Slow performance (I did read the FAQ)

Hello,

I am new to the Apple environment and new to FCP. I am running FCP HD on a iMac 1.8Ghz G5 with 512Mb of Ram and have 160Gb system drive that I am also (I know...) using for storage.

I recently completed a short on this system as test bed to a feature length edit I will be doing later this year. I am only using the system as an off-line editor, digitizing in offline RT from mini-dv downconverts from D5 and only really need it to generate an EDL for our Discreet Smoke to do final assembly in HD.

While I was able to finish the project (which was only 8 minutes long) I ran into slow performance issues that seemed odd considering the low resolution I was editing at and the relative 'shortness' of the piece.

Periodically, I would get a 'dropped frames' error on playback from the timeline and the only way I could get the system to 'behave' properly was to exit the FCP environment and then re-launch the software.

I had a 'system disk almost full' message come up, but the only volume I see is the system drive which shows 129Gb available. I ran the repair permissions as suggested by the FAQ, but that didn't seem to do anything.

Also, the system seems very unresponsive to JKL keyboard commands, taking 10 to 15 frames to pause after the key was struck.

This was all simple cut to cut editing, no titles, graphics, wipes...not even a dissolve and one channel of dialogue. The only other software on the machine, aside from what came with the system is Logic Express and that is not running at the same time.

I'm a Windows/Avid and Irix/Discreet guy and know virtually nothing about Mac/FCP so I apologize in advance if I'm asking something really obvious and stupid, but I want to sort this out before shelling out for more RAM if it's not really necessary and definitely before I crash and burn in the middle of a feature edit.

Thank you.
Daniel

2 issues that come to mind immediatly, your saving footage to the system drive, a major no-no. And your ram needs to be at least 1 gig.

You didn't say but I assumed your editing in mini-dv? You really need a second internal drive to capture your media to. I'm curently using a 533 g4 and can use the jkl commands with no problems.

Another thing you might do is set the system to "safe" mode not "realtime".

Whoops! Just read your post again, your going to need a firewire drive to work from. Capture to the internal drive then push it to the external firewire drive for editing. I personally have a lacie 80 gig firewire drive that I can capture to, but more often than not people have to capture to an internal drive then transfer the files to the external.

good luck!

Kevin

kevin hit it regarding the latency:

? NEVER capture media to your boot drive (apps only - not even your scratch disks are to be set to your boot drive)

? RAM should be AT LEAST 1 Gig (I recommend 4 Gigs if you are running Motion, After Effects and / or Photoshop).

I agree. Bump up the RAM and install a second internal drive for media.

If you come from the Avid world you should be used to spending waaaay more than this for a system that works nicely

<<<iMac 1.8Ghz G5 with 512Mb of Ram>>>

That's the half basketball with the clipboard on top that lights up, right?

While I don't agree with the above that the problem is the System Drive (we capture to it all the time by accident and have never noticed problems) we do have quite a bit more memory than you do and **all**our machines have two internal drives.

We follow the Apple recommendations and never put active live video on FireWire drives and do everything--all our production--between the two internal drives. Apple doesn't say anything about putting live video on the System Drive, by the way. I'm totally convinced that's bogus.

So when you trade your machine in for a nice G5 with two internal drives, I'll bet, even with modest memory, all those problems go away.

Koz

Author: Greg Kozikowski
"That's the half basketball with the clipboard on top that lights up, right?"

-No, it's the 2" wide bugger, which is the latest iMac that Apple offers-

"While I don't agree with the above that the problem is the System Drive (we capture to it all the time by accident and have never noticed problems) we do have quite a bit more memory than you do and **all**our machines have two internal drives.

We follow the Apple recommendations and never put active live video on FireWire drives and do everything--all our production--between the two internal drives. Apple doesn't say anything about putting live video on the System Drive, by the way. I'm totally convinced that's bogus."

-I like that answer a lot, as it makes the most sense to me. I was initially surprised by the memory requirements, considering the very low resolution of the material I'm working with, but I've since heard that there are a lot of demands placed on the system memory that I was unaware of. How much memory are you running and considering my situation...in your opinion... what's the least I can get away with? Or, better yet, what's working for you?-



Author: Jude Cotter
"If you come from the Avid world you should be used to spending waaaay more than this for a system that works nicely "

-I'm used to working in a facility that runs Da Vinci 2K color correctors in $2,000,000 Rank/Cintel telecine suites with a few hundred thousand tossed in for Discreet Logic Compositing and HD non-linear online suites (Flame and Smoke), not to mention a couple million in linear HD and SD online edit suites and decks. Our Avid Meridian Suites are on the low end of our 'scale' and are mostly relegated to digitizing stations as a service to our clients. I want to maximize my 'bang for the buck' in the off-line world to complete my own film based projects. To that end, I want to spend waaaay less money...the waaaay less, the waaaay better, thank you very much.-

A sincere thank you to all that offered advice on this, I do appreciate your time...you too Jude ;-)

My 2 cents. Daniel is using an iMac G5. That's not the "half basketball with clipboard on top" but a NEW iMac that's cool. I'd simply forget the RT and edit DV. Double the RAM to 1 Gig doesn't cost much. Try to get an external Firewire drive for media but the internal, although not ideal, should work OK in a pinch.

