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Do you have any ideas why Motion 5 would run slow on a computer? I have an Imac with 8Gigs of ram, and plenty of hard drive space, but it still gives me the beach ball when I add a few lights and effects. I'm at the end of my rope.
iMac
What's the GPU of your computer? What is your project size? How big are the elements in your scene? Are you casting shadows? Do you have depth of field enabled? What about Motion Blur? Are you using particles or replicators? How complex is your scene? What are your quality settings?
As you can see, there are several factors that can contribute to performance of a project. I'd take a look at this recent thread to see if there are tips that might help for your project.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6010683?answerId=25233160022#25233160022
You call out lights, but since we don't know what else is happening in your scene, it's difficult to say what specifically will helpful for your situation.
I have a 3.4 Giga Hertz processor, the iMac was the second most powerful I could buy only 6months ago. I am running shadows, highlights and am in 3D space. There are three lights, one of which is moving. I have one generator working, but at this point things are working so slowly I cannot adjust the parameters accurately. As far as the RENDER settings, I've turned them to the lowest point; Draft, turned off Dynamic range, and I am not running Motion Blur (whatever that is-I haven't ran it because I didn't know what it was). I have only two reflective back grounds, and simple text. I am running 1080p at 60 frames per second. Like I said, with all things turned all the way down, I'm still getting so much lag, my computer actually crashed!
You probably don't really need 1080 at 60 for your finished projects but since you're just starting out with Motion, you need to lower your expectations. A long way. 1080 is about 2 million pixels per frame, DV is only about 400,000. That's not just five times as many pixels for the Mac to track; everything in video is exponential.
Explore the training tutorials available by Mark Spencer. You will get an idea of how his super powerful machine reacts with the software.
Adding a light roughly doubles the processing time over flat scenes. Two lights increases processing again. Reflections require processing the lights and then calculating the reflections so add another quarter of the time required for flat scenes. Add camera movement, motion blur, and depth of field and you need exponentially more processing time for every frame. The preload of renders into RAM is one of the cooler features of Motion, as comapred to After Effects, but that takes tons of time, to.
Try working in ye olde DV resolution for a few days. Get to know the software's limitations and what gets imposed by your Macintosh. Step up to 720p/30 and see how things slow down.
Do you have any ideas why Motion 5 would run slow on a computer? I have an Imac with 8Gigs of ram, and plenty of hard drive space, but it still gives me the beach ball when I add a few lights and effects. I'm at the end of my rope.
