Performance Improvement Documentation for FCP on Mac Pro
I'm interested in any documentation on how to improve the performance of my Mac Pro (8 core early 2009) for video editing. I'm working primarily with FCP and Motion. Any links or documentation you can recommend for improving speed or performance?
Thanks!
lance
You haven't told us about the type of footage that you are working with, nor the spec of your current Mac Pro.
That said, FCP can currently only address 1 processor core and 2.5GB of RAM.
You should certainly have your footage on a separate drive and not on the system drive, where the Mac OS and applications reside. Whether or not a RAID setup would be beneficial depends on the format that you work with -if it is mostly DV, there will be little to no benefit.
While the graphic card does play a role in FCP it really comes into its own with Motion and most here would agree that the ATI HD 4870 is the way to go at the moment. Motion is multi-processor aware and likes lots and lots of RAM. My 2008 machine has the graphic card mentioned above and 16GB of RAM, which is more or less the sweet spot for the stuff that I do.
You can speed up Compressor with a simple trick shown here: http://www.digitalrebellion.com/blog/posts/speedingupcompressor.html
There's a wealth of FCP related info here: http://www.kenstone.net/fcphomepage/fcp_homepageindex.html
Join your local FCP User Group or check out this site: http://www.lafcpug.org/
Also:
http://www.secondchairvideo.com/
http://lfhd.net/
http://www.thrillcateditorial.com/
http://web.me.com/michaelgrenadier/revised_website/PostproductionConsultant.html
http://www.fcpbook.com/
http://www.amazon.com/How-Cheat-Motion-Patrick-Sheffield/dp/024081097X
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