I suspect the problem is in the RT downconvert handling. Not many folks I know use this technique at all preferring just straight DV. An eight minute piece should not take up much HD space. RT and the built-in display board might be the sluggish point. And, with DV you can use your deck/camera and an external monitor for big beautiful viewing instead of small ugly window on Mac.

Daniel, please let us know if you solve this and what worked.

Phil in Indy

As an aside - an interesting fact about macs. The white ones are 'consumer' level machines. The silver ones are 'professional' level machines.

I understand you want to maximise your spending D, I was just pointing out that (I felt that) you needed to spend a bit more in order to bring the machine you have up to the sort of spec you are after.

People often complain about how expensive macs are, which I personally think is ridiculous, given systems like you mentioned, and some of the other rubbish out there in the hundreds of thousands of dollar brackets that don't do one tenth of what an Avid or FCP machine can do.

The worst offenders are those that set up the most underpowered ibook kind of rig and then complain that they can't get fifteen layers of realtime on thier four hour feature film like they used to be able to on their Avid MC adreneline mojo whatsit.

Not that I'm saying you are doing that.

<<<I'd simply forget the RT and edit DV. Double the RAM to 1 Gig doesn't cost much. Try to get an external Firewire drive for media but the internal, although not ideal, should work OK in a pinch. >>>

What he said.

As resident wet blanket, it does bother me that if you do have troubles, there is no place to go because the machine isn't readily expandable, but I agree, you should probably just give up and edit DV like everybody else.

We have a really good feel for that and can get you out of trouble quickly (usually).

Koz

Thanks again to everyone, I'm off to order more RAM right...now.

But this one confused me...

<<<I suspect the problem is in the RT downconvert handling. Not many folks I know use this technique at all preferring just straight DV. An eight minute piece should not take up much HD space. RT and the built-in display board might be the sluggish point. And, with DV you can use your deck/camera and an external monitor for big beautiful viewing instead of small ugly window on Mac.>>>

I have the same size window on my Mac as when I capture at full DV res and I was able to view through my deck on my external monitor just fine. It looks compressed and 'artifacty'...like offline res does, but the image is fine for editing. For an 8 minute piece, yes DV res would be fine, but again this is a test bed for a feature that I'm shooting this year. I will be shooting 20,000 ft. of film (it's Super 16, but figure 9-10 hours) AND I'm recording the dialogue directly to the Mac in Logic (how cool is that?). The iMac worked great in this capacity, as it's small enough to be 'transportable', but seemed more robust than the Powerbooks I was looking at. I had assumed this thing would be screaming at the offline res, it's a bummer to find out that's not the case.

The offline resolution and the edl manager were the big selling points for me to want to go with FCP in the first place. 10 hrs. of footage digitized at DV res gobbles up 126 Gb (or so)...10 hrs. at offline RT res...15Gb (that's bitchin'). And running at 660Kbps, that should make everything go faster, not be a "sluggish point", right?

And, why the hell aren't you guys using this more often?! It's just like the old days on the Media Composers (when our RAID's had a massive 180Gb's of storage)...edit at offline res, dump the media and batch capture the timeline at your output res. It's quite novel, really...try it just once, you'll never go back. Unless, of course, offline RT really does have issues with the video card, but that just sounds silly to me.

Ok, I'm going to order more RAM...now.

<Unless, of course, offline RT really does have issues with the video card, but that just sounds silly to me.>

Me too, and I suggested it. But DV is just data that flows off HD out FW to deck for display (of course a Mac window Canvas/Viewer too). Maybe there's an issue with reading RT off the HD and getting it to display. What happens when you turn off external display on video monitor and just watch on Mac?

RAM may fix this whole thing. Good luck!

Phil

<<<What happens when you turn off external display on video monitor and just watch on Mac?>>>

Same deal, just sluggish performance. The RAM is on it's way, I'm bumping up to 1Gig total...wtf's the deal with a 512 Mb chip @ $150.00...a 1 Gb chip @ $600.00? Those crazy Apple folk...

D,

I worked with offlineRT a couple of years ago, and it DID scream.
this was on A G4 400, and i had heaps of layers and FX.
I never got decent playback thru FW, so just left it at that, and viewed and displayed on the computer monitor.

