RT and system correlation

The RT setting on FCP, is it based on what FCP can find in your system.
Let me explain, on my G5 Dually with u320 drives, I can get one line of
realtime XDCAM without rendering.

If I had a Mac Pro with oodles of RAM, and fast U320 drives, would the
RT setting support more lines of 1080p video?

In other words, is the RT setting (unlimited) commensurate to the speed,
and class of the Mac you have?

I think the word you're looking for is "stream," not "line."

The "Unlimited RT" feature just means "I don't care if you drop frames, play everything back anyway as best you can, dropping frames or reducing resolution if necessary." When set to "Safe RT," Final Cut won't attempt to play back any media that it can't guarantee will play back at full quality in real time. Note that this only applies to processing power; Final Cut doesn't take disk speed into account when calculating what it can and can't play back in real time. You can still drop frames due to slow disks; by default, dropping frames this way interrupts playback and throws up a warning message.

The "Safe RT" feature is really important when you're laying off to tape. If you're still in "Unlimited RT" when you go out to tape, it's possible that you might have unrendered sections of your timeline that, for some reason or other, drop to lower resolution or a lower frame rate during lay-off. It's possible that somebody might, just to pick an example, FTP into your machine from elsewhere in the facility during a lay-off, and that that would just tip your computer over into quarter-resolution territory. This wouldn't interrupt the lay-off, nor would you get a warning, so if you don't catch it by eye, you could miss it. So it's best to set your timeline to "Safe RT" before laying off to tape.

So yes, a faster system will play back more streams in real time when the "Unlimited RT" setting is turned on.

Most definitely you'll get more streams with a faster processor, more RAM and faster hard drives. But XDCAM is one of those codecs that requires a lot of processing power so once you start tossing oddles of streams and effects onto it you'll get bogged down ultimately...

Noah

Final Cut Studio Training, featuring the HVX200, EX1, EX3, DVX100, DVDSP and Color at [www.callboxlive.com]!
Author, RED: The Ultimate Guide to Using the Revolutionary Camera available now at: [www.amazon.com].
Editors Store- Gifts and Gear for Editors: [www.editorsstore.com]