Worth upgrading to Snow Leopard for FC?
 

The latest Mac rumors point to Snow leopard being released as early as next week. Anyone have any idea whether FCS3 will likely perform better running on top of Snow Leopard?

Based on ADC whitepapers no application will run *faster* as it were, however certain things will work more efficiently in FCP such as renders and filters because openCL will leverage more GPU power to process these tasks.

FCS won't be any better per-se, but should become more robust and stable. There will be other not-so-obvious benefits also such as better color management.

Thanks Robert; those improvements alone in rendering and stability would be worth the trouble in upgrading both my drive space and OS.

My guess is that this will reach stores late September/ October at the earliest, but sounds like it could be worth the wait.

As a $30 upgrade, you bet.

Also, for anyone that has bought a Mac after June 8, you can get Snow Leopard free, just
pay shipping and handling ($9.95).....I know about this, because I am one of the people
who qualify for this program.

Apple - Mac OS X - Update your new Mac with Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Unfortunately, looks like the GPU acceleration will only work with specific (mostly non-ATI) graphics cards running on second gen Mac Pro's. It's not even clear that I will be able to upgrade my ATI x1900xt card for this, since my Mac Pro was purchased in Jan 07.
:(

http://www.maclife.com/article/news/...graphics_cards

Are there any benefits with the new quicktime in snow leopard?
Any performance increases with encoding any codecs?

There's no definitive data that suggests there will be any performance (speed) increases at all with Snow Leopard.

This revised OS is mainly a tweaking of core technologies for handling A/V and color codecs, memory and CPU management and directory handling. It is *not* a complete re-write of the base code such as occurred when things shifted from OS 9 to OS X.

As an analogy: Final Cut Studio "3" is not a complete revamp of the application suite but mostly a feature tweak and modest refinement. Snow Leopard is the same treatment on the OS, that's all.

Core applications such as Safari, Finder, Address Book etc will see major improvements but the effect on Pro Apps such as FCS or Logic will be minimal and in many cases not even noticeable.

One of the much awaited benefits of QTX is the revised Gamma handling which should see the back of the many Gamma shift issues that folks are facing at present.
Apple - Mac OS X Snow Leopard - Enhancements and Refinements (see Gamma 2.2)

As for what to expect performance wise, I wouldn't expect anything too dramatic ...
Here are a couple of nice overviews:
The present and future of post production business and technology What about Final Cut Studio and Snow Leopard?
What's '64-bit' on Snow Leopard? - Business Center - PC World

Hope it helps
Andy

Moving forward- all future apps will of course be developed for whatever is the current version of Apple's OS. So in the short run- will you see massive workflow improvements in FCP using OS 10.6 vs. 10.5, probably not. But long term, for the stability of your system and future potential enhancements and for $30, yes it's a no-brainer. Upgrade.

Noah

Snow Leopard available for pre-order. Just ordered mine.

Dreaming of it making Media Manager in FCP far more reliable than it's been for me in recent times, but more likely that would be something a Final Cut future update would need to fix.

I really don't think it is smart to update to Snow Leopard at this moment.

1. There are still bugs in the program
2. Reviews report that it is slower than Leopard in many occasions
3. Final Cut Studio, Adobe CS4 and other programs aren't optimized at all for Snow Leopard so the raw power of Snow Leopard is not unleashed at all.
4. A 64-bit finder, addressbook, mail or iCal... who cares? Final Cut Studio, Adobe CS4, iTunes (resource eater) are all 32-bit and have not been written in cocoa. All the stuff on Apple's site is good marketing but those Apple applications work fine in 32-bit under Leopard and you really won't notice a big difference in 64-bit. The applications that desperately need 64-bit need to be rewritten and that is going to take a while.

I really applaud Apple for going 64-bit bit at this moment. But it will be 2010, maybe even 2011, before we are really able to take advantage of that. I decided to wait until either an upgrade or update of Final Cut Studio and Adobe Creative Suite 5. When I am lucky, Snow Leopard will be at 10.5.1 or 10.5.2 at that time and most bugs have been killed.

But I am looking forward to the findings of the adventurous types on these forums.

That makes sense...in a way. I am not really planning on INSTALLING Snow Leopard right
away, but I am BUYING it. The Apple up to date program gives you 90 days from the
time you buy your computer to buy Snow Leopard. So if I can get it now for
$9.95, I am definitely going to do it. When will I actually install it? Who knows.

Try Snow Leopard with SxS cards
 

Well, with a little free time, a spare Mac, an up-to-date Time Machine and a fresh copy of Snow Leopard from the shop this morning, how could I not?

Right now at time of typing so to speak, I've hit an impressive brick wall regarding SxS cards used in my Sony PMW-EX1 camera. They cause a Kernel Panic in SL. Just working through the options (when spouse gives me time off for good behaviour), MxR works where SxS emphatically does NOT.

So that's enough for me to restore from Time Machine and pack away that little install DVD for a while.

