Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

people that got the 8 gigs of ram what do you do with it?

8 gb helps a lot when film editors or computer graphic designers use multiple applications simultaneously such as Final Cut Pro, After Effects (huge), photoshop ect ect.

Also in film, when something complex needs to be rendered, you need as many gb for ram as you can get. Renders can take up to days.
 
Well personally I use 4 gigs of RAM in my home machine to run a virtual lab environment. Not into the sound/video editing deal but running 3 or 4 virtual machines really helps with 8 gigs or RAM :)
 
Watch A LOT of porn, like 10000 window's at a time easy.. no im kidding however still a nice thought. I usually work on website in dreamweaver and render video's and such, some photoshop and flash movie's. But dosen't everyone!?;):D:apple:
 
Quu said:
Now, I suppose this topic is aimed at the new Unibody 17" MacBook Pro as it just recently came out with 8GB (2x4GB) of RAM as a Build To Order option. My personal view on this is 8GB on a MacBook Pro is a bit stupid as the Processor is quite slow (Not a Quad for starters) and many of the apps that you would use (even combined) that would approach 8GB of usage would require some hefty CPU time that the notebook simply cannot provide. Basically if your utilising all 8GB or even close to that the system will be running so slow that it negates the usefulness of the RAM in the first place.
Click to expand...

I have 6GB in my MacPro and I'd say that's a solid amount for me. I've figured out how to run my system and not max that out, and as much as I'd love to buy another 4GB just because I have empty slots - I really don't have a need for it. Here is what I'll usually have open:

Mail, Adium, Safari w/several tabs, PS CS3 (settings set to use 3GB), Aperture with a (currently) 29,915 image Library (I'm cleaning it out right now), Coda (HTML Editor) CSS Edit (CSS Editor), MAMP to run my website projects, iTunes playing all the time. Doing all this I'll still have about 1GB free memory (including inactive).

Now, to get to my point, you mentioned that a C2D wouldn't have enough power to handle 8GB of work and I beg to differ. Rarely when doing what I'm doing do I ever tax my processors. Just because you're utilizing RAM doesn't mean you're making your CPU do anything difficult. A 17" C2D Macbook Pro w/8GB RAM would work just fine for me. But I could afford a MacPro and really liked the internal storage and 2+ Monitor capability etc. And I was done trying to manage a huge Library on an external drive with a Laptop.
 
wheezy said:
I have 6GB in my MacPro and I'd say that's a solid amount for me. I've figured out how to run my system and not max that out, and as much as I'd love to buy another 4GB just because I have empty slots - I really don't have a need for it. Here is what I'll usually have open:

Mail, Adium, Safari w/several tabs, PS CS3 (settings set to use 3GB), Aperture with a (currently) 29,915 image Library (I'm cleaning it out right now), Coda (HTML Editor) CSS Edit (CSS Editor), MAMP to run my website projects, iTunes playing all the time. Doing all this I'll still have about 1GB free memory (including inactive).

Now, to get to my point, you mentioned that a C2D wouldn't have enough power to handle 8GB of work and I beg to differ. Rarely when doing what I'm doing do I ever tax my processors. Just because you're utilizing RAM doesn't mean you're making your CPU do anything difficult. A 17" C2D Macbook Pro w/8GB RAM would work just fine for me. But I could afford a MacPro and really liked the internal storage and 2+ Monitor capability etc. And I was done trying to manage a huge Library on an external drive with a Laptop.
Click to expand...

You really cant compare because your using an 8 core system. Even 20% CPU usage on your system would be over 100% utilisation on a MacBook Pro. I'm not saying that using 8GB of RAM somehow makes the CPU explode out of the case in a ball of fire. What I'm saying is if you are using applications that require that much ram then they also must be requiring some very high CPU time.

Take Motion for example, if you're scrubbing through a scene that is using 6-8GB your CPU is going to be going nuts especially if its in HD (which it most probably will be). A Mac Pro can handle that no problem because not only is it an 8 Core system but each CPU is a desktop variety with 12MB's of L2 Cache and a 1600FSB to each processor (1600x2 on the 8 Core) the MacBook Pro by comparison has a 1066MHz FSB and only 6Mb of L2 Cache, not mentioning only Dual Core and only 2.66GHz or 2.93 if you take the upgrade.

Again I'm not saying its not possible to utilise all 8GB and not have high CPU usage. That is entirely possible in many tasks like VM usage where you have a bunch of virtual machines sitting idle. But for professionals in design work (where these upgrades are targeted) it's almost completely useless. To make it viable they need to stick a Quad in the 17" or at-least bump that Dual Core up to a Desktop class chip Cache wise.
 
digitard said:
When I tend to edit video's I start to chop the hell out of the original clips so it's tons and tons and tons of chained together pieces which is going to be put into RAM if possible, at least from my understanding.

