Number of Realtime HD streams in Final Cut Pro 6 with Macbook Pro
 

I was thinking of getting a Panasonic HPX170 and am concerned at the amount of realtime HD streams I can edit on my 17" 2.6 Core 2 Duo early 2008 Macbook Pro.

Does anyone know when you ingest P2 footage; how many realtime HD streams you can edit on a final cut pro system on a Macbook Pro?

It's not a question of how many you can edit, it's how many you can playback in real-time, and for that there's no set number since it all depends on system resources, use of external drives etc etc. and, what format you're editing in. 1080 takes a lot more resources than 720 for example.

ProRes 422 can playback more streams in real-time than in any native HD codec but that requires transcoding during import and that's not recommended for DVCPRO-HD since you're already in an i-frame 4:2:2 codec.

Without knowing your total system resources are you should be able to handle 2-4 streams of HD without issue for real-time playback (after they've been fully rendered, that is). More system resources (external drives, more RAM etc) will increase that number.

I have a G-Tech External drive that I can hook up Esata or Firewire 800. I have a 2.6 Core Two Duo 17" macbook Pro with 4GB of ram, and my laptop has the GForce 8600GT graphics card. I'm also running Final Cut Pro on this system.

Does that help determine how many streams I can playback?

It all comes down to bitrate calculations; the best read/write speed you can hope for on a Mac laptop external drive even with an eSATA connection is around 130MBs regardless if it's a single drive or a multi-drive RAID.

Look up the bitrate for the codec you plan to edit in, multiply that by the amount of streams you hope to use and plug that into the available read/write speed of the drive that contains your assets - and allow yourself some breathing room in your estimates. This also means you'll need a utility that can actually test the RW speed of your edit drive.

Other than that, only by testing the physical setup will you find out *exactly* what your system and drive can handle.

Jon, if this helps, I have a similar set-up:

2.5Ghz Core Two Duo, 4GB RAM, 7,200 rpm hard drive 15 inch MBP (mid 2008) and an external G-RAID3 (that's two 1TB 7,200 rpm drive in a RAID 0) linked by FW800 for all my media.

It works just fine for 35Mbps VBR 1080p XDCAM EX3 (PAL) files and I've done several big corporate video jobs very successfully on just this set-up (typically 5-10 minute videos). I do not currently use ProRes and have typically 4-6 video tracks and maybe 6-10 audio tracks. As Robert points out, you just have to render each edit change before playback (as is normal in FCP, can take a minute or so on a MBP) and it all seems works "just fine". I'm playing it back full screen on an external 24-inch monitor too.

By way of comparison, I also have a (brand new 2009) 2.66GHz 8 core Nehalem Mac Pro, 12Gb RAM, 4 x 1 TB 7,200 rpm internal drives and this is obviously faster at the rendering steps etc. - but it does not leave this MBP/G-RAID3 system "dramatically behind" on overall usability with typical FCP projects like I describe. i.e. I notice it, but the MBP system does not feel frustratingly slow by comparison to my new Mac Pro system. This is from experience over the last 2 weeks with my first big corporate video edit I've done on the Mac Pro. Not had time to try it yet, but I'm expecting the Mac Pro should come much more to the fore in things like Motion, Colour and so on when I get to that stage, as I know these leave my MBP/GRAID-3 set-up struggling a bit. I'm also hoping the multi-core Mac Pro hardware will eventually come into it's own in a year or two with launch of FCS3 etc. - time will tell. YMMV. Hope this helps!

I can confirm Andy's thoughts on this. I ran many streams of Pro-Res 720 from my GRAID-2 (MBP 2.5 ghz, 4 GB ram) for a feature. It was similar to the results of an 8-core aside from rendering and some responsiveness. I'd just copy the project file and render on the 8-core with the media.

If rendering is a problem, you could always use the media manager to create off-line files. I'm editing something like that on my Wind ;)
-C

I have also had very good results with a MBP. I had no problem editing multiple layers of HD although I didn't really test how many I could do. I even used the Nvidia 9400 with great results even in Motion. To be honest There was a difference in Motion between the 9400 and the 9600 but it wasn't as much as you would think.

You can download AJA's excellent "System Test" software (free):

Software - AJA Video - Serial Digital Video Interface and Conversion

Use it to test the speed of your system and hard drive.