But my inner geek wants to twiddle and tweak and try and find out what's up, so we'll see what I can do over the weekend.

I just got SL today. I am backing up my machine now and will install SL later tonight. I hope with no problems. Does anyone think I will have any trouble with FCS2 after I upgrade?

I've installed SL

-iStat doesn't work
-Apogee Maestro seems to work (audio hardware interface)
-I wonder if the new quicktime has any new codecs?
-VMware Fusion works in 32 bit mode
-I have so much confidence in the guys who code VLC that I'm just assuming it works.
-I would like to know if iDefrag works. Nothing on their website. I ain't "testing" it. It does start normally.

Final Cut?

As an apple product, we know FCS 3 has been tested. We'll just have to see what the small problems may be, if any.
But I sure wouldn't move a main editing system to SL for at least a month. Next year would be better.
There are nice little changes in SL that I keep finding.

Just like the upgrade to FCS3, the price makes it a resounding yes. I am, however, waiting at least until 10.6.1. In chess, the pawns go first.

I second to that. I did it with Leopard waited until 10.5.6. and am happy person. So will tactfully wait while guarding the Queen.

I am going to wait on CS5 and and/or Final Cut Studio 64-bit (free update or paid upgrade). And not on their release, but once they go to .1. Leopard is working wonderfully for me for so long now, I really don't see why I would need to update.

As a matter of fact, I did a clean Leopard install on both my laptop and desktop system last weekend and with 10.5.8 it is running smoother than ever before.

I installed Snow Leopard on a MacBook Pro with Final Cut 7 / FCS3 on it yesterday.

So far, the new Quicktime seems to hold a lot of promise - but only for specific workflows.

Outputting from Final Cut through 'Share' or QT Conversion is still slow as molasses. But output a 'current settings' file and it's only a few seconds. Then take that file into QTPro (it gets hidden in your Utilities folder) and compress and it's really fast. If you can live with the limited choices of output in Quicktime X, it's even faster. A file that took 20 minutes to render out to a web version before now only takes 20 seconds.

(Clarifying: this is pro res footage at these quick speeds. Just tried HDV and it's still fast to output a 'current settings' file but the compression in Quicktime from the HDV is still pretty slow.)

I haven't done much testing of different formats because I was trying to figure out if 5Dmk2 files would work natively. You can put a 5d clip on the timeline and do cuts-only editing with no rendering and it plays smoothly and will output a current settings file in only a few seconds. But if you put in a lower third or mix in some other footage, everything comes crashing down and it's endless rendering and the output is glitched. So no love there... you still need to transcode 5d footage.

WARNING: all my express card adapters are useless in Snow Leopard. A Delkin CF card reader causes a kernel panic. A firewire adapter doesn't work. And reports elsewhere say that XDCAM SxS cards cause a kernel panic as well. I'm afraid to try plugging in my eSATA drive via an express card adapter as reportedly that will crash the system as well.

I'm sharing a file (trimmed from an HDV master) to youtube with Quicktime X now. I've been uploading full 1920x1080 files from FCP directly to Youtube and letting them handle the compression with great results. But I have to do it from work where I have much faster upload speeds. It'll be interesting to see the results.

FCP 7 seems to about the same as it did under Leopard. Used share to make a BD on CD, and it took about the same time. iStat Pro showed that it was still only using 2GB of the available RAM (total of 4 GB installed). So I guess it really isn't 64 bit yet.

Clarifying: the amazingly quick renders I talked about in previous post were in Pro Res. Just tried native hdv and the current settings output is fast but the re-compression in QT still takes a while. No actual timing but it feels slightly faster than before but is not fast like using Pro Res.

update: a two-minute HDV timeline with a couple of lower thirds and a cross-dissolve on FC7 under snow leopard takes two minutes to ouput at current settings. If you then take that file and open it in Quicktime X and 'save as' HD 480p, it takes two minutes to make a 640x360 h.264 file but it changes the audio to 44khz. You have no control over the settings. If you open it in QTpro and export as 640x360 h.264 it retains the 48khz audio but takes ten minutes to export.

So far, I think workflow will be a challenge to figure out.

So far I like SL the only thing that is annoying is the fact that my expresscard eSATA does not work.

I'm running FCS 2 under SL and it's fine. I'd say it's a bit quicker, but I can't prove it. I erased my HDD for the install, and then reinstalled FCS and others because my system needed a serious spring clean, so any performance improvement might be down to simply clearing out the crud.

FWIW, this is on a mid-2007 2.16GHz iMac with 3GB memory.

I doubt that the SL upgrade has made any substantial improvement to my FCS experience, but I like the other changes.

Annoying?
 

For me this is a deal-breaker til fixed.

Jus.

Yeah, not sure what I'd do without an e-sata connection to my external drives; this has been a known issue for a while in the pre-release versions of Snow Leopard. I've just snagged a copy of SL, but I think I'm going to wait a while for fixes to emerge before installing.

