Rendering is slow on Imac i7 with 16gb RAM???

K

KOHR

Well-known member
Hey everyone, I'm just trying to work out the kinks since I just got my hands on some new editing hardware. I just upgraded from a santa rosa macbook pro 15" with 4gb RAM to a much more powerful iMac i7 quad-core with 16gb of RAM. What I'm wondering is... why is it just as slow at rendering/converting/compressing as my old macbook pro?? I am not seeing a real big improvement in terms of render times. Are there settings I need to change in my programs to make use of all of the new RAM and extra processors? Heres the programs I'm running in:

After Effects CS4
Final Cut Pro
Compressor
Photoshop CS4

Any help would be fantastic! Thanks!
KOHR
 
Grand Central Dispatch would help I imagine? I seldom encode using Macs, but I've heard this helps.
 
The hard drive, or the bus speed to that drive could be the limiting factor. You may not be able to read the media any faster if you're encoding material off of a drive plugged in via USB2, or the crappy 5400RPM drives they put in MBPs.
 
Everything i've edited so far has been on my internal hardrive which has an RPM rate of 7200. Any other ideas? I should be exporting 5 minute 720p files much faster than an hour and a half.... don't you think?
 
KOHR said:
Everything i've edited so far has been on my internal hardrive which has an RPM rate of 7200. Any other ideas? I should be exporting 5 minute 720p files much faster than an hour and a half.... don't you think?
Click to expand...
Well what kind of footage are you rendering? How many filters and effects are you using?

As for compression, are you doing it AFTER creating a master file, or straight from FCP? You'll speed things up greatly (on any machine) if you use a master file first, since it doesn't have to render any additional effects.
 
Using Premiere CS5 would also speed things up.

...SCNR

No really. I work on CS5 for quite a while now, but had a client last week, that wanted me to edit on his FCP.

Bering used to the speed and power of Peremiere now, I was totaly shocked how slow FCP was.
And they both run on computers with similar specs. (i7 quad-core, same RAM)

Frank
 
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FCP is hardly optimized for handling modern codecs like Premiere is - it transcodes to ProRes though, so you'd think this wouldn't be an issue.
 
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