Motion seems to run slow on fast system

As a newbie, I'm looking forward to diving more in-depth into Motion, but at the outset, I'm surprised at how slow it seems to run...

I recently purchased a dual 2.5 G5 with 4.5GB of RAM, which I thought should easily handle this app. Just in building a few basic layers with effects, I'm often waiting for the spinning beachball for long periods at many steps along the way. I've got about 85% of the memory dedicated to Motion at the moment. I don't even have it playing through.

It's running full-screen on the 23" cinema display and the view window is fairly large - could this be part of it? Again, I thought it would be able to handle it.

It was really bogging when cycling through particle effects in the library to see the different effects, and also when I loaded a couple on different layers. Also, a full RAM preview of a fairly simple layer with a few effects on it took almost 30 minutes to render!

When I went to an Apple seminar on Motion, the demo guy from apple wasn't having any hang-ups like this on what seemed to be a comparable set-up.

Is this normal? Anything I can do to help? Reminds me of the early days of FCP when a friend I used to edit with used to judge renders by how many cigarettes he could smoke, "That's a half pack, etc." :-)

Best,
~Chris

What card are you using? The card is really the driving factor for realtime performance.
Mark

Oh yeah, thanks Mark - forgot to mention...it has the top ATI card - can't remember as I'm at work on my powerbook at the moment, but I think it was the 9800? It should be the best ATI makes (I had Mac build it to my specs).

I called apple about whether I could make my default sound setting my external home theater system on the optical out (I kept having to reset it in System Prefs everytime it either rebooted or went to sleep). They asked if I was having any other performance issues (I'm on 10.3.7) and I mentioned that Motion seemed to be running slow.

They suggested I zap the PRAM, then use the install disc to run repair, and if worse comes to worse, to do an archive and install :-(

One last note - can you zap the PRAM with a wireless keyboard & mouse? Seems like they have to come to life with the system once it's up, correct?

Anyway, thanks for any insights.

~Chris

Before all that I'd trash your Motion prefs file and repair permissions. Don't know about the wireless keyboard and zapping PRAM.
Mark

Good idea - thanks Mark (that used to solve a lot of FCP problems I experienced back in the early days :-)

~Chris

Hi Chris,

I know of two systems that were running more than 4 gigs of ram and were getting the same slow down.

Pulling ram so that the total is 4 gigs fixed the problem.

If nothing else help you might conside this.

--ken

Weird, but many thanks Ken - it's worth a shot...I'll try it this weekend and post an update for the group.

Cheers,
~Chris

Hi Chris,

I know it sounds strange but it fixed a FCP and a Motion constant 'spinning beach ball of death' on two different Macs. Even though new Macs can hold 8 gigs of ram, something seems to happen when there is more than 4 gigs.

--ken

If there's anyone I trust, it's you Ken :-)

It's easy enough to try - I'll just pop out the 2 256's and rearrange the 4GB sticks.

A friend also told me about the free "Menu Meter" download to check the specifics.

We'll see if I make three!

All the best,
~Chris

I forgot to download menu meters, but Motion DOES seem to be running much faster now that I dropped back down to 4GB of RAM. I'm still learning the program, so I haven't been really putting it through its paces, but it's definitely much improved.

Thanks Ken!

Hi Chris,

"definitely much improved"

is good.

--ken

Hi, I seem to be having the same slowdown problem that others have described. I was rolling, and suddenly the beach ball of death all of the time. I have a G5 2.5DP with the ATI 9800XT and 2G of RAM (So I can't take any out, which is weird in the first place). Maybe the RAM is timed wrong? But I'm pretty sure that it's correct. I'm not having any other problems. Motion 1.0.1, but I might try rolling it back.

Rob,

There are some others on the Apple Motion discussion forums who are experiencing this where it's not the +4GB strangeness Ken brought up. I just scanned the threads and posted Ken's note to try and help anyone else, but since my problem seems fixed, I moved on...you might try checking there to see if there's any additional info.

P.S. (sorry, being new to this forum, I'm not sure if it's in bad taste to reference other forums, just trying to help)

Best of luck,
~Chris

Hi Chris,

Read the specs on 10.3.8. It seems like there might be some help in it for Motion. Not sure.

