Pro Mac chuggin

I have a 2.66ghz quad core Macintel Pro with 5GB of mem and 1.5TB of disk. It has the default Nvidia 7300 video card in it as well as the ATI x1900. The ATI is connected to a 23" Cinema display and the second connector is connected to an older VGA CRT. The 7300 is not connected to a display.

Now, I downloaded the 1920x1080 h.264 video from here:

[www.apple.com]

It chugs. IMHO it should not chug on this machine. Spotlight is not indexing. There is nothing else running on this machine. FCS 1 (FCP 5.1.4) is installed. That's it.

Any ideas why this video chugs on my machine and what I might look at to resolve this?

Chugging? as in slow to load or chugging as it plays? That has nothing to do with your machine. Its your internet connection. Or, you set your display resolution to high. 1920x1200 should do it.

Michael Horton
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Chugging as in choppy playback. And I saved it locally via QT Pro.

whats your display res?

Michael Horton
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I can play this straight off the server without chugging - although it's too large for my screen so in quicktime I've set my 'View' to 'Fit To Screen'.

When you saved it locally, did you 'save' or 'save as', and what format is it in now?

Also, what Mike says.

I do save as and the 2 options are reference and self contained - I pick the latter. Screen res is 1920x2000. The 720P version plays just fine streaming or locally.

Well, all I can tell you is that that file plays great here on my eight core. So possibly there is something wrong with your machine. Can you run some other diagnostics to check the health of your system?

Or - are you the kind of guy who has every application open at once, or fifteen quicktime movies all open at once? If so, shut down everything else and then try. (Make sure nothing in your dock has a small black triangle next to it showing that it is still open) Also, set the view to fit to screen - even though it still plays OK here when running oversized.

And - try restarting your machine. Shut down, wait ten seconds, restart, try again.

The ONLY thing running on it is the QT player. Not sure what kind of diags are available for the machine. And I have been trying to run this file for a while. Started playing with it about a week ago. Was just hoping one of the Gurus here might have a thought.

Thanks for the replies so far tho - I do really appreciate the help!

Mike

Or, if you're feeling adventurous...

Close everything but your stopped movie and open up a Terminal:

Applications, Utilities, Terminal.

Run the movie.

Select the Terminal.

Type...

top

...and press return.

That's the activity of your machine in UNIX-ese, but a lot of the items you can guess at. "QuickTime" is pretty obvious.

Look at the %CPU. QuickTime, in your case, should blow right up to 200% or maybe 300% while the movie is playing. Look at anything else running with really large numbers. Most machines run with almost everything under 10%.

The numbers are really "percent of one CPU." Since you have quite a few of them, the number can go over 100.

My dual core QuickTime flips around 140% - 150% while the movie is playing--correctly, by the way.

What happens to you?

Quit the terminal or press control-c to stop the top tool.

Koz

I do have one item.

This is not the best video I ever saw. It has a number of jerky motion artifacts. QuickTime INFO insists the movie is at 30.00 which is really unusual. Being a BBC production, I bet it was shot at 25, converted to 30 and my display is trying its best to force it to conform to 75.

It's stunning when nothing is moving.

Koz

I'm seeing it beautifully. No chugging. G5 dual 2.5 stock Video Card. QT 7.1.6

Try plugging into your 7300 for giggles.

Michael Horton
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Update.

It was shot with different framerates. Some of the scenes have perfect smooth motion and some are choppy.

Could this be what you mean by chugging? Comes and goes, too, doesn't it?

Koz

OK, I tried Michael Horton's suggestion first.

The original configuration was 23" on the ATI and VGA on the nVidia. So I moved the 23 to the nVidia and it played back perfectly. Zero issues.

Out of curiosity I moved both connectors to the ATI board. When I fired up the mac, the monitors were reversed (the main monitor was now the CRT and the secondary was the 23". So I ran it setup like that and moved the QT window over to the 23 and told it to full screen and it played just fine.

As a final test, I reversed the connectors on the ATI board so that the 23 would be the primary monitor. When I did this, the Mac would no longer recognize the VGA monitor and when I played the video, it chugged just like before.

This makes me wonder if I wasted the $250 extra that I paid for the ATI board... It's supposed to be a higher performance board but now I am not so sure...

If I recall FCP wants your canvas window on the monitor hooked up to the card that came with your Mac. In this case that would of been the 7300. Your secondary monitor goes on your other card. In this case, the 1900. So, I guess that means the same with Quicktime player. I am pretty sure leaving that card (7300) empty is going to cause problems.

Another 23in monitor would do you proud to go along with that x1900 you bought.

This is gear head talk which I'm not real comfortable with so I'm just guessing here.

Michael Horton
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I have the same machine with 4GB of ram and the 1900 card, no choppiness when I play back. Could be the extra graphic card as Mike has suggested. Also, how did you get an odd amount of RAM? Are all your chips installed in parallel?

JK

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SCQT! Self-contained QuickTime ? pass it on!