[Taliesn Jones]

Thank you , Nigel , for that seasoned advise. Best response yet. Certainly more informative than the * Just upgrade and then ask me again* one size fits all response I initially received from Kadner.
And , yes , doing a clean & full reinstall of the entire FCStudio 2 Suite is a solid recommendation that I will take in good faith. I may yet wait until the next FCStudio incarnation or when the next paying job involving video editing justifies the expense.
Short of that I still make far more money using *Motion* in concert with AE CS4 which is more pressing for next in line for an upgrade to CS5.

[Taliesn Jones]

Thank you , Gareth , for a straight “from the trenches” answer acknowledging that Motion4 is not that much better than Motion3 ( which I’ve heard and read elsewhere and was looking for an all clear signal ) which means to me that upgrading is not automatic no-brainer solution.
For now I’m just going to continue to reinstall a fresh version of Motion 3 seeing as how this is only the 2nd time it has misbehaved like this through not being used for over a month , but not when it’s in constant use on a project. That time has arrived so it’s time for the solution that works so far till I make the upgrade and then bitch about the misbehaviors I encounter then.
Anyway appreciate the *buyer beware* post. More than pone opinion is *always* better. 😉

[Taliesn Jones]

“Well I don’t know what else to tell ya. :)”
Well this is why i was hoping for other voices to chime in , but such is my luck I s’pose.

“If you’re using Motion more than once a month I personally think it’s professionally a bit unwise to be on the fence about an upgrade.”

No, it’s simply order of priority in spending at the moment.

“However you want to justify $330 as the cost of upgrading Motion on its own with the boat anchor you consider the rest of FCS is your mission I suppose”

Again your misperception proceeds you. It’s not that i consider the rest of FCPro Studio 2 as unnecessary baggage as you appear to assume , it’s the fact that I make more money using Motion and I have no choice in the matter anyway since it is bundled no matter what. As I said the digital editing market in Wash.D.C. is so saturated as it is.

“But again you can diagnose the problem yourself rather than arguing about the finer business points with me..”

Well I s’pose you’re so used to having your say on the subject and and be done with it instead of having hearing heaven forbid a *working* alternative perspective . Old Asian proverb: “When you operate as a hammer all the world appears as a nail.” Was simply looking for a broader base of opinion. Sorry if you’re not used to being corrected on misperceived judgement calls , but alternative business models do exist my friend. 😉

[Taliesn Jones]

“You honestly use nothing else in FCS than motion? Hmm. I suspect you need to reconsider your workflow…”

Uhhhm no , but ever since *Motion* , the only app I was interested in because it had enough FX features that AE did *not* , or didn’t do well near as well ( Motion’s far more advanced animated brush engine comes immediately to mind ) was folded into FCpro Studioi *forcing me to buy the whole damn package just to access Motion3 and the job that I applied Motion3 specialities to paid for the 24″ iMac 3.06 GHz w/ 8 GBs RAM and FCPro Studio 2 and CS4 so the payout justified the initial investment pretty damn well.
I’m now getting far more *paying* work executing *animated illustration & calligraphy* than video editing because one can throw a stick in any direction in the Wash.D.C. can hit a editor , but specialized animated free-hand created FX are a way of differentiating oneself to a unique niche that I kind of enjoy working from. I trust that answers your question about buying into FCPro Studio just to get my hands on Motion3. I had *no* other choice in the matter and the job paid for it. Not so unbelievable when you get right down to it.

[Taliesn Jones]

Point taken concerning the $330 if taken by itself , but then there’s the upgrade to CS5 and then the follow-up upgrades to a whole host of plug-ins to support CS5 ( Trapcode comes immediately to mind )
not too mention more for external hard drives. I guess what I’m trying to suggest os that , in this economy , no one upgrade exists in a vacuum and the laundry list grows long.
Next job should pay for it while allowing CS5 upgrade to lie fallow. Heard that there was next to nothing new added to Motion4 except , apparently more predictable stability. Taken in that perspective $300 is quite a premium to pay for just a single app ( not a 1.0 ) to perform with a measure of predicable stability, no?

