Can FCE take advantage of 4 cores?

Question

I was wondering if Fce can take advantage of the 4 cores that the mac pro offers. If not, can it at least use 2? If so, can you use the remaining cores to do other tasks without affecting FCE? (Garageband, ect). Any advice would be appriciated. Would one reccomend using a mac pro for heavy FCE and livetpe rendering work as well as heavy idvd work (also, can idvd use multiple cores for proccessing data)?

Answer 1

IMHO if your processing needs drive you to Final Cut on a Quad Core MacPro, you should be looking at Final Cut Studio, not Final Cut Express.
That said, OSX including Tiger has always provided full symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) support and also handles assignment & management of multithreaded tasks to the processors. In the majority of applications users do not have the option of assigning specific tasks to specific processors.
You can look at Apple's performance comparisons for FCP and quite a few other apps on quad MacPros vs. quad G5's. But don't get carried away by the numbers, remember that these comparisons were done in laboratory conditions. For what it's worth, an advertised 30% or even 50% increase in processing power doesn't impress me, between those being optimized comparisons and the reality that all sorts of factors (memory, for one) can eliminate the advantages of more or faster processors.
I'd suggest you look at it this way - a quad core machine gives you much more computing power than a dual or single core machine; and that aggregate computing power is available to all the applications you run on it.