Mac dual quad cores & rendering...not much going on!

[8string]

So what am I missing? I have dual quad core mac pro w/10 GB RAM, and when I pull up the Activity Monitor during rendering, the CPU is just idling away at a low rate, using about 380 MB of RAM and all the activity is disk I/O, which makes sense. But why isn't FCP socking way more of the disk info into RAM, and letting the cores do the work in RAM rather than constant I/O? Disk activity is like 100%.

What am I missing in the way this is working? What I read from this is massive small data fetches, processed and then put back on disk. I assume I am missing something fundamental in the way the app handles rendering. Just seems inefficient given the massive amount of RAM and cores available.

No biggie, just wondering...

 

[RyanBellaCine]

The issue lies with the wicked old programming code that Final Cut Pro is currently based on. It's still a 32bit program and doesn't efficiently utilize 64 bit & multi core systems just yet.

We will have to wait for a brand new Cocoa 64bit based FCS program that has been re-written to take advantage of all of the new goodies that Snow Leopard has introduced before we'll see 800-1600% ( or more when the 6 & 12-core towers arrive which could be this year ) CPU utilization in FCP. But converting an entire complex program such as FCP from 32bit Carbon code to 64bit Cocoa code is no easy task for Apple programers to tackle.

Also, there is still much development to be done to QuickTime X, which like what FCS will need to be, was re-written completely from scratch in 64bit. Although it greatly lacks any "pro" features & abilities that FCS requires. FCS depends on QuickTime 7 right now which is also only 32bit.

One thing that has been shown, is that simply having Snow Leopard installed does help processing times across the board. Also CPU utilization is more stable and threads don't jump from CPU core to core as they do in Leopard. The backlash to that is minor, but all those milliseconds wasted from jumping cores can add up long term.

Also good to note that the best performance is only as good as your slowest component ( including the software ). So if your using slow external drives for scratch drives, or rendering on you system drive, that has an impact on overall render & export speeds.

 

[Staven]

Also. Final Cut Pro only uses 4gb of Ram. Any extra Ram is not utilized. But that extra ram works well for other programs such as Motion.

To speed up rendering you could look into an accelerator like from Matrox.

I always use the click render then go do something else or render at night theory.