FCPS3 fully multi core, but not with HDV?
 

Hello, can anyone confirm/deny the rumors that FCPS3 still does not fully support multi core (as in 8 cores on a mac pro) for HDV rendering? Meaning when looking at your CPU usage, all the cores hover around 50% not fully maxed out? Supposedly with other less compressed formats all the cores come on line at full capacity? I got that info here.

EMediaLive.com: Final Cut Studio 3 First Look: Apple Ignores DVD Studio Pro Again, but Debuts (Modest) Blu-ray Support, New HD Codecs

So basically if this is true, people shooting HDV and capturing live on a Focus Enhancements drive in the field would have to then convert the HDV to Pro-Res and lose something in the process to save time in rendering? Somehow I think little time would be saved in the dual process? Other option would be to capture live off the FE-DTE drive running through the camera to be captured by a Black Magic type of card? (probably best method....)

Any news on similar less compressed codecs like DVCPRO-HD or XDCAM-EX? Maybe there is a reason to go with the newer formats after all?

Yes, it does not yet "support multi core".

That's a loaded way of putting it. If you're doing straight cuts, then you should be fine to work in HDV (depending on your editing system) until you need to get into finishing, in which case there are workflows out there.

There certainly is, but it has nothing to do with FCP or ProRes and has everything to do with HDV being an aweful format outside of home videos and cheap-and-dirty DIY stuff.

We should be learning more how Prores works with Snow Leopard this week. If any part of FCS will show improvements with the new OS it will be prores.

Each codec need to rewrite the code to run well multithreaded. Prores would be at the top of the list, I expect HDV near the bottom. You covered you options pretty well, from my limited knowledge.

I took the same HDV file and made a 640x360 h.264 mov on my laptop running Snow Leopard and on my 8-core Mac Pro running 10.5.6.

The same export on the laptop was almost twice as fast as on the monster tower.

Which doesn't mean it was fast, but it was faster. The HDV file was two minutes of footage. It took around 18 minutes on the Mac Pro and around 9 or 10 minutes on the laptop.

Two minutes of footage in Pro Res (proxy) takes about five seconds to render to 640x360 h.264 on the laptop. <g>

Don't forget that when you're editing multiple tracks of HDV footage in FCP, you should change the Sequence Settings>Render Tab to render as ProRes. This alone speeds up rendering and yields higher quality. I've never looked but it may also render using multi-cores because it's rendering in ProRes. Dunno......

I would be shocked, considering codecs and processor threads have nothing to do with one another. FCP simpley does not support multi-core processors.

I'm not sure what you mean. Codecs are separate programs. Certainly the newest prores was written for multiple threads.

What does the rendering, the codec or the host application? See where I'm going?

FCP does indeed support multicore. it has for the last several versions. I'm watching it use 650% right now on a 8 core machine, or all 8 at about 80%. very few apps can get to 100%, in part because they may well be I/O bound with drives and ram.