[Gabriele Sartori]

It is just the way FCP 7 is. I got the same issue and it was totally unexpected because even imovie is capable to apply the smoothcam filter on H264 material. I spent an entire day trying to figure out what was wrong. For some obscure reason FCP 7 doesn’t like to apply SC on certain formats. You have to convert the clip into another format re-import and it will work.

Gabriele – California

[Gabriele Sartori]

I’m wondering if during the crash etc. you “lost” your graphic drivers and now FCP thinks that you have a lower end graphic cards. It is hard to tell but it could be.
I don’t recall if you wrote that was a total crash and you rebuilt the disk with time machine or not but if you didn’t you could try to plug in a new boot disk, reinstall the OS and time machine it. A good job to do overnight. This assuming that you have a recent time machine backup.
If you are not in that situation , try to run an update and see if the mac detect “new” drivers for your graphic card. What I’m trying to say is that you probably had the newest drivers previously but there is a chance that something happened in that area, crashes may corrupt files including SW drivers. Also, even before doing all this launch system profiler and see what graphic card is detected by the system.
These are just some ideas I may be totally wrong but it is worthwhile to explore that path. Using an I/O card is a good thing but I don’t think that it is your problem right now, you have to have your system in order first.

Gabriele – California

[Gabriele Sartori]

Bought a 27″ Samsung TV/Monitor for just $399 at Costco. It is a 1080P native, it has digital tuner , HDMI, DVI, Component etc. In my opinion a TV has better gamut and color temperature than a PC monitor. I will get the mini Tuesday and I will tell you more but so far the monitor is doing great with perfect colors

Gabriele – California

[Gabriele Sartori]

Same here 10.5.8 was fine and 10.6.2 is fine. I found the 10.6 from the Apple DVD having issues here and there but 10.6.2 is fine

Gabriele – California

[Gabriele Sartori]

Zane
You are right. I gave that suggestion because I wasn’t sure if he meant rendering while exporting. Just trying to help since in my case I had the same problem when I was rendering and when I was exporting. I enabled Qmaster for exporting only and I got a great benefit in term of CPU utilization. Now, also when I do just rendering I’m using all the cores. May be there is no link at all and it is just a coincidence. In any case for rendering exporting it really cut my time and I don’t have an external cluster. These applications are so complex that I rather to make an extra attempt and see what happens than taking the books by their face value.
Best regards

Gabriele – California

[Gabriele Sartori]

I didn’t mean to start a diatribe but you should have read all my post done before your:
“Although here it is explained for compressor, it works also when FC calls compressor. ”

Indeed when you “share” from FC for example if you want to make a BD directly from FC, you can choose the “cluster”, try and see it. This happen obviously because Compressor is called as I was saying.

Gabriele – California

[Gabriele Sartori]

You basically create your own little cluster inside your system. It is a trick in order to cheat the SW that wasn’t written for so many cores:

https://tinyurl.com/ycq85y7

“However, if you have a multiple core system, you can also use Qmaster to treat the multiple cores on your system as a cluster when rendering in Compressor. It’s a two step process; first you have to configure Qmaster, and then you have to choose the new cluster for encoding in Compressor.”
Although here it is explained for compressor, it works also when FC calls compressor.

Gabriele – California

[Gabriele Sartori]

Read this article and the linked articles:
https://tinyurl.com/ycq85y7
I agree with John, mileage will vary. In my case however I can see the difference. A lot as to do with the tasks that you are accomplishing. Today I was doing some simple rendering after applying some motion blur and all my cores were at 100% I can’t tell how much qmaster helped but in my case it is enabled and on average I get a much better “filling factor” now, particularly when compression involved. Right now my system is “sharing” to 3 different output (BD,DVD,Iphone) and al the cores are taking 100%. It is nice to see all the cylinder going 100%. SW all at 64 bit not necessarily will make a better use of 8 cores.It will mostly happen because generating 64 bit they will also make sure that is better multithreaded but 64bit itself can be equally badly written.

Gabriele – California

[Gabriele Sartori]

I beg to differ. FC doesn’t make a very good use of all the processors all the times but I often saturate all the cores in my machine. It is not limited to two cores. You can’t make an absolute statement like that. It depends on the type of code running at a given time, doing rendering or compression, what library is in use, what codecs are involved, how many threads running etc. Qmaster was done exactly for that reason and indeed it works, it is highly recommended to enable it, particularly in machines with 4, 8 and pretty soon 12 cores.

Gabriele – California

[Gabriele Sartori]

Did you enable qmaster?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Qmaster

Gabriele – California