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What's my bottleneck?

Santabean2000

Santabean2000

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Nov 20, 2007
1,889
2,053
Hi All, quick diagnostic if you can please.

I'm running Motion 5 on my 2012 13" MBP. I have a SSD boot drive (crucial m4), 16GB RAM. The motion library and clips are located on a 500GB 7200rpm USB3 external.

I'm guessing the weak HD4000 is the main issue here, but does the lack of quad CPU and/or the external drive make a big difference?

The edit seems laggy and the export painful.

Any thoughts appreciated.
 
The first thing I'd do is to copy a project and its related files to your desktop, eject the drive, and play around with it.

If it's working much better then looking for other external drives would be the way to go. If it's working exactly the same, the problem is something else.

Sorry to not have an actual answer, but I think doing this will at least start to narrow your search.
 
Santabean2000 said:
Hi All, quick diagnostic if you can please.

I'm running Motion 5 on my 2012 13" MBP. I have a SSD boot drive (crucial m4), 16GB RAM. The motion library and clips are located on a 500GB 7200rpm USB3 external.

I'm guessing the weak HD4000 is the main issue here, but does the lack of quad CPU and/or the external drive make a big difference?

The edit seems laggy and the export painful.

Any thoughts appreciated.
Click to expand...

You external drive is MUCH slower then the internal SSD. You'd gain some speed if you moved the projects to internal SSD and used the external drive for archive storage.

The other thing you do to make FCPX fast is in the preferences. Doing a lot of transcode and analysis on import slows the system down and if you want to be faster turn on proxy editing.

export will always be slow on a MBP but at least you don't have to be there in front go the commuter waiting.
 
ChrisA said:
You external drive is MUCH slower then the internal SSD. You'd gain some speed if you moved the projects to internal SSD and used the external drive for archive storage.

The other thing you do to make FCPX fast is in the preferences. Doing a lot of transcode and analysis on import slows the system down and if you want to be faster turn on proxy editing.

export will always be slow on a MBP but at least you don't have to be there in front go the commuter waiting.
Click to expand...

Small White Car said:
The first thing I'd do is to copy a project and its related files to your desktop, eject the drive, and play around with it.

If it's working much better then looking for other external drives would be the way to go. If it's working exactly the same, the problem is something else.

Sorry to not have an actual answer, but I think doing this will at least start to narrow your search.
Click to expand...

Thanks for your replies. Moving the files across has helped a bit for sure. I removed the dvd drive and slotted in a samsung SSD; the dual SSD setup helps.

Still a bit slow, but that's just the other hardware limitations I guess. Can anyone break down the relative importance of each component when working in Motion?

RAM/CPU/GPU/disk IO
 
ChrisA said:
What does "Activity Meter" show? If the RAM is not fully used then more RAM can't help you. If the CPU is only half used then more of that can't help. I'd guess you are compute-bound but look and see.
Click to expand...

Yeah, RAM and CPU not fully maxed... Not sure what that all means.:confused:
 
Santabean2000 said:
Yeah, RAM and CPU not fully maxed... Not sure what that all means.:confused:
Click to expand...

Doesn't really mean anything.. The CPU and GPU are not powerful enough for that kind of processing Motion 5 needs.. Even with the SSD and the maxed out RAM I don't think there is anything to do to increase the performance.. :(
 
e1me5 said:
Doesn't really mean anything.. The CPU and GPU are not powerful enough for that kind of processing Motion 5 needs.. Even with the SSD and the maxed out RAM I don't think there is anything to do to increase the performance.. :(
Click to expand...

Yep, it's running as fast as it can, it what I gather. It just can't run very fast.

But what about the new MBPs..? Is there a big difference between the iris pro vs discrete 750m? More RAM vs CPU GHz?
 
Santabean2000 said:
Yep, it's running as fast as it can, it what I gather. It just can't run very fast.

But what about the new MBPs..? Is there a big difference between the iris pro vs discrete 750m? More RAM vs CPU GHz?
Click to expand...

I have no ideal tests here but the GPU would definitely be stronger. Integrated GPU's are basically worthless for anything above minor gaming so for something like this they are a major issue.

More RAM and CPU power would help because Motion would have more it can access. However The effect might not be as strong.
 
Santabean2000 said:
Yeah, RAM and CPU not fully maxed... Not sure what that all means.:confused:
Click to expand...


It means the CPU is waiting for something. Likely the disk.

Have you looked at the disk I/O bytes per second?

If nothing is maxed out it means you have perfect "balance" and no bottleneck. This sounds good but means you would need to replace everything if you wanted to go much faster.
 
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