Most of my editing is either done in HD lately (720p HD cam) and I tear apart the video pieces of all the little things.

For example: A while back I filmed a local paintball tourney. I took continuous match footage, and then tore it apart into the highlights for each game so it ended up with a few hundred chops in there.

I may be wrong, but I've always been under the train of thought that these chopped of pieces are put into RAM before any HDD temp storage. The more RAM the less HDD storage of your chops.

Rendering, etc, yeah that's processor side... but I'm talking about the efficiancy of the editing process.

D.
Click to expand...

hmmm. Maybe. Not sure about actual timeline cuts being stored on either. But i'm usually wrong. Keep in mind I'm asking because I really want to know..

I've never noticed a speed bump in more ram when working in FCP. a million cuts or not. I've noticed it with multiple apps open and in after effects.

I'd love to really know the answer to what RAM actually does to performance of video editing in FCP. My guess at the moment is not much.

I do however think that FCP will be re-written for snow leopard. Just a hunch. It's just that FCStudio is not taking advantage of the hardware correctly and a re-write is needed in the same direction as the snow leopard changes. I think both will go hand in hand and change the dynamic of how FCStudio deals with the OS and hardware.

thanks for the reply...
 
wheezy said:
I have 6GB in my MacPro and I'd say that's a solid amount for me. I've figured out how to run my system and not max that out, and as much as I'd love to buy another 4GB just because I have empty slots - I really don't have a need for it. Here is what I'll usually have open:

Mail, Adium, Safari w/several tabs, PS CS3 (settings set to use 3GB), Aperture with a (currently) 29,915 image Library (I'm cleaning it out right now), Coda (HTML Editor) CSS Edit (CSS Editor), MAMP to run my website projects, iTunes playing all the time. Doing all this I'll still have about 1GB free memory (including inactive).

Now, to get to my point, you mentioned that a C2D wouldn't have enough power to handle 8GB of work and I beg to differ. Rarely when doing what I'm doing do I ever tax my processors. Just because you're utilizing RAM doesn't mean you're making your CPU do anything difficult. A 17" C2D Macbook Pro w/8GB RAM would work just fine for me. But I could afford a MacPro and really liked the internal storage and 2+ Monitor capability etc. And I was done trying to manage a huge Library on an external drive with a Laptop.
Click to expand...

While it is likely that people who require a lot of RAM also require a lot of processing, they can be considered separately. The data I deal with/generate often has file sizes > 1 GB. If I need to load several of these and do any operations on them, I need some overhead so I'm not thrashing my disk, which as most know severely compromises performance, system wide. So that's what we're avoiding.

Loading data into RAM is the issue for me. The analyses that are run on that data vary in computational requirements, and I don't often care if a job runs in 3 minutes versus 5 minutes (until it scales, of course). My 2.0 GHz MP is doing just fine, and I haven't been annoyed with its speed yet, since 2006.

I also find that 6 GB is a fine amount for nearly everything I am currently doing. My MP and one of my MBPs currently has 6 GB. I consider it the minimum for most of my work.

Having said that, 8+ GB would be useful and completely reasonable if MATLAB on OS X was 64-bit (they're testing it now). My data analyses are already pushing these limits for relatively simple tasks ... it's just insane how much data gets generated, and if you have to keep double precision, it grows quickly.
 
How does more RAM help video editing (assuming you mean FCP)? Isn't it more processor intensive?
Click to expand...

In FCP by itself, it doesn't. FCP is incapable of addressing more than 4GB of RAM (1.5GB reserved to system, 2.5GB available to the user). Having more memory than that is beneficial in multitasking. Like say, having Photoshop and After Effects open as well. Both applications are huge resource hogs in of themselves.

However, you can indeed push FCP to its 4GB memory threshold quite easily if you have multiple complex projects open. So, it's mostly CPU intensive, yes, but it can be very memory intensive as well.
 
CaptainChunk said:
In FCP by itself, it doesn't. FCP is incapable of addressing more than 4GB of RAM (1.5GB reserved to system, 2.5GB available to the user). Having more memory than that is beneficial in multitasking. Like say, having Photoshop and After Effects open as well. Both applications are huge resource hogs in of themselves.

However, you can indeed push FCP to its 4GB memory threshold quite easily if you have multiple complex projects open. So, it's mostly CPU intensive, yes, but it can be very memory intensive as well.
Click to expand...

I see. I was under that round about impression. Thanks for the info
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back