How do you give Final Cut CPU Priority?
 

How do you give Final Cut CPU Priority?

I have a new 8 core 2.8GHz Mac Pro with Final Cut Studio 2, Leopard and 4 GB Ram.

The CPUs show they are only using about 20%, is there are a way to boost it?

Thanks

this has nothing to do with CPU priority. FCP is simply using all it needs to use.

while its possible to alter an apps CPU priority, its not a good thing as the app can spawn various thread which may depend on some threads always executing before others... hence you stand to potentially really do more harm then good. the only time priority is an issue is if there are other apps running at the same time which are also using the CPU's... therefore simply quit them but I think you will find you've got a lot more processing power there then you think.

Ok so priority is the wrong word but if its only using20% to render a file that takes 12 mins then surely if it used 80% then it would go faster

ok, you didn't say during rendering.

there can be a number of factors here

1. are you using any 3rd party plugins ? not all are multithreaded / multi cpu capable

2. drive throughput is too low and is starving the CPU's for data in and writing back out. what kind of drives are you using ? is your media on a seperate drive meaning not the system drive ?

3. RAM throughput. slow ram, or other bus contention issues. basically a 8 CPU machine can be expected to be starved by slower ram / bus speeds. not much you can do about it besides telling apple to design a faster motherboard.

4. not enough ram. 4 gigs for 8 procs is a little skimpy. usually 1G per core is a good base to start at.

5. maybe the effects you are using are actually GPU rendered effects. in this case the video card is rendering them, and the CPU's are just decoding frames, putting them on the card, and taking back the finished result. since apple doesn't spec whats rendered on the GPU, no way to know for sure if this is your particular case.

6. do you have other apps open and running using up CPU time ?

a lot of things can be happening and there may or may not be anything wrong.