Multithreading in FCP at render time?

[pranic]

I have a FCP project (6.0.4) with ProRes422 footage, and just put a keyframed gaussian blur over one clip, along with a title on the next video track.

Since my timeline is less than 2 minutes, and I have a MacPro with four cores (2.66Ghz) and 9GB of RAM, I wouldn't expect rendering to take more than 12 minutes.

So, I went to look at the system CPU usage, and while the rendering is happening, it almost looks like there is some aspect of the project that isn't taking advantage of multi-threading, becauswe there was only one CPU churning away, and only at 23%.

Shortly thereafter, the system went up to having 3 processors at 100%.

My question, is whether there are filters or transitions in FCP that are not multi-threaded at render time?

It's more out of curiosity, so I can avoid them in the future.

Thanks!
Andrew

 

[NoahK]

I wouldn't take it down that road. Render time is what it is and trying to speed it up by dodging certain filters surely isn't going to be a time-saver in the long run. This is the time to go get a coffee. If you really want much faster renders- get another couple of machines and set up a Qmaster render cluster and send every timeline to Compressor.

Noah

 

[pranic]

Thanks for the feedback Noah! I was curious because it was the first time in five years where the CPU usage was low, but the whole computer seemed to be sluggish... followed by the CPU usage getting high, and the system becoming stable and responsive. In many ways, this was counter intuitive

 

[ullanta]

However, what you should know is that, in my experience, Boris title3D is extremely slow, and never takes advantage of multithreading. My renders and exports, when using it, fly at high speed and high processor usage (> 300%), then drop when there's a title (~100% processor usage), then fly until they hit the next title. This seems to be what you're experiencing. This seems to be what you're experiencing...

If your titles are simple, use a non-Boris plugin.

If they're complex and don't need any of title3D's special features, make the title in Photoshop or something and import it as a graphic to speed things up.

Sad... it seems to me that title3D is not multiprocessor-aware and possibly not intel native. It ran much faster on my dual 2.5 G5 than it does on the Quad 2.66 Xeon...

-B