No eSATA on 13" Macbook Pro - what's the optimal harddrive solution?

RMI Studios

RMI Studios

Active member
Hey Everyone - just getting going on FCP - bought last version of Macbook Pro with 2.26ghz and packed it up with 8 gigs of ram and bought a new FW800 drive.

Thought that would be fast enough for some slick FCP action but I was wrong! Editing 1080 HD footage i get horrible stuttering the second I pop any filter on. No filter - no stutter.

Now that Macbook Pro's (except 17") don't have eSata -- what's my optimal solution for non-jittery safe playback on this system? RAID drive using FW800?

I'm also using just one FW drive for all the FCP folders...


Any help would be much appreciated -- thanks!
 
You are doing something wrong. Are you making sure that you render your clips which you have Effects on?
 
yes but the problem is i'm grading with 'Magic Bullet Looks' fxplugin and each 6 second clip render takes about 30 minutes -- and switching to 'unlimited rt' in lieu of rendering provides ridiculously choppy playback.

i'm starting to wonder if it's 'Magic Bullet Looks' itself -- unless you can think of anything else? Is MBL usually this much of a render monster?
 
even 6 seconds of chroma key is requiring 8mins of render time -- if this is normal then i just didn't know what i was in for :) i'm used to the realtime audio plugins in protools haha
 
Incorrect. The 13" MBP does not have an ExpressCard port.

And Magic Bullet Looks + 13" MBP = Recipe for Frustration. It's just going to be slow no matter what you do.
 
Yup- too much processing for that machine. You should move up to 15" or 17" or better a desktop machine. Or get something good to read while it renders...

Noah
 
NoahK said:
Yup- too much processing for that machine. You should move up to 15" or 17" or better a desktop machine. Or get something good to read while it renders...

Noah
Click to expand...

How come? Is the i5 with 2,4GHz that much faster as the 2,4 C2D...?
How good is FCP at multithreading?

And about what kind of 1080HD flavor are we talking? I edited DVCpro100 on my old MBP 2,16 - wasn´t fun but straight editing without effects was ok...

Just curious because I thought of getting the 13" for office work and occasional offloading/transcoding t2i/5D h264 files to ProRes...
This thingy costs way more than other small laptops and should give me a little more use than running Word and Excel...
Or won´t it?
 
There's a difference between using your machine for logging, loading, transcoding and editing and color-correcting with something like MB Looks. I have the 13" MBP and it cuts just about everything I can throw at it with ease. But when I start layering effects and color-corrections, it just can't handle it.

That's why I always say that if you're getting ONLY a laptop for editing, get the biggest, fastest one you can afford. I have a Mac Pro desktop for power editing and finishing, so the speed of the 13" MBP isn't really a problem for me.
 
RMI Studios said:
yes but the problem is i'm grading with 'Magic Bullet Looks' fxplugin and each 6 second clip render takes about 30 minutes -- and switching to 'unlimited rt' in lieu of rendering provides ridiculously choppy playback.

i'm starting to wonder if it's 'Magic Bullet Looks' itself -- unless you can think of anything else? Is MBL usually this much of a render monster?
Click to expand...

Must be something wrong. I have used MBL on several projects and the longest anything took to render was about 15 minutes and that was with a 1 minute + time frame with various clips. This was done on an old MBP 2.2 which I would assume is a lot slower than a newer MBP.


I have a 7200 rpm system drive , 7200 rpm external drive connected via eSata , and 4Gbs of ram.

One thing you might try doing is to render your clips in 8 bit instead of 10, that might help A LOT with the processing time
 
From the reports I've read, MBL is slow to render even on the fastest machine:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...looks+slow+render&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

How fast the render occurs, all things being equal, depends on part on the codec and sequence settings.

If you indicate which sequence setting you are using, then it would be simpler to assess whether it is MBL or something else.

Some of this may also relate to GPU. The 13 inch MBP do not have discrete graphics cards, as I understand it.

And 13 inch MBP don't have either the i5 or i7 chips; they are Intel Core 2 Duo based.
 
Here are some screenshots of my settings -- also the only filter i'm using now is ChromaKey and rendering time is about 15 minutes for a 1 minute clip. Does this sound right?

(DISREGARD THE LAST IMAGE WHICH SAYS 23.97 -- THAT'S FROM A DIFFERENT SEQUENCE, WAS JUST TRYING TO SHOW YOU GUYS THE CHROMAKEY AND BACKGROUND TRACK TO GIVE A SENSE OF WHAT'S IN THE TIMELINE)


fcp1.png

fcp2.png

fcp4.png

fcp3.png
 
I'm guessing that I should now cut up my promo with no grading or chromakey whatsoever until everything is in place and then do a render -- although I can't believe that this is how you have to work on FCP - guess I need a more blown out rig then!??
 
Are you using the FCP keyer? I use Conduit as a FCP plug-in, great results, but a PITA to render - even on my MacPro 8core...
You can also do realtime keying with it in motion, not as many opions but as said realtime, but I don´t know if the integrated grafics card of the 13" is enough for motion...
 
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