Eventualy we went back to the DV, of course,
and thats something you wil be doing too.

so why dont you try that sooner rather than later, and see how the Native DV works.

i'd also recoment dooing the feature at DV res.
you'll be working on that for a lot longert then the 8min short, and your eyes will thank you.
also, showing to other people (potential investors?) you wont have to
a: apppologise for the poor image quality, (which no matter how hard you try to explain, they wont understand, they'll just think your film looks bad)
or b: go thru a laborious up-res each time you want to screen the film.

I recently finished a feature with both myself and my assistant working from DV rushes on external FW drives.

finaly a more general comment:
is it my imagination or are there more compliants about "slow" or "Sluggish" behaviour with FCP 4.5HD, than there were with FCP4.11???

i'm working in 4.5 for the first time now, and it does seem slower to me, though i haven't had a 10-15 frame lag yet.

cheers,
nm

<<<Eventualy we went back to the DV, of course,
and thats something you wil be doing too>>>

I can say without a doubt that I will not, I refer you to my last post.

<<<...or b: go thru a laborious up-res each time you want to screen the film>>>

I would not 'screen' a film to 'investors' (or anyone important, for that matter) off of anything less than a HD D5...because I can, and that makes sense. So, I will be 'laboring' whether or not I'm in offline RT res or the cleaner (and more space gobbling) offline res...meaning native DV (which, is all DV truly could be). And before you hop all over me and tell me how great DV is and how many people you've made happy with your DV product, I say project it on a 40ft. screen and let me know how it goes.

BTW, what format is your Project set to? Maybe it needs to be set to an RT setting. You could be having performance issues because it's set to DV or something and it should be an RT setting. Again, since I don't edit in this format, it's a new thing to me as it seems to be to lots of other posters.

Phil

"And before you hop all over me and tell me how great DV is and how many people you've made happy with your DV product, I say project it on a 40ft. screen and let me know how it goes"

Te He :-) viewed from 200ft away DV will look great, and viewed from 25ft away it will look ropey. But viewing a HD D5 projection from 25ft will look bad too - it's all a matter of scale :-)

Sounds like offlineRT is the way to go for your project if you want to edit tonnes of footage on a small mac. The two things I'd check from reading above is that you're editing with footage that's not on your boot drive, and that you have enough RAM. I think that it should work with the spec of machine you have - after all, many of us have edited full DV on G3 laptops which are much much lower spec. And you'll be doing pretty much cuts only editing for your project I guess, so that shouldn't be a strain.

Check that the canvas window is set "fit to fill" shift+z is the handy keyboard shortcut for this. Check that there's no funny background processes running on the mac too. Did you use easy presets for the capture and timeline? These should help eliminate any other problems.

Graeme

<<<Te He :-) viewed from 200ft away DV will look great, and viewed from 25ft away it will look ropey. But viewing a HD D5 projection from 25ft will look bad too - it's all a matter of scale :-)>>>

Funny you mention it, I just watched my short projected at 25ft on a 30' x 18' screen last night. It was displayed from an American Cinema Systems TI chipped DLP projector from D5 and at that scale it looked AMAZING. DV looks like hell on a big screen TV...especially at 200ft.

"And before you hop all over me and tell me how great DV is and how many people you've made happy with your DV product, I say project it on a 40ft. screen and let me know how it goes"

a lot better than offline RT!

i work by having regular screeings.
on a feature, i'd be aiming to have a screeing every week.
an important part of the screeing is it NOT being just another run thru with us sitting around the computer, but rather taking the film, or a tape, or a QT file or whatever to a screening room, or theatre, and showing it to ourselves, trusted friends and advisors, and yes, actual and potential investors.
on the latest film, i didnt actualy measure the screen, but i think it was big enough to now alow me to let you know that it went rather well ;-)

captureing and working with the media at DV res is no harder than capturing and working with offlineRT, (just add a FW drive) but the benfits are enormous.

"I can say without a doubt that I will not...
I would not 'screen' a film to 'investors' (or anyone important, for that matter) off of anything less than a HD D5...because I can"

well if you've got regular and free acces to a D5 set-up, you're luckier than me!

appologies for going OT, hope the RAM helps,
cheers,
nick

D,

...shoulda asked about WHERE to buy RAM:

[store.macsolutions.com]

Macsolutions is the best. NEVER BUY RAM FROM APPLE!!!

- Joey

So is PC3200 RAM specific to the G5?

My G4 has PC2600 RAM, and Frye's does not have 2600..

Can I swap RAM around, 512s in the G5 to the G4 when I upgrade the G5 to 1G sticks... or am I outta luck for upgrading the G4?