[Declan Smith]

I am still running leopoard with FCP 7. How do you get FCP to use the cores? I have MacPro early 2009 (dual 4 core 8Gb) and iStat shows the cpus barely doing anything, yet there is a lot that needs rendering before it runs at full frame/quality.

Even compressor only uses 11% of cpu when it is flat out compressing. It’s not disk bound in my opinion.

I am surprised that with such high spec hardware, better performance isn’t seen, although like I say, I am running just leopard. Does snow leopard open things up?

I will be upgrading as soon as the driver for my mixer gets released.

Declan Smith

[Declan Smith]

Hi Stephen

Thanks for that. The only other thing I had to do was on the text format pane, match the X rotation with that of the circle. That made the text face outwards from the circle and align with the circle path.

regards

Declan Smith

[Declan Smith]

I normally have it set to Unlimited RT as Safe RT usually puts the unrendered box up. I think I have it set ok now. Unlimited RT, Dynamic Quality, Full Frame rate, appears to work. However, when set to safe RT will full frame rate it needs rendering. It’s ok on the canvas window, but monitoring externally, the quality seems to drop (like preview quality not full high quality), depending on the type and amount of effects..

I would have thought that with all that CPU at FCP’s disposal, it would be able to RT render higher quality output, but it just doesn’t seem to use the CPU very much.

Even when I set it off to actually render a clip, the CPU hardly get’s off the floor, whearas I would have thought it would use whatever resources are available.

Declan Smith

[Declan Smith]

David,

Thanks, this sheds a little bit more light on things. I guess the real question for me is workflow. I have come from Sony Vegas, which breaks clips up on capture, so naturally I am attempting to set things up in a similar way with FCP, which may not be the best way.

I suppose what I really need is “best practice” guide for capturing an entire tape (to save on the wear and tear of log and capture). I like the fact that FCP puts emphasis on the log and capture as it should save time in the long run.

A previous reply to this thread (by Tom Meegan – thanks by the way), suggested ,that keeping all the subclips pointing to one large capture file should be ok and not introduce any performance issues.

Maybe what I am trying to do by splitting up subclips into separate files is pointless ?

Regards
Declan

Declan Smith

[Declan Smith]

It is formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Two 1Tb disks in a striped raid array.

As I said, If I pick all the odd subclips (1,3,5,7,9) and use media manager to copy them out, that works, then do all the even ones (2,4,6,8) etc.

If I select clips in order 1,2,3,4,5,6 etc (which are the adjacent clips from the full capture) then media manager will only write one single, large file, a copy of the original full capture. Smells of a bug to me, but open to suggestions.

Declan Smith

[Declan Smith]

I have read the section on media management but I have obviously missed something. It always creates a clip of exactly 3.6Gb. I select all the subclips and open media manager. Using either “existing” or “copy” from the options, still creates a single large clip. I have however, managed to get it working after a fashion and I think it could be a possible bug.

Steps taken.

1. Start new project, capture tape, DV start/stop detect, create sub clips
2. Selecting any adjacent clip (i.e. clip1, clip2, etc) it creates a single large file.
3. Selecting non-adjacent clips (i.e. clip 1, clip 3, clip 5) it creates the separate files as expected with differing sizes.

When I say adjacent, I mean timecode wise (after the DV start/stop detect) such that clip 2 follows immediatly after clip1 etc.

Is there some other setting that I missing out here?

Declan Smith

[Declan Smith]

I figured that the way I had set the drives up was probably not optimal, so thanks to time machine, I re-configured the drives so I have two independent raids, just striping, One pair of 1 TB for the System, and one pair of 1Tb disks for media (may change this again as I don’t need 2 TB for system stuff, but this is the 1st Mac I’ve had so need to get used to it).

So in answer to your question, the media was on the main drive, however, only 82 GB on a 2TB partition is being used, and the project was just a handful of DV clips (6 in total, longest duration 1m30s. I was using some media just to get used to FCP.

Looking at the Apple support note for dropped frames, I was getting the first warning box, i.e. it doesn’t give the cause of the dropped frames.

Since reconfiguring the drives (and without moving the media to the second raid array), I can’t reproduce the problem, even by clicking on the tabs as before), which makes me think that, although disk utility let me create the raid in a mirrored pair of striped arrays, that this is a sub optimal config.

i.e. before
RAID (mirror)
-> RAID 1 Striped
–> 1TB Disk
–> 1TB Disk
-> RAID 2 Striped

Now
RAID System (Striped)
–> 1TB Disk
–> 1TB Disk
RAID Media (Striped)
–> 1TB Disk
–> 1TB Disk

Declan Smith

[Declan Smith]

Ok, the DVD player I am having trouble with is the LG RH4820. I have a DVD with two titles, each title with a single chapter. When I select the first title to play, it plays, but hitting the menu button results in disc error. If I select the second title from the DVD menu, it results in disc error.

If I play the first title and click next chapter button on the DVD remote (whilst it’s playing), it will play the second title. If I then hit the menu button (whilst playing the second title) the menu appears. I added a third title and this behaves the same way as the second title (i.e. it won’t play from the menu, but when you use chapter select button when either the first or second title is playing, the menu button returns to the menu).

This is strange, and all I can think is that there must be a setting wrong in my DVDA setup that is confusing the hell out the LG player. The DVD works fine in a computer drive or a portable DVD player that I have.

Now here’s the kick. I created the same DVD using Ulead MovieFactory disc creator, and it works exactly as expected in the LG player, which is why I don’t think it’s the DVD player, and that there is something odd in DVDA or some setting/setup that I am getting wrong.

It’s starting to drive me to drink.