Speeding up render time

H

humanimal

Member
Hey,

I have just added more ram in my computer and I'm wondering if it is possible to get fcp to use more of my ram because it only uses about 700 megs. Any setting I can adjust? Thanks. Happy Thanksgiving to any canucks out there.

D.
 
i think FCP can only utilize 4GB of ram

to be honest i can not tell any rendering difference from my work machine (4GB)
and my home machine (7GB)

when it comes to motion/running multiple apps, thats a diff. story!

shawn
 
Rendering is really more Processor and disk intensive than Memory intensive. What your computer is doing is figuring out exactly what each frame should be and writing them to disk so that it doesn't have to figure it out on the fly. More RAM will help your computer playback movies without rendering but RAM usually isn't a chokehold. There's an awesome app called MenuMeters that can probably help you diagnose where things are backing up
http://ragingmenace.com/software/menumeters/.
One of the biggest things you can do to increase render times is make sure your source material and your scratch disk are set to two separate drives.
 
curious, by having your scratch on another drive how much of an improvement are we talking?

great tip!

shawn
 
Almost always, the choke point on your render is going to be your processor. That's why VFX houses use render farms to do huge render jobs, if you have two processors rendering two frames at 1.5ghz, your job will finish faster than one processor rendering two frames in succession at 3ghz (in general).

I moved the scratch disk on My mac Pro (Quad core) to a RAID 0 and my render times cut by about 1/3rd generally. But like I said, there's so many factors going into this it's hard to give specific numbers and as I haven't run any spec tests these are just guesstimates.

The basic idea is that you never want your processor to be waiting for your hard disk so you can be writing out render data to one drive while reading in data from the other at the same time.

Also, @humanimal, depending on what format you're editing and how much ram you have. You may want to turn off "SafeRT" and have FCP just load the renders in the RAM. I know for lite effects in SD my 5Gb's can usually handle this.
 
There actually is a preference. Go to Final Cut Pro>System Settings>Memory&Cache. Generally, you should set it to 90 percent, and still cache to 5. You want to leave a little overhead so your system won't slow to a crawl.
 
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