[Taliesn Jones]

Appreciate the feedback , but this is kind of a rather over-generalized diagnosis. The version of Motion3 ( from FCStudio 2 ) I have should be consistent with the release version of OSX Leopard I have when *both* OS & app were purchased ( April 2009 ). I purposely did not upgrade to *Snow Leopard* for fear of such unpredicted performance glitches.So i stayed with what I had for stability’s sake. Hence my frustration with this anomaly with both OS & app which were made for each other at the time and with all things remaining the same I’d have thought someone may have discovered a similar behavior anomaly and found out why.
That is why i found the relatively simplistic solution to my problem is “just throw more money at it by upgrading and see if problem goes away” less than enlightening. I’m a buyer-beware kind of guy and would still want some feedback with alloyed with similar experiences or reports thereof with perhaps the problem identified. That said if I could readily afford to *just upgrade everything* whenever such misbehavior arises I would’ve already done so. Thus I wanted some measure of experienced assurances that this particular dysfunction goes away with the upgrade to Snow Leopard & FCStudio 3 before I spend
as I’ve other pressing purchases sharing the same shopping list.

[Taliesn Jones]

Appreciate you getting back to me. Went online to iChat with my *Mac Whisperer* of some 15 years and he reminded me of the *Output Module* window that pops up when you double-click on the words *output module* in the *render cue*. I knew there was some check box somewhere for turning on audio to be rendered with the animation.
I don;t use the audio for actual performance purposes , but for references as I render out each vignette of animation animated in time to each selected block of the music soundtrack. Put simply it’s extremely difficult to put descriptive names to each little isolated piece of the entire soundtrack and then assemble them in the correct order for the performance. It’s so much easier, for me anyway , to just here each bit of music and know precisely where I am in the production chain and can choose from among several experiments for the right one to use.

[Taliesn Jones]

[ Jason Allen ] “I’m going to try and hold myself back, but even in getting the answer you wanted you can’t help being *a* rude and arrogant.”

My ,my, my , looks like you mercifully caught yourself about to call someone a bad name ( or the “a” serves no purpose ). We are relieved. 😉
Look , mate , at times of hard deadlines with a large project , in *this hyper-competitive* economy BTW, and needing time for more experimentation with a new Trapecode Suite of plug-ins ( the new more advanced *particular* in particular ) and originally being from New Yawk as an advertising design & commercial artist during the decade of the 1980’s ( yeah the *Decade of Greed ) , one can get impatient. ( So ,Yeah , I can be a temperamental artistic type when under pressure and in this marketplace. No sympathies here, I do just fine, thank you )
I knew that the Core2 Duo has only 2 cores w/ 8 GBs rack o RAM and i was asking about moving up to a 4 Core with 16 GB’s rack o’ RAM , then right out of the gate I get:
” You don’t have enough RAM to feed even the four physical cores in your computer, so the question of whether hyperthreading works is moot in your case. ”

Where did he get ” the 4 cores in my computer” from? Please explain? What am I supposed to take from that? Don’t bother with an upgrade I hadn’t bought yet? Simply saying that hyper-threading capability was not in AE CS4 yet , but multiproc performance will be substantial , or not. Why would this have been so difficult to say?

That aside , no , I didn’t immediately “get it” about why even a full compliment of the maximum rack o’ RAM would be moot so far as hyper-threading is concerned. I just needed to know if investing in the quad core Nehalem would be worth the performance. AE CS4 had clear warnings of being problematic with OSX 6.Obviously that was a sensitive question for an Adobe rep. To then assume that I hadn’t even thought of upping my pref settings was not only wrong , but rather presumptive & , yes , condescending regardless of how many times he’s been made to *suffer* though such blatantly ignorant questions from we great unwashed masses & digital aborigines

So right off the bat I was made to think I was getting short shrift of an answer and that I was now in for another one of these long dialogues to get at what could’ve been a one post response to which I *always* give glad thanks.

