So how does the 8 Core perform?

Spartacus

Spartacus

Veteran
Still thinking of buying one, but its A LOT of extra cash of course.
Those of you using it (or having real world info on it) - could you state if you´re satisfied with it?
I´m most interessted in editing and encoding, especially Flash8 with the Flix Exporter Plug in for FCP.
Are render times improved dramatically? Which programms really benefit from more cores?
If multithreating doesn´t improve much, what about multitasking eg editing DVCproHD while at the same time encoding stuff with Compressor or Squeeze?
Please share your experience, thanks!
 
I have no experience with flash or that plug in you use, but i can say that studio 2 on an 8-core with 6gb ram smokes the quad 2.66 with the original studio. the new compressor is far more effecient. though i wish it was cheaper, it is well worth the money if you are making money on your shoots.
 
So does compressor use all 8 cores?
Maybe the improvement is mostly because C3 is significantly faster, as stated by Apple...
 
The 8 core is literally twice as fast at rendering out of Compressor.... IF you know what you are doing. Basically you set up "Virtual Clusters" where Compressor uses the single Mac as a render farm. It's really quite amazing. Here is an article with benchmarks for you.

http://www.barefeats.com/octopro5.html

There is no real difference in FCP though rendering timelines. The only other benefit is After Effects which will use ALL 8 cores and a full 16GB or RAM. Insane performance.

Is it worth it? Ehhh, unless you are an AE artist I say not really. I always run my Compressor renders at night when I leave the studio or for long stuff on Friday afternoon and take a half day and let it run over the weekend.

Buy a 2.66 and a macbook pro for slightly more money and then you have a 6 core with 2 of those cores being portable. It's all about qMaster.

Good Luck Bro...
 
SinisterProductions said:
Buy a 2.66 and a macbook pro for slightly more money and then you have a 6 core with 2 of those cores being portable. It's all about qMaster.

Good Luck Bro...
Click to expand...

Hehe, that´s exactly what I was thinking about as an alternative when comparing prices...
Well AE not in this live, I plan on using Color though, but I guess it relies more on the graphics card...?
I never have used qMaster to be honest, can I use it to connect different Macs to a renderfarm?
Could I export a QT reference movie on a MBP and render it via LAN on the MacPro?
Are there any books about postpro workflows and media management?
And what is the new server aplication good for?
Just a cameraguy with A LOT of questions...;O)
 
I suggest you RTFM.

Open compressor, select help "Distributed Processing Setup" and then search that help file for "Virtual"

Apple help docs are the best in the biz in my opinion, don't waste your money on other books when you have it right there in front of you for free.
 
Hey guys, we just recieved a whole fleet of V8s. I'm trying to figure out the whole Virtual Cluster thing.

I got it working, but it doesn't seem to be any faster...

15min DV clip transcoding to a custom h.264 - usually took about 2x the clip lengh on our "old" Dual G5's ... But his V8 doesn't seem to be cutting that time down any. I still hit 35 min with barely a hit on the render bar before i stopped it....

Mac Pro V8
8GB RAM
4instances on Virtual Clusters - Final Cut Studio 2
ATI X1900 Video Card

Can you believe we just got 4 of these muscle machines?!!"
 
Using compressor 3, I set up a virtual cluster of 5 instances on one of our Mac Pros today. It was a 5 min clip with a custom setting exporting h.264 @ 320x240. it took 46 minutes to do its thing.

The file looks great and is about 16mb in size. but geeze i would think that a V8 could be a lot faster then that...... 9x slower then real time??? is this right?

This was with 8GB of RAM installed. I"m gonna steal RAM from another tower and try the same test with 8 nodes on 16GB RAM......
 
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