G5 + FCPHD What to expect
 

With a dual 2.5, 4G Ram, 2HD, all whistles, oooh and aahh, what should I expect running FCP HD, and Motion? My main concern is the rendering time consuming and the frequent crashes from PC NLE. Rather than reading what the Tech Specs indicates, I prefere to hear how is it going in the real world. I'm about to get my hands on this system (near 8k big bucks) and just want to be sure

Thanks

Alexis

Upgrade your video card to get better performance out of Motion.

Thanks Jeff, the configurations is with the new Nvidia ready for the 30" display.
My main question is if Real Time editing will work fine here?

The OS is what makes software crash. Mac OS X is so rock hard stable, its awesome. I don't think I've ever had FCP crash on me, motion I've had 2 i think (not too worried, 1.0)

I have a 15" PB and I do all my editing on the road and on the go. And RT still keeps me up to speed, the time that you do spend rendering is when your compositing a bunch of layers or using livetype, motion files, etc and with your G5 it should be sooo fast.

Anyhow, your best bet, head down to an Apple Store test that setup out.

Alan

Alex, will you be editing DV or some other format?

<<<-- Originally posted by Jeff Donald : Alex, will you be editing DV or some other format? -->>>
Jeff, Main format would be DV.
Thanks Alan for your comments, good to know...

Alexis

Alexis, for editing DV your system will fly with the amount of ram etc. you are incorporating. It will also improve with the next update to OS X, and the release of FCP 5.

We'll be in this together, Alexis, starting this Wednesday 9/8/04 when WorldDance New York takes delivery of our first G5 2x2.5ghz.

Unlike yours, though, ours will arrive with only the basic 512mb of RAM.

There's so much controversy (or 'differing experiences,' anyway) over how much difference the volume of RAM makes to render time, our little company has decided to try the basic configuration before we spend another nickel.

First we heard there was a "2GB RAM sweetspot" and now it's "oops, no that's not right, it's 4GB RAM that's the sweetspot." But then someone else says 'render time is NOT about RAM at all' - !! That post (here at dvinfo) stopped me dead in my tracks. "Hey! Maybe we can save some money!"

I abs. don't mind plunking for 8GB of RAM if that will improve our department's productivity, but I DO mind plunking for 4GB of RAM if that's not cost effective.

Our box usually has only one-or-max-two apps open at a time: FCPHD, or Soundtrack, or DVD Studio Pro, or Photoshop CS. The fact that they're almost never all open at the same time means we don't need more RAM - I think.

I suspect we're gonna be happy with 512mb of RAM, because Activity Monitor consistently showed LOADS of unused RAM on our G4 2x1ghz CPU with 1.5ghz of RAM.

Stay tuned: If UPS delivers as promised I'll have a render report for you by the end of the week.

final cut pro, motion and dvd studio pro all recognize 4 gigs each so if your using all three at the same time..i can definetly see the reason to have 4+ gigs.

apple RAM is overpriced, 2X street prices for the same stuff.

crucial.com is a good place to shop. They aren't the cheapest but they offer good service (see resellerratings.com) and their RAM is conservatively rated and uses conservative settings (which means its less likely to fail on you).

For optimal performance, buy in pairs of the same model (all DIMMs the same model).

2- Real world experience:

Editing on a DP500 G4 FCP3
Multi-camera edit, lots of cuts on nests (bad idea- slows FCP down bigtime)
The project file size ballooned to about 30MB.
256MB to 512MB: Night and day difference. I actually needed to upgrade the RAM as Final Cut reported a "out of memory" error.
512MB to 756MB: Seemed to be faster, although I am not 100% sure.

You can take steps to lower RAM needs by making your project simpler and splitting things into sequences. Also avoid lots of nesting. This may also make it less likely you'll see the dreaded "preparing video for display". PVFD may be linked to how much RAM you have... I never really tested this though.

Big complicated Final Cut projects take more RAM.

3- The thing with RAM is that having an overkill of it makes no practical difference on speed. If you don't have enough however, you will see very noticeable slowdowns when the program has to load or unload things.

4- RAM makes no difference on render times, although it can make Final Cut feel smoother.

Using FCE, not FCP or FCPHD. But thought I would note the comment from the Apple sales person when I bought my refurbished 1.8GHz dual with additional 512mb RAM: 'We use Crucial." I doubt it was meant to be an endorsement. But it does go to the issue of what is expected to work. When I add RAM, I will probably add more of the same. I'm not a techie, so I just want it to work so I can get on with the stuff that I'm interested in.

Alexis,

You are going to be very pleased, especially with DV as opposed to uncompressed video. We use a dual 2ghz G5 with 2 gigs of ram with Aja IO for our uncompressed stuff and it works great. With DV you will be able to have more real time layers.

Enjoy.

Now in our second day of operating the 2x2.5ghz G5 with only 512mb of RAM, and so far, things are turning out as we anticipated.