--ken

Hi Chris,

I scanned this board, but didn't see any other fixes. I'm going to try to reinstall completely. As it happens, the slowdown started when I upgraded to 1.0.1 and 10.3.8. I wasn't doing any real work with it before so I have nothing to judge by (except that I made it crash in the Apple store after 5 minutes of testing). I reconstituted an AE project to test it out. Worked great for a while and then everything went to beach ball hell (before I had even stressed it).

A PC guy that I was working with doesn't believe in the Mac Myth anymore. I tried to tell him that things just work, until they don't and then there's nothing you can do. Unlike the PC world where an expert can usually play with the settings. He appreciated the 'permissions' and 'PRAM' voodoo...

-Rob

Best of luck Rob, keep us posted. I haven't jumped to 10.3.8 yet...I used to update as soon as they came out until 10.3.6 which for some reason caused hard drive meltdowns to myself, my boss, and a friend. For my boss, I had to archive and install...I ended up having to zero-out my drive and completely rebuild my laptop. Ever since, if all's well, I'll stick with it until reading feedback on the forums.

~Chris

I usually wait on the updates, but this one had a stable beta rep and motion fixes (I think). 10.3.6 sounds grim.

Anyway, for completeness I reinstalled everything, but the project seems to be corrupt, so I started it over and didn't have the same trouble.

However, I did notice an interesting behavior. The default RAM cache setting in motion is 80%. At that level, I get frequent hangups. If I bring it down to 40%, it's a lot better behaved. Still buggy as hell, but not so much with the beach ball of death. So I'm wondering whether this is just a problem with motion, or if some RAM is bad or mistimed or something. I know that FCP used to have problems with third-party RAM, but I thought that Apple tightened their requirements so that bad RAM would be rejected. Anyway the RAM works fine with After Effects processing and previews. But it does have a different speed rating in the profiler.

The Apple (2x256MB) RAM is PC3200U-30330 and the additional RAM (2x512MB, 2x256MB) is PC3200U-25440.

So my question is whether this could cause a problem, and whether or not there is a utility that will throughly test the RAM? Since Motion is engaged in fast transfers between system ram and video vard ram, it might be sensitive to timing problems.

Thanks

I'll be interested in hearing any RAM feedback as well (I bought mine from Crucial). Hopefully with us all exchanging info on these forums, we can help work out the kinks.

~C

I've been running memtest (www.memtestosx.org) for a while now and am leaving it running overnight. But so far it sees nothing wrong with the RAM.

So does anyone know exactly what the timing details reported by the profiler mean, and if Motion could be affected by them?

Chris, would you say that Motion is solid after you removed the RAM, or is it still crashing, just not as unacceptably?

I wish I had more time to play with motion, but I've never experienced any crashing...in my limited time (only a few hours here and there), the only time it's really bogged down to the point of being ridiculous (since I dropped down to 4GB of RAM), was when I used the moving circles background from one of the templates as a background layer in an experiment...it literally slowed to a snail's pace. Even after a full RAM preview (which took a long time to render), it was still noticeably slow chugging through the animation.

Other than that, no problems yet, but both here and on the Apple discussions boards, there seem to be all kinds of people experiencing this in one degree or another. Hope we can zero-in on what's causing this in so many forms.

~C

Well, nobody else seems to have any information... I've done some tests and I don't think it's the RAM. I guess that Motion is just a very buggy, beta-quality program... Nobody has claimed that it runs well for them.

I wouldn't go that far - the folks that aren't having problems are the ones that aren't posting - I have no problems with Motion on two machines. Overall I think it's quite stable and bug-free for a 1.0.1 release.
Mark

Yeah, I don't want to come off negative...I really like the program and despite the little things here and there, it's very impressive. Some of the OS updates can wreak havoc, but after what I experienced before and reading hundreds of pages on forums, it was still a small minority who experienced what happened to myself and my friends (actually, I'm running 10.3.6 right now on both my laptop and my G5! :-)...it just proves the importance of backing up. I had a worst case scenario with my laptop, and despite have to rebuild and reinstall everything from ground zero, it still only took 3-4 hours, which still sucks, but in the grand scheme it's not the end of the world. Still, as I said, just by everyone trading information, it's really helpful to get an aggregate picture and help find solutions - Ken's strange but true "dropping the RAM to under 4GB" definitely improved things for me...

Best,
~C