have smooth playback whilst editing in “better quality” mode with a USB3 drive.”

Steve is correct, 120 MB/sec is NOT a lot of throughput for a media drive.

FYI, two new 6G SATA drives striped together at RAID 0 inside the drive bays of a 2008 Mac Pro, deliver nearly 385 Write/340 Read.

Mike, you’re operating from the perspective of “minimum requirements necessary,” not on the computer itself, but on your media drive, and you’re clearly underestimating the importance of throughput with additional overhead. Hard drives are very inexpensive now, don’t hold yourself back looking to Apple as the issue here, you simply don’t have enough drive horsepower.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

Until you run the test and give us the actual read/write speeds on your computer you’re getting nothing but guesses. His do we know that your USB 3 bus is working properly???

For the record, all drives and raids have theoretical performance characteristics, but their actual performance can be completely different than you might expect, for a whole host of reasons.

So, rather than simply continuing to assume your USB 3 drive is performing the way you think it once did, please just run the test and give us the results. It only takes a minute or two…

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

Harry is still on Mavericks, so in theory he should not be having the Cuda issues most here are reporting under Yosemite. Some have reported having the same issues under Mavericks, but I’m not, nor are any of my friends and clients who have proper clean installs of the OS and the proper Nvidia and Cuda drivers.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

Mike, have you run either the AJA or Blackmagic disk speed test apps to see what the “actual” read/write speeds are? I mean seriously, this stuff ain’t rocket science, but it is science nonetheless. All this back and forth banter with all the FCP X gurus, and not one recomendation to look into the science underlying that could easily be the source of your performance issues?

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

Hey Harry! Long time no see…

Call me tomorrow or Monday, I can either help you to fix it, or I can direct you toward a fix.

If you no longer have my number check my website… @ drwfilms dot com.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.