Editing in FCP is faster in every way, but especially noticeable in small renders.

We estimate small renders are occurring approx. 5-times as fast as we experienced with our 2x1ghz G4 with 1.5mb RAM. This is greatly speeding our workaday work, and so we are really happy about that.

We have not yet done large renders so can’t speak to that yet.

Our view, as we mentioned earlier, is that we may not need to purchase more RAM because we rarely have more than one app open at a time, never connect this box to the web (so no e-mail or Safari), and noticed with our RAM-packed G4 that Activity Monitor (a very handy app found in every OSX machine) that most of our RAM was never being accessed in our method of work.

More to follow as our experience with the new machine grows.

Tonight we finished production of a 45-minute DVD, "Belly Dance for Body Shaping: Abs" - our next release - see:
http://www.neonissima.com/news.html#

We immediately opened DVD Studio Pro to do the "build" (encoding) and "format" (writing to DVD). With our 2x1ghz G4 with 1.5gb RAM the first part of this job used to take about 45 minutes and the second part about 15. Our new 2x2.5ghz G5 with 512mb RAM did the whole job in less than 15 minutes.

Thanks all for your comments.

Scott on what format are you editing?

Alexis:
PAL, widescreen - see my profile
Thanks,
Scott

See my September 9th posts...now a month-and-a-half later and we have discovered that while video editing hurtles with the 2x2.5ghz G5 with only 512mb of RAM, we run into memory problems when editing audio - !! Apparently Soundtrack makes more use of installed memory. So I'm plunking for another 2ghz of memory. Should have it in there in a few days and will report on results for both audio and video.

Sorry it has taken us so long to follow up on the report above -- we simply were not doing any heavy rendering in all these weeks...

Today we began working very intensively rendering widescreen PAL video in Final Cut Pro (shot in 25p, progressive) and discovered that the addition of 2gb of memory has made an enormous difference, speeding up the rendering significantly.

If you have been reading this thread you know that is NOT what I have been expecting to discover. Sigh!! I was wrong!!

More memory is definitely better for speedy rendering in even the heftiest 2x2.5ghz G5.

Exactly how much faster is difficult for us to say - we don't have bench-testing equipment and frankly we're too busy producing our products to really work through all that.

But let me state clearly: I was wrong to think that FCP rendering is 100% about processor and 0% about memory. That was my theory and I was thumping the drum for it here based on a dramatic improvement in render time that we experienced when we moved from two 1ghz G4 processors to two 2.5ghz G5 processors.

Our old G4 machine was stuffed with memory while the new machine had very little memory -- only the standard 512mb they put in at the factory. Despite this the new 2x2.5ghz G5 rendered video dramatically faster. "It's all about processor speed!" I said. And I did not bother to buy more than the preinstalled minimum memory (512mb).

Tonight we discovered that the 2x2.5ghz G5 processors can go EVEN FASTER with 2gb of memory in there to help them. Way, way faster. We are very much struck by the dramatic increase in speed we have realized through adding the memory. So I was wrong.

I hope I did not send anyone down a wrong path to purchasing (as I did) lots-of-processor and no-additional memory. It's clear to us now that the task of rendering in Final Cut Pro benefits enormously from an additional 1.5gb of memory. Now my question is: Would it go EVEN faster if we put in STILL MORE memory...??

Yes, the sweet spot is between 2Gb and 4Gb ram, as I referred to in my first post in this thread. I know some members have been making the claim that ram makes no difference in rendering. Ram may have little effect on a PC, but as you've seen Scott, ram has a huge effect in FPC. When OS 10.4 ships, ram will have an even larger role in performance. Hopefully the 1Gb chips will fall in price so that populating the slots with 1Gb sticks won't cost an arm and a leg.

Thanks Jeff - hey can you tell us more about this added memory use by OS-X 10.4?

Is more of our applications going to sit in installed memory than at present? -- that is, my understanding is that in UNIX 'disc-based virtual memory rules' and installed is used mainly for brief instantaneous bursts, only when needed...is that (a: true?...and b:) going to change?

Here's a link to a bit about memory in OS 10.4

10.4 aka Tiger won't be pushing more of a program into RAM, it is just that 10.4 will have more 64 bit optimized code in it so you will see speed increases when utilizing any program that puts a lot of code into RAM, or swaps in and out large data sets from Virtual Memory. How much RAM a program uses is mostly left up to the programmer of the application, but then system memory is controlled and handed out by the OS as it sees appropriate. You really can't go wrong with more RAM in the end as it is a factor of 10x faster (or more) than having to swap in and out from your Hard Drive.

A combination of the 64 bit code and their new Core Image libraries will utilize your graphics card even more, so that you should see a noticeable increase in speed simply by upgrading your OS (given you have a supported graphics card). For all of the trouble people are having with Motion, it looks like core image will be able to offload work to the GPU more efficiently.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/core.html