Nicole Haddock
Forum Replies Created
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What’s your processor speed and what are your sequence settings at? Assuming going to drives over FW400 or 800?
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Wait- you’re delivering blu-ray discs for wedding clients? Er… how’s the playback compatibility been with their various players?
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First thing I would do is fix your RAM. Pull the 512 sticks and put them on the shelf.
Apple’s explanation and reasoning here:
https://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/MacPro_MemoryRiserCard-DIY.pdfhttps://support.apple.com/kb/TS1957
I went through all of our Mac Pros and reseated alot of RAM (after lots of random installs by random people) and saw improvement and more stability on some systems.
Also, you didn’t tell us what you were compressing, but blu-ray compressions (Which it looks like you’re doing) can take a very long time. It’s the nature of the beast. If you did a single pass, it would go faster, fwiw.
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What standard settings for h.264 are you using? There are a number of settings for that codec in Compressor.
Which version of Compressor? What version OS?
What kind/frame rate/etc of HD?What’s your RAM breakdown too- 9GB is an odd number, unless you have a 512MB paired DIMM…
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Another vote for iShowUHD, and the regular one works fine too. When you record in Animation or Pro-Res codec, I’ve blown up screen shots to 500% without a huge loss in quality. Rhed Pixel does all of our instructional DVD and podcast titles using iShowU and have for years. It rocks.
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Have you rendered the timeline?
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How big is the project? What kind of drive is it stored on? How much free space is on that drive?
It’s hard to figure out what might be going on, but when Final Cut starts acting weird, and this is definitely weird, the first thing I do and advise everyone to do is to trash FCPs preferences. It solves more problems than you might think. The preferences are buried, and there are 2 free tools out there that will do this- Digital Rebellion’s Preference Manager works with 7.0 for sure, I just tested it- https://digitalrebellion.com/
There’s also FCP Rescue https://fcprescue.andersholck.com/ but I have no idea if that’s working with the new FCP.Try trashing the prefs, emptying your trash, restarting, and seeing where that leads you. If it’s still being buggy, let us know more info about the project, drive, and what FCP is doing while opening the project.
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With Macs, my rule of thumb is- buy the biggest, baddest machine you can afford that fits your needs. I have also used my macs up until I bought a new one, and then the older gradually gathered dust. Upgradability is usually limited to RAM, and very occasionally, processors.
I’ve edited DVCProHD on all the systems you listed, even my sluggy little Powerbook. The good news is that the footage cuts well, moves well, on all of those systems. The bog down occurs when you do alot of filtering, compression, rendering from AFX, Motion, etc. Laptops CRAWL compared to desktop machines when it comes to rendering and compressing. Is that worth it for you? Can you wait? RAM is part of the equation, sure, but so is processing power.
You can do some damage with the 24″ iMac. It’s probably the best bang for your buck right now, but buy more RAM (not from Apple). It’s the cheapest and easiest way to boost your machine’s potential. And if you really had to move the system somewhere near a plug, I knew someone who would just toss hers in the box and walk around with it when needed.
Dennis answered some of your other questions, I can’t really speak on graphics cards. As for monitoring final output- are you looking to monitor in SD or HD? I’m assuming that budget is separate from the machine cost?
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I realize the answer is probably no, but if you have Telestream Episode, it can do .avi files.
I did some googling and came across this little app and tutorial- https://blog.bitcomet.com/dvd_vedio_audio/post_24056/
Might help you out. It’s always been my experience that .AVIs are a world of pain, aggravation and render wanders. Welcome to the club.
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You could nest all the sequences in 1 sequence, and then make a multiclip out of them. Then you could watch all 3 in the Viewer window.