[Walter Soyka]

[Jeremiah Crowley] “Thanks so much for the post. I think I am confused…the machine is not on a network.”

I think that Grant was referring to Time Capsule, which is Apple’s networked Time Machine backup system.

[Jeremiah Crowley] “When I check the actual project folder, everything is in it’s place. For some reason FCP doesn’t “remember” that I had set the scratch up correctly. It certainly knows it somehow because the files work but if I was to work on the project again, I would need to reset the scratch disc.”

As I mentioned in my other post, scratch disk is not a project-level preference.

I think that you might be misunderstanding a nuance of the scratch disk settings: it determines where new files (both captured and rendered) will be written. Once the file is written to disk (in whatever folder the scratch disk points to), Final Cut will remember its location, independently of the scratch disk setting.

Changing the scratch disk does not affect FCP’s ability to locate existing files; it remembers the entire path for them. It only affects where new files will be written to disk.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Lexi Elven] “Is there a way to add more detail in to my parameters so I’m not working with ridiculously small increments?”

Not directly. I don’t know enough about your project to suggest a better workflow, but here are a couple ideas.

Hold Command on a Mac, or Control on Windows, while scrubbing a parameter to make fine adjustments.

Alternately, you could add a Slider Control effect to your footage, then link your parameter to it. Throw in a little math to make it more responsive. For example, to animate Position, you could add two slider controls and rename them “Position X” and “Position Y.” For the position parameter on your solid, add an expression:
x = effect("Position X")("Slider") / 10;
y = effect("Position Y")("Slider") / 10;
[x, y]
A move of 10 on Position X will now correspond with 1 pixel on your comp. Change the value in the expression to make it more or less responsive.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Jeremiah Crowley] “I am very careful to set the scratch disk correctly each time I start a project…. Open System Settings to check Scratch Disc-NOT GOOD. It defaults to some other folder, not the correct one…. Question: Should I worry about this? Why doesn’t FCP recognize the REAL scratch disk folder? It plays it correctly but just doesn’t default to it. “

Scratch disk is a system setting in FCP, not a project setting. In other words, the scratch disk location is not saved in your project file, and it will not automatically change when you switch from one project to another; it’s completely independent.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Maxim Moisseev] “There’s a simple player for OSX – MSAQTPlayer, that can override this limit.”

I’ve never used this tool before — thanks for brining it up. Do you have any experience with it?

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

I’ve used the term “magic” colloquially, of course. Again, note that the texture size has been increased to 8192×8192 in DX10.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Maxim Moisseev] “I’ve recently encountered a problem I can’t resolve now. How to play a 4,800 x 600 video file across 2 graphics cards outputs with a triplehead to go on each on a PC, using openGL output? Is there a player capable of this?”

That seems like it’d be very taxing on a single computer — it’s the sort of thing I’d usually split across a network. I’d be curious to hear if Thomas’s suggestions work for your application.

The only other thing that I’d note is that 4096 (4K) is a “magic number” in video: OpenGL and DX9 hardware is typically limited to 4K x 4K (though some newer OpenGL and DX10 cards double that in each dimension to 8K x 8K). Some codecs may not support raster sizes beyond 4K, so compression and playback could be a challenge, too.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

Bill, thanks for posting this. QLAB looks really promising!

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Eric Gross] “Thanks for clearing things up, wish there were a few more revelations… We just hired a guy that swears the iMac at his last place was faster than the current dual quad he’s working on.”

Perhaps there’s a non-hardware issue here. The online help has a great page about improving performance.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Eric Gross] “32 GB of memory per workstation is a given.”

For After Effects, RAM is my first priority, and I’m glad to see you’re already accounting for that!

[Eric Gross] “Recommended Video Cards and how many? Obviously we have one slot taken with fibre channel card. We also typically have a AJA Kona Cards. Would it be better to designate one or two Macs as an ingest stations and put in multiple Graphics/Video cards?”

If you install multiple video cards for ingest, you’ll also need software capable of multi-stream ingest. This may or may not be more trouble than it’s worth, depending on your workflow.

[Eric Gross] “Would it be better to designate one or two Macs as an ingest stations and put in multiple Graphics/Video cards? I don’t really know details of how processing takes place now with many calculations being handled by the video cards. Are any cards better suited for AE? Quadro FX 4800? ATI HD 4870? Something else… If I have compatible cards from older macs can I install those or should all cards match?”

After Effects rendering is not accelerated on the GPU (some specific third-party plugins are), so picking a graphics card depends on other apps you use. For example, if you are a heavy Premiere user, the Quadro FX 4800 would be helpful. If you are a heavy Apple Color user, the ATI HD 4870 is the preferred card.

[Eric Gross] “Something else… If I have compatible cards from older macs can I install those or should all cards match?”

If you use any GPU acceleration on any plugins (like Knoll Light Factory, Optical Flares, or Noise Industries), AND you net-render, your graphics cards should match. If your graphics cards do not match, you should disable GPU rendering on these plugins wherever possible, or render locally only.

Keeping everything the same would also simplify system administration.

[Eric Gross] “Would Multiple Hard Drives add any performance boost? Perhaps formatting in such a way that OS would live on one drive, applications on another, leave the other for virtual memory… Just thinking outside the box. If so would it worth it to then purchase the Mac Pro RAID Card? Or shove another video card in?”

What kinds of speeds are you getting on your XSan? If your SAN is nice and fast, you may not get an improvement by adding more local disks.

If you want to work locally, you could use a three-drive setup: OS/apps, footage, and render. You could replace the footage and render drives with a high-speed RAID, but skip the Mac Pro RAID card; it’s junk. I’d recommend an external RAID enclosure. Many great RAID manufacturers advertise here — you’d be very happy with a CalDigit, or a MaxxDigital, or a Dulce, etc.

Many applications require installation on the startup disk, so splitting your OS and your apps may not be an option. With 32 GB of RAM, your virtual memory usage should be almost non-existent.

[Eric Gross] “We also typically load all the Adobe and Apple Studio applications onto a mac. While this is great for functionality, if I am looking for streamlined performance, is it significantly better to just install the most used programs, and designate other machines for other purposes (say the rare use of inDesign). “

Installing them should make no difference in performance, but be careful how many apps you keep open. If you’re not actively using InDesign on a workstation, close it to free up RAM and resources for other applications.

Hope this helps,

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

I’m not sure that you can deliver 1024×768 video for the iPad. From the specs:

H.264 video up to 720p, 30 frames per second, Main Profile level 3.1 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps per channel, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats; MPEG-4 video, up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Simple Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats; Motion JPEG (M-JPEG) up to 35 Mbps, 1280 by 720 pixels, 30 frames per second, audio in ulaw, PCM stereo audio in .avi file format

(emphasis mine)

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events