Walter Soyka understood what I was seeking. He *bothered* to explain about AE CS4 being about multiprocessors and not hyper=threading. This was a clear answer. What was so difficult?
That I commented that this could’ve been resolved from response one is a matter of fact and excuse me for daring to bring that to the attention of the 1st responder who’s a professional. It’s also not as if I’ve not encountered sensitivity about the short-comings of AE from Adobe representatives before during Q & A of live demoes here in the Wash.D.C. market.
I dunno , but where i come from to have one’s honest inquiry addressed as suchwith a wave of the responder’s hand while assuming I needed the fundamental checks I felt was rude. It cuts both ways , mate. So his response rubbed me the wrong way and , yeah , it got my Irish up and I over-reacted.

Walter Soyka understood what I was seeking. He got it and I was genuinely grateful for it.
This should be “end of story”.

Which brings me to your response.
“I’m going to try and hold myself back”?
What is this , “Oprah”?
Your 2¢ worth has been duly noted.
Feel better now?
Let’s move on now shall we.

[Taliesn Jones]

Well I *am* as sorry for my tone i this exchange as I am that it took these many give & takes to get to what was the answer you’ve given here.

[ Walter Soyka] “I think part of the disconnect here is that you are using the term “hyper-threading” inaccurately. Hyper-threading refers to running two threads simultaneously on a single core, essentially creating two virtual cores on one physical core. This is why Todd and I answered with distinctions between physical cores and virtual cores.”

Point well taken. My confusion concerned *Multithreading* was the means by which a 64-bit enabled OS
appropriately optimized accessed just the 4 individual cores *as* just 4 individual cores, not this artificial doubling. This is what I meant by my not being under any illusion of a Quad Core being 8 Cores; 4 Cores , 4 GB’s of RAM per core knowing that a certain fraction is taken out of the equation for the OS.

[ Walter Soyka ] “After Effects uses multiprocessing in order to render multiple frames simultaneously and reduce render times. If you read the linked livedoc, you’ll see that it does this by launching one render process per core.”….

…”AE’s renderer is frame-based; it is not a scanline or bucket renderer. After Effects does NOT hand a frame over the CPU and ask the CPU to split it among its four cores; it hands each core one frame at a time to render. “….

“..Neither AE nor Motion are currently tuned specifically for Nehalem to my knowledge.”

“….If your renders are slowing down, then yes, the two additional cores in a quad iMac will give you a noticeable speed boost over your existing Core 2 Duo. ”

Ya know all of this back & forth would’ve been avoided had Todd put it that way right from beginning.
*This* is the kind of thoughtful answer I was searching for and i *do* thank you.
This distinction tells me right away that , yes , these 4 :”non-virtual”cores ( with the maximum compliment of 16GB Rack oRAM ) indeed perform far better than the Core2 Duo’s 2 cores “enough” to make the upgrade investment worth the expense.
That’s all I needed to read.

[ Walter Soyka ] ” When you get your Mac Pro for your studio, go for an upgraded ATI video card, and you’ll see a big boost in Motion performance, too. ”

Yet another reason for the upgrade because , at the time of last year’s iMac purchase the ATI was *not yet shipping* and since I was on a hard deadline I had to take the then stock 512MB GeForce 130 that it came with.
Again, Thank you Walter for your thoughtful answers and my apologies for rustling some feathers, but with the added influence of a full moon things can , as they say , get my Irish up. Like I said i *wish* you answer was the one I had received from the get-go. Now that I have confirmation that AE CS4 9.0.2. can be recommended to play well with Snow Cat OSX 6.whatever I’m good to go.
Be well.
Taliesyn

[Taliesn Jones]

I am sure Todd is a great resource to this list , but what got as a response from him was simply inadequate and apparently too cryptic for me because it took *you* to put what is apparently *the answer* into *other words*.
“[Todd Kopriva] “The Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing features uses physical cores, not virtual cores.”

[ Walter Soyka] ” So the answer is no, AE will not use hyper-threading.”

