Rendering Clips: Is it a function of the Harddrive, or the brute power of the CPU (Gigaflop Power)

When you render clips that need it (colour correct, Broadcast Safe, etc, etc)
Is it the speed of the Hard-Drive or the Power of the CPU that drives the rate that it renders the clip.

At present on this G5 2.5Ghz machine with 2 Gig of Ram, it can take upwards of 5-10 minutes to
render 10 second clips.

The hard-drives are U320 Huge Arrays, and I was wondering if I had a 12 core Mac as opposed to a
2 Core Mac that rendering time would be much faster.

This is when 1920x1080 footage is affected...

Thanks

It's everything, and the speed you get would be close to the slowest part of the chain, otherwise known as a bottleneck. Data access rates help access information from the source file, the processor clock speed, frontside bus, cache, ram, are all part of the flow. If you use cuda or openGL enabled effects, the graphics card may cone into play, often to take the load off the system processor.



www.strypesinpost.com

The first thing I would suggest is upgrading your RAM. 2 GB split between FCP and the OS isn't much.

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...

I'd upgrade. G5s aren't really well supported anymore.



www.strypesinpost.com

the hard drive you have is plenty fast enough, thats not the bottleneck here I think ... more RAM would certainly help (you could and should up it to at least 4GB) ... but I'd agree with Strypes, the real issue with your system is the CPU et al, its time to upgrade, I dare say my ancient (5 year old) Core Duo laptop (now relegated to family media center duties) would run circles round your once powerful G5 tower