MacBook air M4 16gb ram, 500gb free space on HD
All latest versions of everything.
When I render a file of a few files, probably less than 20gb total.
No special effects other basic transitions
My Hard Disk free space goes from 500gb down to less than 50gb whilst its working.
Also mac is taking ages to do render.
Any ideas please or is this normal ?
thanks
MacBook Air 15″, macOS 15.4
Robin Bonathan wrote:
MacBook air M4 16gb ram, 500gb free space on HD
All latest versions of everything.
Despite the Finder's use of the outdated name "Macintosh HD", your Mac does not have a mechanical hard drive. Like all Macs in Apple's current lineup, it has a much faster solid-state drive (SSD).
When I render a file of a few files, probably less than 20gb total.
No special effects other basic transitions
My Hard Disk free space goes from 500gb down to less than 50gb whilst its working.
Also mac is taking ages to do render.
Any ideas please or is this normal ?
It sounds like the rendering software
The Mac's virtual memory system lets it pretend to have more RAM than it really does, by swapping some data to "compressed RAM" or to the startup drive. However, even a fast SSD is much slower than real RAM. Push virtual memory hard enough, and performance may take a dive off a cliff.
You can check whether the rendering software is overloading virtual memory by running the Activity Monitor with the Memory tab open while you are carrying out a normal rendering workflow. The Memory tab has a color-coded Memory Pressure graph, and various memory indicators including Swap Used.
If you see reds on the Memory Pressure graph, that means that your Mac does not have enough RAM for what it is doing, and that this is hurting performance. Yellows indicate that things are marginal.
Robin Bonathan wrote:
MacBook air M4 16gb ram, 500gb free space on HD
All latest versions of everything.
Despite the Finder's use of the outdated name "Macintosh HD", your Mac does not have a mechanical hard drive. Like all Macs in Apple's current lineup, it has a much faster solid-state drive (SSD).
When I render a file of a few files, probably less than 20gb total.
No special effects other basic transitions
My Hard Disk free space goes from 500gb down to less than 50gb whilst its working.
Also mac is taking ages to do render.
Any ideas please or is this normal ?
It sounds like the rendering software
The Mac's virtual memory system lets it pretend to have more RAM than it really does, by swapping some data to "compressed RAM" or to the startup drive. However, even a fast SSD is much slower than real RAM. Push virtual memory hard enough, and performance may take a dive off a cliff.
You can check whether the rendering software is overloading virtual memory by running the Activity Monitor with the Memory tab open while you are carrying out a normal rendering workflow. The Memory tab has a color-coded Memory Pressure graph, and various memory indicators including Swap Used.
If you see reds on the Memory Pressure graph, that means that your Mac does not have enough RAM for what it is doing, and that this is hurting performance. Yellows indicate that things are marginal.
The rendering software may have its own cache folder management. I would contact the software developer of the rendering software and let them know of your experience. Once you hit the hard drive being over 85% full, the machine is generating its own swap files to keep up and space usage gets really erratic.
Etrecheck - the handy reporting tool for … - Apple Community
Will help you identify other memory resident applications which should be disabled to avoid issues.
Its final cut pro as per original post.
thanks
Memory being gobbled up when rendering