I'm getting qmaster errors again with the "share" function. Worked once after the upgrade/clean reinstall of FCS. Now nothing.

I'm really getting tired of throwing money at Steve Jobs...

The thing that I do not understand is I do not get any error messages. I plug in my Express Card and the logo appears in the top right hand corner of the screen. (Just like it did in 10.5.) Except when I turn on my HD nothing happens and it does not appear...

I hope they fix this problem ASAP! I really do not want to use my 500GB external drive via FireWire to do my upcoming projects. If I have to it wont be that big of a deal but it would be nice if it was fixed in the next two weeks.

Absolutely Not
 

It would seem that Apple has instead released a "white elephant" rather than a Snow Leopard.

With all the research in white-papers and ADC docs there didn't seem to be anything to indicate any serious compatibility issues however, real-world testing has shown that once again Apple has delivered a wonderful glossy ad campaign only to disappoint on the delivery.

We've uncovered and run into literally dozens of bugs and mission-critical failures caused by the SL kernel and core communication changes. Everything from FCP6 to FW has been affected adversely and the net is flooded with complaints - including a few DVinfo users - on failures from connecting previously running external devices to apps that crash the entire system.

And then there's this bit of not-so-obvious news on the 64-bit environment which I did not see covered in any white-papers:

64-bit Snow Leopard defaults to 32-bit kernel | Apple - CNET News

The bottom-line for pro-app users: Don't upgrade to SL. If you did hopefully you saved your previous OS image (see the sticky I posted about saving your system) and can restore your previously good-running system.

It may well be into next year before Apple has time and resources to address all the problems just now surfacing.

P2, SxS and ExpressCard users especially beware: DO NOT attempt to use your external devices or connect media with money-making clips to a SL system.

As much as I work with P2, I'm holding off until they address this driver issue. If I never plug in a Panasonic camera with firewire/usb that'd be fine with me. My love for duel adapter and MBP is too important. Also, can anyone confirm MXO 1 & 2 support in SL?
-C

I really don't hope it takes that long for them to fix the Express Card problem.

Don't wait for them to play catch-up; get back on 10.5.8 and get back to work. Until all the major pro apps actually become 64-bit native there's really no need for SL. Only Apple consumer apps (and a limited few) will actually benefit, nothing else.

I don't think Snow Leopard is a 'white elephant' at all. It's a major change in the operating system and some things won't work for a while... just like switching from OS9 or switching from Win2k to XP to Vista to 7.... no one in their right mind would switch a production machine over to a new OS until the workflow got straightened out.

But, if speed is important to you, Snow Leopard's new Qucktime engine is worth the hassle. So far, it looks like it will cut 20 minutes off my overall output times for 2 minute news pieces.

Chuck, after all your experimentation, what's your current workflow in Snow Leopard? Where have you seen the most significant speed improvements when encoding video?

Michael, I installed Snow Leopard and FCS3 on a MacBook Pro on Friday. A weekend isn't enough time to figure out all the workflow issues.

But if you output from FCP at 'current settings' it is really fast. A two-minute HDV timeline makes a self-contained .mov in less than two minutes.

If you then pull that self-contained .mov into Quicktime Player X, and do a 'save as' at HD 480 P movie setting, you get a 640x360 h.264 file with 44khz audio in less than two minutes. (You have no control of settings.) If you output from Quicktime7Pro so you can control the settings, it's still faster than it used to be... maybe ten minutes to make a web file on my MBP vs 18 minutes to do the same thing on my 8-core Mac Pro running 10.5.6/QT7.6. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like the speedup extends to FCS3's new 'share' menu, but I haven't tested that much.

A totally separate workflow speedup unrelated to Snow Leopard has to do with Log & Transfer and Pro Res Proxy settings in FCS3. If you use a camera that can transcode to ProRes(proxy) through log & transfer and you can live with 1920x1080 footage with good color but low bit rate, you'll feel like you've been born again. No rendering for anything at any point. I can't figure out a way to capture tape into proxy files, though.

hope this helps.

Because SL is being installed as an "upgrade" rather than a clean install this seems to be the source of most of the troubles. It would be inconceivable that a new 17" MBP that ships with SL could not use it's ExpressCard adapter for all the things it's supposed to.

I don't have time to test this further but so far many of the bugs and failures seem to be around the upgrade path rather than a clean install. Unfortunately most people don't have time to make a clean install.

Anyone running the Sonnet Pro esata card should be fine. This is the fastest esata card that doesn't use the SIL chipset. I believe its only the sil3132 that's the problem.
No one should ever update any business/production machine on the release of a new O.S. So I'm not sure the drama here is necessary. Apple touched a huge amount of the code in OSX. I think the moderate number of reported problems should be expected.
Snow Leopard is like the switch to Intel. Important to do for the long view. If FCS has some problems, they shouldn't take long to fix.

you can't argue with a confident man.. (Napoleon Wilson, "Assault on Precinct 13")