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joeysarks

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 21, 2011
122
0
Detroit
1. Right now I record to my internal 5400rpm hard drive on my 13 inch MBP, but lately it's slowed down, and I can't record in anything higher than ProRes LT now. I'm looking to upgrade, or at least hold myself over with something till Haswell comes out. Should I be looking at an SSD and continue recording to my internal drive before I move it to external for editing, or should I get a thunderbolt to SSD/7200rpm drive and record directly to that? Right now i'm using a 7200rpm external with USB3 for editing, so I don't believe I can record directly to that right? (cuz the packet delivery) And does anyone know if the fusion drive on the iMac will record directly to the SSD instead of HD? What i'm shooting for is at least flawless ProRes recordings, but I wouldn't mind having the option to record in HQ or even 4444 at times if possible.

2. Is it better to background render or just randomly render pieces as you go? I notice my fans come on more with background rendering, and I feel it gets sluggish even in proxy, while having it off doesn't feel like it gets as sluggish even when doin non proxy work. Does having it on or off effect the RAM more or less? I feel like i'm doin something wrong since I still see people working in FCP7 with barely any RAM and they don't look bothered by it lol. Am I just not using the RAM as efficiently as I could be?

3. Would you recommend a maxed out iMac 21.5 or a baseline rMBP? Is there a way to get around the slower speed of the iMacs hard drive? Or would I be better off getting the rMBP and working around the 8gb of RAM? Not to worried about the processor, I would think with both having i7s with hyperthreading, speed increases would be counted in mostly seconds, which I can deal with. And honestly they both look like they'll get hot and throttle down anyways lol.

4. Almost forgot, how does the GPU help with editing? I'm using an intel HD 3000 right now so i've never experienced the perks of having GPU acceleration. Does it speed up background rendering or exporting?
 

-DH

macrumors 65816
Nov 28, 2006
1,070
3
Nashville Tennessee
With legacy versions of FCP it is NOT recommended to use your boot drive for capturing or editing video. The boot drive will be busy enough running the OS, FCP, any other apps you have open as well as all the various background processes.

Other recommendations are:
Use only hard drives with a minimum rotational speed of 7200rpm (or SSD).

Do not edit video when stored on a USB 2.0 (or lower) drive. USB transfers data in packet (short bursts) and many NLEs, including FCP, will see the gap between bursts of data as dropped frames and subsequently cause performance issues.

For external drives, use Firewire, eSATA or Thunderbolt, all of which will transfer data in a sustained stream.

RAM has little to do with rendering or processing video within FCP. FCP 7 and earlier can only address about 2.5gb of RAM, regardless how much you have installed.

The GPU does process renders but only with FX Plugs ... the CPU handles the normal rendering.

-DH
 
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