My Mac Pro 1.1 is too darn slow. Help!

I use FCP 7.0.3, and OS 10.6.4 on my Mac Pro 1.1 I've been shooting with a Sony VX2100 (SD), but am moving to a Panasonic HPX-170. I've just completed a couple of SD projects of one and a half to three hours and I'm really not happy with either the speed of Compressor in rendering MPEG2 files, or even with FCP's handling in the timeline. A 90 minute FCP project sent to Compressor takes more than 90 minutes to produce the sequences. And in FCP's timeline, every time I try to move around in the timeline it takes several seconds to nearly a minute for the timeline to move and resolve. Surely this can't be either normal or acceptable to some of the more experienced members. So, do I need a fast array? A better graphics card? I'm really eager for some direction here. Thanks

The primary usual suspect for me is always your media drive. What kind of storage are you using? How full are all the drives connected to your system (even ones not being used by the project in question)? You named a few things you're considering upgrading, but you haven't told us what you're currently using, so we have no bottom line for making any recommendations.


www.derekmok.com

Have you set up Qmaster to use the 4 cores in your machine? Are you rendering out/exporting a single file from the FCP sequence before going to Compressor? If so when you submit your exported movie in Compressor are you selecting the checkbox to grab available computers which will harness the multiple cores on your computer?

A video card will help with some rendering in the overall workflow but not in compressor. Color is the app that benefits the most from a new video card. Went from a stock x1900 ATI card to the ATI 5770 and it has sped up things considerably in real-time previews, some transition renders and as I mentioned Color.

Compressor is one of the few apps that can use lots of memory as it spills out multiple instances of itself when rendering but this assumes you have Qmaster setup properly and the Compressor "submit" is done in a way to use the multiple cores in your machine's CPUs.

If you think your renders are long now, wait till you go to HD, however, if your machine is setup properly there is no reason you can get it running efficiently.

Man! There is so much I obviously don't know. I have no idea how to set up Qmaster. I have two 250 Gb drives (one for my software, one for back-up of that software, and two 500 Gb drives. One of these I edit on, the other is the back-up of all my print and video work. The back-up drive is full, so I'm not backing anything up right now. Could this full drive be part of my problem? Maybe I should upgrade to a pair of 1 terrabyte hard drives?

I have just been exporting my FCP project to Compressor by using the "Send to Compressor" pulldown. I'll try exporting a single file (how about this: QT (Not with Conversion). Make Self Contained, Use Current Settings, Do Not Recompress all frames.)

Thanks for the help.

PS; where would I find info on setting up Qmaster?

How full? What kind of connection? What kind of drive?

Details, man, details. We can't help you if you only give vague insinuations. It's not like 500GB drives run slower than 1TB drives, if that's all the information you give.


www.derekmok.com

Rick, first off. You are now on the right track. Your head is pointing in the right direction.

Drives could be a problem. Easily fixed. You have 4 drive bays. You can pickup 1.5 terrabyte drives to stick in your machine for between $100 and $150 right now. I'm presently using Western Digital, the green ones. There are other brands: Samsung, Seagate, etc. These manufacturers have had major problems of one kind or another over the past couple of years but I believe they are fine now. Find a good computer shop in your area that sells PC parts to geeks who build computers and find out which ones are the best in terms of reliability and cost/size ratio. 1.5TB last time I checked was the sweet spot for cost/size. Get those puny drives out of your machine ASAP if you are going to continue to do video work. Especially if you are moving to an HD workflow. You should do this soon.

Right now though you need to fire up Compressor. Not to use the app but to launch the manual. Once Compressor is launched go to "Help" on your pulldown menus on the top of your screen, then locate and launch the Compressor User Manual. Make a pot of tea, grab a cup and read pertinent sections for an hour or two. I would suggest you go over this manual in varying degrees, a few times over the next week so you get into the nitty gritty of it. Qmaster is covered off in this manual along with a lot of other stuff. It is essential reading, again if you are getting into HD as your rendering time is going to mushroom exponentially. Read that last sentence again. Long form videos, like event stuff where you have 2 to 3 hours of HD video are going to be "overnight renders". Rendering your timeline, as you know, hogties FCP, then you have to export your sequence to a single quicktime file, then you have to redo it again in Compressor. Rendering is part of video editing. Get used to it.

EDIT:

One more thing about Qmaster. It can be confusing when you are getting into it. There is a Qmaster Manual as well that goes into a bunch of stuff about render farms and commandline use. You don't need to concern yourself too much about that unless you are interested in that sort of thing.

Qmaster exists as an application in your application folder but the part of it you will be using will be in the System Preferences. You can do all your Qmaster setup from there. All it is doing is creating a doorway to your CPU cores beyond your 1st one and having them on standby for Compressor. Focus primarily on the Compressor Manual as it will tell you about Qmaster in context of Compressor.

Andrew, I will need a few days to get done all that you suggest, but I will get it done. I'm pretty jazzed about learning to use Compressor better. I've used Western Digital hard drives for years with no problems, so that's the route I'll go. I'll post my progress and, again, thanks so much for this invaluable help. I'm pretty much totally self-taught and sometimes I'm not so sure I have a great teacher.

One more question for now ? how did you know I'm a tea drinker?

I didn't but beer and learning about heady things like distributed computing don't go well together unless retention isn't a concern.

You should be settled once you do some reading, system tweaking and get some beefy drives.

Try some of these tips:
[www.digitalrebellion.com]

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

Andrew, the 1.5 Tb drives are 5400 rpm. Is that an okay speed?

No. For full size drives you should use 7200rpm with a minimum of 8MB cache. Make sure they are correctly formatted.

All the best,

Tom

Yea, for WD drives, get the black caviars, not the greens. The greens consume less power, thus a slower spin speed.



www.strypesinpost.com

I just built a little raid enclosure. I had two 1TB WD black caviars in an eSATA Dual-Bay Enclosure Kit. Bought the NewerTech MAXPower eSATA 6G PCIe 2.0 RAID Capable Controller Card from OWC. I'm now able to work on uncompressed 10-bit footage. It's a nice cheap way to uses some drives and make a Raid.

I have a Mac Pro 1.1 also. Every little bit helps...

>I'm now able to work on uncompressed 10-bit footage

Uncompressed HD?



www.strypesinpost.com

Quote
Uncompressed HD?

Sorry I left the HD part out... but yes, Uncompressed HD. There are not long clips. About 10 minutes. It's footage I get from Bono Labs that are converted from film that come from the National Archives.

I convert the footage the Pro Res anyway but it's nice to know I can.

Okay, I've got two 2Tb, 7200 rpm internal hard drives coming (64mb buffer). Are buffer and cache the same thing?
Also, I'm assuming I'll be doing the formatting of these drives when they arrive, right?

As soon as I get some billing attended to I'll be starting in on the Compressor Users Manual so I can learn about Qmaster.

It still amazes me that I can get this kind of help way out here in the woods. You guys are great.

>it's nice to know I can

That's interesting. I always figured you need at least 4 drives to stream Uncompressed HD. Well, good to know.



www.strypesinpost.com