Gabriele De simone
Forum Replies Created
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The ATI Radeon 9650 isn’t fast by today’s standards, but if I’m not mistaken it comes with 256MB of VRAM and that should let you work with HD-sized frames at 8-bit fairly well.
If you’re planning to use built-in or third-party plug-ins based on FxPlug, keep in mind that you may get an error message that says “failed to render at the current size, etc…” when working with HD-sized frames.
If that ever happens, switch your Sequence Settings > Video Processing option to “Render in 8-bit YUV” and you should be able to render fine.AFAIK, the only Sequence presets that comes with high-precision rendering enabled by default are the (new) ProRes presets.
Hope this helps,
Gabe
Noise Industries, LLC
https://www.noiseindustries.com -
The ProRes codec uses VBR (variable bit rate) encoding, and as far as I know the HQ vs standard ProRes sequence settings simply tell FCP how much “bandwidth” your output should use.
You can get this info by choosing the “HD and Broadcast Formats” command under the FCP Help menu. If you scroll down to the section titled “About the Apple ProRes 422 Codec”, you’ll get the exact bit rates used by the HQ and standard settings.
Lower bit-rate obviously means lower quality, but also lower requirements on your I/O (especially when editing/transferring over a network). I don’t think anyone has tested how much slower the HQ settings are though, it would be interesting to have that data…
Gabe
Noise Industries, LLC
https://www.noiseindustries.com -
I’m guessing that you’re getting an error because you’re trying to render the sequence at one of the high-precision settings, but your graphics card does not have sufficient video memory to do that. If my guess is correct, try the following:
– Open your Sequence Settings window
– Switch to the Video Processing tab
– Select the “Render in 8-bit YUV” option
– Re-render the sequenceHTH,
Gabe
Noise Industries, LLC
https://www.noiseindustries.com -
If you’re running Leopard, I’d stick with the drivers that Leopard is already using. Wait and see if ATI posts anything specific for Leopard. ATI usually adds a few features here and there to their own drivers, but the common wisdom is that Apple and ATI share the same codebase for their drivers.
Keep in mind that Motion really eats up all the graphics card resources it can. It also eats up main memory quite fast, so the beachball you’re seeing may just be a sign that your virtual memory system is being taxed while Motion is given all the resources it is asking for.
I also noticed that you are running one of the displays off the ATI Radeon 9200… you’d probably be in better shape attaching both displays to the more powerful ATI card. Yes, you’ll use up some video memory on the X1800XT to do that, but you’d get much faster performance from your 3D/OpenGL apps if you are in the habit of using both screens. Right now, if you have any kind of advanced program – like Motion – running on the 9200, you’re essentially forcing Motion to use the X1800XT for rendering, *then* copying the results over to the other card, via the slow PCI bus. And, you’re still eating memory on the X1800XT to get this working. The only way you can be sure not to pay this “price” is if you never use the slower monitor/card combination for any “content” windows, and that defeats the purpose of having two screens. Just my 2c, of course. (The newer cards in Mac Pros come with 256MB or 512MB so it is a no brainer there.)
HTH,
Gabe
Noise Industries, LLC
https://www.noiseindustries.com -
Your card should be capable of supporting textures (graphics card lingo for images) up to 4096×4096, but I’m guessing this is a card that you bought from a third party, not one that came in the machine.
If it’s an ATI retail card, I’d pay a visit to their website and see if there are newer drivers available.
A very up-to-date list of all graphics cards capabilities on Mac OS X is here:
https://homepage.mac.com/arekkusu/bugs/GLInfo.html
Notice that all MacBook Pros do at least 4096x4096px textures, with the very latest MacBook Pros being capable of 8192x8192px (look for the MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE entry in the above page).
HTH,
Gabe
Noise Industries, LLC
https://www.noiseindustries.com -
This is a known problem when running FCP 6.0.1 under Leopard. It indeed affects all FxPlug plug-ins, including the built-in ones. The workaround which works for us is to ignore the error. When you see it, simply save your project and restart the app. This saves you the trouble of having to repeat the parameter setup.
In our own testing, what you did (delete the effect and reapply right away) did not always work, so you definitely got lucky if it works all the time 🙂
Gabe
Noise Industries, LLC
https://www.noiseindustries.com -
Enclosing the text into its own Group (aka Layer) if necessary, then go to the Group properties and enable the “Fixed Resolution” checkbox.
By doing so, you are telling Motion that no matter what the boundary of the text is, it should always render the text in an image that has a fixed size (normally: the frame size). This trick often gets rid of unwanted clipping when rendering Motion projects in FCP/DSP/Compressor. I hope it helps in your case too 🙂
Gabe
Noise Industries
https://www.noiseindustries.com -
Our freebie plug-in (mentioned earlier) *does* give you control over the text blurring as it fades into the distance. Because of the way the blur is applied (non-uniformly, via a depth mask) it also makes the colors fade away as they scroll to the back.
Star Titler comes with an image well to specify your own background and rotate it via a sphere map, which in my humble opinion is pretty neat 🙂
https://www.noiseindustries.com/fxfactory/free
If you have suggestions for improving the plug-in, I can’t imagine a more appropriate thread than this one to collect them…
Gabe
noise industries -
All three cards mentioned can handle images at 4096×4096 quite easily in Motion:
https://homepage.mac.com/arekkusu/bugs/GLInfo.html
I use the NVIDIA 6800, NVIDIA 7300 and the ATI X1900 daily and the latter is quite easily the best performer. The only sad part in all this is that ATI sells faster cards for much cheaper on the PC side, and Apple hasn’t refreshed their GPU options in a *long* time…
The Apple store is still down after the iMac announcement, I’m still hoping on a silent upgrade to their Mac Pros 🙂
Gabe
noise industries -
Also check the current sequence settings, under the “Video Processing” tab: if your rendering choice is one of the “high-precision” ones, switch it to the 8-bit YUV rendering.
High-precision should take four times as much memory as 8 bit YUV (though the exact numbers are something only Apple knows about). Although this is no big deal for plug-ins which use only main memory (they become dog slow, but work) it becomes a serious bottleneck if the graphics card has only 128MB or less VRAM to process your frames.
Gabe
noise industries