Ram within the Mac system
 

Does FCS- 6 use all its available Ram within the Mac system. Or rather, is the operating system limited like XP where it will only see or use 2 – 3 gig of Ram?

Still thinking about getting the Mac Book Pro 17” as my main editing system but if the system is limited to the amount of Ram like a PC I might re – think things.

Simon

at present FCP is still only a (carbon based) 32 bit application, so no, it can't address all the physical RAM in your system ... long overdue for a cocoa rewrite.

So what would be the amount of RAM necessary for MacPro with FCS 2?

FCP can only address 4 GBs of RAM so more will not help. Apple recommends 4 GB for uncompressed HD but to run Motion or Color properly you'll need specific video cards that have their own RAM. So 4 GB should be fine.

I have 4 and FCP run everything fine. You can get by fine with 2 gigs, but may have some trouble in certain areas. Everybody recommends 4 gigs for HD.

does anyone not recommend mixing apple brand ram, and 3rd party ram in the same computer?

I mixed 2gb of apple ram with 10gb of third party ram and all works fine.

Mixed also .. four different Macs without a problem. ..that I could see?!

Jim

It's true that FCP (or any 32-bit application) can only "see" 4GB of RAM however how often is FCP the ONLY app you have running? How about Motion and FCP.... now you can benefit from 8GB of RAM (and that doesn't take into account the OS itself). OS X is pretty good at memory management! 2GB was where I started, 4GB was the first sweet spot. 8GB was the 2nd sweet spot.... meaning I saw marked improvements at those points.

Mike

so on a related note, can anyone recommend a reliable source for third pary RAM?

Based on personal experience, I'd happily recommend Crucial (Memory upgrades, flash media, and usb storage at Crucial.com). I have been told that Kingston are good too.

All the upgrade memory in my Macs (2 x iMac, 1 x MacBook Pro 17") has come from Crucial

FCP will only use about 2.5G of ram, period. it has some weird limitations. I had major problems rendering today with out of memory errors on a 8core machine with 12G of ram. FCP is crap. it was rendering random frames of other clips today too. had to re rerender a bunch of stuff before I finally got it right.

adobe apps OTH can use all the ram you have by launching additional instances ( render nodes if you like ) onto all the procs in a machine.going that route, you can actually use all the ram you have, at least on a 8 core machine.

on a 8 core machine, bare minimum is 8G of ram, ideally 16G. 4G and the machine will just barely run once you get into render / ram intensive work.