Now that’s the kind of matter of fact , plain English answer he *could’ve* given ,right,right?
Why was this so difficult for him to say as plainly as you have?
However , his stating about the differentiation that AE CS4’s architecture makes between *virtual cores?* as opposed to *physical cores* that means that AE CS4 on an 8 Core MacPro only gets AE CS4’s performance benefit by virtue of the fact that those 8 cores are distributed between 2 Quad Core Nehalem’s ( ie i7’s.)

So obviously this translates into the fact that Adobe is lagging behind the ability to use of Intel’s 21st century ability to harbor 4 individual cores on a single physical chip. From the reading I’ve been able to find describing the concept & design of Intel’s Core Duo2 evolving into the Nehalem informs me tiny little mind that there’s nothing *virtual* about the cores. It’s touted as a distinct *improvement* insofar as the *on die* cores gain access to each other and RAM far faster expressly *because* they share the same die. My source was the 12 page on line article form Ars Technica:
Re:Nahalem by the Numbers: the Ars Review. ( Someone should inform Adobe perhaps )
https://arstechnica.com/hardware/reviews/2008/11/nehalem-launch-review.ars/13

Which now brings me to where your answer went off the rails a tad.
[Walter Soyka] “…If you get a quad-core machine, it will use four physical cores with multiprocessing, not eight virtual ones.”

You know you really had me one your side until you added this precious little info-nugget. I was under *no* illusion that if I was purchasing a Quad Core iMac that I was getting anything more than 4 cores that apparently Adobe CS 4 can’t deal with efficiently via Hyper-threading.

Knowing this your misexplainantion of what I’m missing here is quite the overreach on your part. FYI a *Quad Core* Nehalem/i7 are *4 cores* acting in concert that share a *single* physical chip. So with that fact your explanation is totally non-sequitur.

Now we get to your *opinion* which I respect because it obviously comes from a total video production mindset , which is fine , but *not* what I do with it…..*professionally*.

[Walter Soyka] ”
” In my opinion, an iMac isn’t well-suited for professional motion media work. It’s not expandable, so you can’t add a video card …..An eight-core Mac Pro is a much more substantial machine, and far better suited for motion media work.”

OK , first of all , yes an 8-core ( on 2 physical Nehalem 4 Core chips ) *would* most definitely be far better suited for the*Live Performance of Animated Grafx* that I’m paid well to do and with my next paying gig with the classical symphony orchestra here that’s exactly where I’m going to go. I’ve found that lugging around those cinder blocks carved out of aluminum G5 form-factors to be not for the faint of heart.

In the meantime I was tired of waiting for Adobe to finally release a version of AfterFX that would have , among other things , a more advanced animated brush engine. It was then , early April 2009 , that someone heard my complaint and turned me onto *Motion’s* animated brush engine and I never looked back.

Thus when I read that the 3.0.6 Core2 Duo with an 8 GB rack-o’-RAM in the just released iMac would literally dance around my Dual 2.5 Gb G5 I was there and let me tell you the portability factor was a dream and around $1k cheaper than the laptop solution with 24″ screen in the bargain.

The contract paid for the then top-o-the-line iMac which was mandatory to run Motion and the entire FinalCut Studio 2 with enough left over to then go on to use my AE 6.5 license to take advantage of the upgrade to the full Adobe Production Premium CS4 Suite.

Which brings us to today. My next *Fantasia-style* live performance production piece for the symphony orchestra will be cherry-picking the *best* of what both Motion & AE CS4 each have as their signature features which the other program doesn’t ( along with a suite of 3rd party plug-ins
another friend and digital colleague just turned me onto )

Therefore , seeing as how the recently released Quad Core iMac has the very same Quad Core Nehalem as the 8 Core MacPro , and the ability to harbor 16 GBs of the same 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM as the MacPro , I figured I would sell-off my Core2 Duo privately and put that towards the new Quad Core iMac and then buy the 8 core MacPro as my main in-studio production box with the iMac as the on-site live performance Mac which plugs directly into their stage-size digital projection screen. seeing as how I’ve already road-tested and am satisfied with the iMac for these live performances.

It is within this context that i sought out real world results of whether the up-grade to the Quad-core iMac made it worth the expense.