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Level 1

21 points

The Octo report on FCS3

I need to justify shelling out $300 for the new FCS, my main concern is whether it will finally support all 8 of my processing cores. My system had a giant frowney face experience when rendering in FCP6 decided to spike only 1 out of 16 virtual cores. (in stark contrast to LUDICROUS SPEED with Qmaster and Shake)

So, all you Octo guys out there who are snagging the new suite without question, I would be very happy if you would open up the Activity Monitor when rendering, or installing the handy little tool that is iStat menus, and showing us all whether FCP is really USING the mindnumbing overkill amount of processing power inside our Octos.

Mac Pro Octo2.26GHz Nahalem, 6GB RAM, ATI Radeon HD 4870, Mac OS X (10.5.7)

Posted on Jul 23, 2009 11:51 AM

17 replies

Eisen Feuer Author

Level 1

21 points

Jul 23, 2009 10:42 PM in response to Rob A.

thanks tom, that... that stinks. Well, I'm still holding to my guns that this will be another "4.5"

As in, the initial release was weak but when the time is right they'll doll out the big feature we've all been waiting for. Looks like the rumors were right though, FCP is an ancient program and it'd have to be completely rewritten to do something like support n cores.

Rob A.

Level 1

47 points

Jul 24, 2009 8:40 AM in response to Eisen Feuer

I agree that n core support in any application almost always requires a complete re-write or at least a 80% re-write to leverage the technology. I've code multi-core applications and it is by no means a trivial task -- you really have to design from ground zero and hope you can salvage existing code to some degree.

The biggest problems I've encounter with my multi-core apps is debugging them -- the development tools are limited in what they can do when you have many threads running on multiple cores. Timing is everything, even the introduction of tracing can skew timing which can prevent the duplication of a bug/problem.

But in this day and age, I'm still disappointed that a "professional" grade application such as FCS appears to be relatively technology ignorant when it comes to rendering -- but it does explain how "Compressor" came to being a "solution".

So if I understand this correctly -- FCP 7 background processing is really just about rending on another single core while keeping another core available to FCP? -- rather than just one core for both?

Is QMaster updated also?

Rob.

The Octo report on FCS3