FCP 7 slow with many stills. rMBP with 16 GB RAM?

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Level 1

15 points

FCP 7 slow with many stills. rMBP with 16 GB RAM?

I'm editing documentaries that are heavy heavy with stills, and they must be high res. I'm frustrated with my 3 year oldl MBP's sluggishness and looking at getting something new. I am considering the 16 GB rMBP in order to have the high RAM, but will this solve the problem I'm having? I also need to have other things open when I work -- i.e. to search Google for info, to read MAIL, to work on paper cut on WORD. My MBP just can't seem to handle it all. PLUS i am storing everything on hard external drives, so they are also churning (most are firewire 800).

I've read lots of debates about the new MBP and the only real reason I'm considering the retina is the option to get 16 GB RAM, but is there an alternative option to have fast/more capable of handling it all?

I'm not a professional editor/ I'm a producer of oral history based documentaries and it's just simpler to do the edit myself usually, so I'm not very sophisticated about some of the technical aspects of things.

I do very simple things in FCP 7 -- cuts, fades, cross fades. combining interviews with film clips with photos and music. nothing else flashy. Maybe I don't even need to be using FCP???

thanks for the time to listen to my challenges!

macbook pro, Mac OS X (10.5.6)

Posted on Aug 11, 2012 11:54 AM

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Answer 1

Russ H

Level 7

22,432 points

Aug 11, 2012 1:07 PM in response to mbpellie

More RAM is not going to help you with FCP 7. (FCP X, however, would gladly use as much RAM as you can stuff into the beefiest of workstations.)

I don't own the new MBP, but the people who do (including family members) tell me it is crazy fast. TB is obviously going to be a huge step up in speeds – although selection of drives is limited.

I suspect your current speed issues are related to your stills. Final Cut will gag on a lot of high res images – and those > 4K will sometimes crash it. So if you want a more pleasant editing experience, resize your images to something approximating your sequence size. I routinely size mine in PS to a 1920 preset…except those that I'm going to put pans and zooms on. In the latter case, I might bump it by a factor of 1.5 or 2.0, depending on the move. What I don't do (anymore) is lay a bunch of 18 mpx images on a TL, when I know FCP is just going to discard most of those pixels anyway.

Good luck.

Russ

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Answer 2

Aug 11, 2012 1:46 PM in response to Russ H

I'm editing documentaries that are heavy heavy with stills, and they must be high res.

the video spec of 720 or 1080 pixels high is not high res, but you have to live with that, so do as Russ says.

I batch convert all my stills after prepping through Downsize, its very fast at batch processing hundreds of images to appropriate dimensions .

Stunt Software Downsize

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Answer 3

mbpellie Author

Level 1

15 points

Aug 11, 2012 3:22 PM in response to Gary Scotland

thanks Russ and Gary -- anyone willing to tell me how to batch downsize hundreds of images? is that in FCP or another ap?

thanks again!

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Answer 4

Russ H

Level 7

22,432 points

Aug 11, 2012 3:48 PM in response to mbpellie

You want to do this prior to importing to FCP.

Gary gave you a link to one such solution.

In my case, I have created actions in Photoshop for landscape and portrait that output various sizes. Preview can also resize (never tried using it with large batches, however).

Russ

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Answer 5

mbpellie Author

Level 1

15 points

Aug 11, 2012 5:13 PM in response to Russ H

ah, didn't see the link from Gary. Will download it. Thanks all. I think I need to organize my photos and external drives MUCH BETTER. will take about a month full time. thanks again!

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Answer 6

Jim-H

Level 1

0 points

Aug 12, 2012 4:50 AM in response to mbpellie

Be careful that when downsizing your images that you create new lower-res versions instead of just overwriting your existing files. Don't want to find out after that you've lost all your original data and now have only downsized photos after you've run a large automated batch script in Photoshop. I would copy a few images to a test folder and practice on those first.

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Answer 7

Studio X

Level 7

27,229 points

Aug 13, 2012 3:01 PM in response to mbpellie

Aside from downsizing the stills, you can also increase the stills cache. It is found in the FCP system settings tab. Normally it is set to 10% (or so) of the 2.5GB available to FCP. You may want to bump it up to 50% if most of your doco is stills. Just don't make it more than 75%.

Have fun.

x

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