performance

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Level 1

28 points

performance

ok, fresh install of OS 10.8 on a 2.8gzh 8 core, 32gb ram Mac Pro with tons of HD space.... FCP 7 beachballs and struggles to play the stock, master templates.

the timeline is not smooth the CTI moves more jittery like, like a Timex watch vs Rolex sweephand you know?

a test export of two of the master templates (28 seconds) took over a minute to render to quicktime movie with current settings... and it was set to only Ipod movie standard.... thats a 1:3 ratio... at that rate, a 2hr project would take 6hrs to render at Ipod size.

the video card is Nvidia 8800 @ 512mb... is that a bottleneck? I could see maybe in the editing or what you are trying to play on screen but would that effect export also?

am I missing something here? I see others complaining about 10.8 too. will reverting to 10.6 help?

I seem to recall FCP 5 working really well on Power PC with only 2G of ram! I completed lots of projects with that combination.

Posted on Oct 20, 2013 2:46 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

The hatter

Level 9

60,980 points

Oct 20, 2013 2:58 PM in response to M-323

have you tried in FCP forum:

https://discussions.apple.com/community/professional_applications/final_cut_pro_ x

I think what type of disk drives and where, not that you don't have the drive space you need.

http://www.barefeats.com/fcpx01.html

http://support.apple.com/kb/SP624

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5151

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5152

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Answer 2

M-323 Author

Level 1

28 points

Oct 20, 2013 3:03 PM in response to The hatter

space? the main drive is 500GB

drives 2 and 3 are 1TB and and 320GB

there is no drive 4 at the moment

however something else is funny... Drive 1 does not show up in finder.

but if the machine does not see D1, then how can it boot up?

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Answer 3

M-323 Author

Level 1

28 points

Oct 20, 2013 3:29 PM in response to M-323

ok I found the main drive under finder preferances.

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Answer 4

The hatter

Level 9

60,980 points

Oct 20, 2013 3:29 PM in response to M-323

I would if you can:

Put the system on a new 250GB SSD ($175) or 500GB ($340)

http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Electronics-2-5-Inch-Internal-MZ-7TE500BW/dp/B00E3 W19MO/

I would not use the older 320 and 500GB drives. Even consider moving to 2TB WD Black for your 3 storage drives. If money was no object it would be fun to experiment with a new 1TB SSD ($599) which isn't all that bad (I paid that much for a 50MB drive back in 1989!)

The 2008 is held back with your best GPUs they don't perform as well, lot of improvements even though it is PCIe 2.0 for the two 16x slots.

More VRAM help? I don't know. But I would get at a minimum 5770 $249 or does it benefit from CUDA and GTX, then look at MacVidCards for GTX. For AMD how about the 7950 for $419. Not the Apple 5870. This is a Mac Edition card.

The SAPPHIRE HD 7950 Mac Edition is equipped with 3GB of the latest GDDR5 memory, and its Dual Asynchronous Compute Engines (ACE) deliver up to 4.3 TFLOPS Single Precision compute power. It provides hardware support for Open GL 4.2 and Open CL 1.2

http://www.amazon.com/Sapphire-Edition-PCI-Express-Graphics-11196-15-40G/dp/B00B W0XDU6/

I really don't use FCP so I defer to those that do but as far as ideal system performance there are some things you can do - just not improve cpu performance. There are 2009's used going for good prices (OWC for one) that are better in terms of rendering and memory (your 32GB was a large investment at the time).

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Answer 5

M-323 Author

Level 1

28 points

Oct 20, 2013 3:38 PM in response to The hatter

Hatter,

I have a pc that I use for bookkeeping and it runs some small apps like MS office and dragon dictation I use for dictating stuff. Its about the size of a Mac Mini ...called a "ZBox".. I put a SSD in it and although its only 1.2Ghz, that little guy smokes for what Im askin it to do, so ya, I believe in the power and transfer rate of the SSDs. I was thinking about that for the main boot drive. Probly make quite a difference.

But what will the video card improve? how can it impact on rendering? if it will make a difference, for sure Id go for a 1 maybe 2G video card but would that money be better spent on the SSD?

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Answer 6

M-323 Author

Level 1

28 points

Oct 20, 2013 4:01 PM in response to The hatter

oh my goondnis gracious... I just watched this video... they installed a PCI card with two 120G SSD... therefore bypasses Sata - watch the write speeds OMG! http://youtu.be/r4umTWEfr4s -- and it keeps your bays open too.

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Answer 7

The hatter

Level 9

60,980 points

Oct 21, 2013 3:18 AM in response to M-323

for scratch or benchmarks, for Lightroom and Aperture, SSD on PCIe is great. For boot drive, not really, the high IOPS and near zero seek latency. Some PCIe cards make booting a longer delay, so SATA2 works but if you need to free up drive bays very handy. 2008 some cards work but not as well as in 2009+. You have 4x PCIE 1.1 slots and one 16x 2.0 slot. So check.

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