Erik Lindahl
Forum Replies Created
-
A render farm does’t always do the trick though. After Effects for example is a pain to run in a multi-machine setup.
On the flip-side, After Effects is again a software that scales very unevenly with a multi-core or multi-machine setup. RAM-previews are still not distributed for example.
-
This varies a lot from project to project. “Rendering” is in general a problem, not sure how to quantify that as a “bottleneck”. We’re about to move to a new MacPro 2013-system from our older 2008 machine so we will see quite a boost in this area but I’m not sure it will “revolutionize” things as much as one would hope. We shall see…
A lot of manual work in prepping projects for example won’t change as this isn’t really a CPU, GPU och i/o limitation. What ever system we move to from our current (FCP7 / Color / AE) seems to have similar issue. Premier Pro CC doesn’t solve anything for us really, I’ve tried it on a few projects and for us the mercury engine and AE-integration is completely overrated and doesn’t even work as intended a lot of times. I have been quite impressed by what FCPX can do on modern systems but again it won’t solve everything. FCPX + Resolve should, in theory, be a much faster turn-around solution than FCP7 + Color but for us FCPX still lacks a few basics we constantly use (batch-exporting, SD-projects).
We work in short-form relatively high end advertising post production so lots of edits, but normally between 10s and 60s in length.
-
Would be more valid with a compression test from a proper encoder like Episode Pro or even Adobe Media Encoder. Apples Compressor is quite sub-par (or has been before).
-
Sounds like OSX-being released onto the world. That said, OSX saw a more rapid development AND Apple kept OS 9 + Classic alive for a long migration period.
-
What’s your source format? Could potentially be an i/o limitation.
-
I think the 6-core base machine is a very well balanced system. I would however get 32GB of RAM at least.
The value of the D700 GPU’s is harder to guess. They could potentially decrease processing time a lot but it’s something very few know at the moment.
I’m not sure how you prepare footage for Vimeo but I’d advice you to look into something like Telestream Episode / Episode Pro compared to Apple Compressor.
Having a fast dual-drive setup could help as well. Read from drive A output to drive B. With this in mind a 512GB SSD might be preferable as well as a decent external TB RAID.
All the above said, it’s hard to say how much faster things would be in the real world.
-
Not 100% sure thats true though. My “Young” project consists of ProRes 1080p-footage, various transfer modes and effects. During a share it maxes the CPU-usage.
My “Cotinka” project however uses very little CPU. I’d have to test it more but I have a theory there about the adjustment-layers with motion-created effects that covers the entire edit.
-
But to follow up on your other comments I fully agree. One can live with out a scrolling timeline or a send to motion command. But if their system is so slow they can’t use it, well there is no work-around for that.
As boring as it is I think Apple is laying solid ground to FCPX. I’m very keen on learning more about the added functions to the XML-structure and share-API. Maybe third parties can do some clever magic to / from After Effects / Nuke / Mocha for FX work.
Scrolling in the timeline and event browser seems way smoother now. Much appreciated.
-
I was playing with the thought of a Tube at home yes but the cost probably outweighs the performance increase and I don’t do that heavy lifting work here normally. But it’s defiantly not off the table.
At the studio I’d imagine anyone who charges for FCPX-work will enjoy a MacPro and can easily motivate it. Are the required? Of course not but seeing the performance this machine get (with a blood mobile GPU!) I can just imagine the creative freedom a new MacPro has.
I by the way wonder if Apple in Mavericks can so some magic with the Core-based systems as well. Some models come with both a dGPU and iGPU, couldn’t they simply route the OpenCL-processing tot he dGPU and have the iGPU handle screen-redraws? Much like DaVinci-systems have done it for a few years?
-
Did the BruceX test now and got 80 seconds on average compared to the same spec machine on their site. I would however claim the BruceX test is a poor performance test.
a) It only taxes the GPU. From my two sequences it’s very clear some operations are GPU-bound and some CPU-bound.
b) It’s only based on generators and effects, i.e no i/o comes in to play as you would 90% of the case have running FCPX in real life.
c) Outputting to H264 is a very odd choice. No sane person works that way in post-production.