??What to do What to do What to do?? (opinions please!)

Hello, so to put it simple:

To upgrade or to buy new? That is the question! :S

My computer does not seem to Render as quickly as I wish. It makes me discontent because half the time I am waiting on my projects. My present computer specs are:

13" Mid 2010 MacBook Pro
-2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
- 16 GB RAM
-NVIDIA GeForce 320M 256 MB
-250 GB Hard Drive at 5400 rpm

If I were to keep, I would upgrade to a Solid State Hard Drive, likely from OWC.


OR

Sell this bad boy (maybe $700-800?) on Craigslist, and get myself a brand new 15" Retina display model ($2,100 :sick: ):

-2.0GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor
- 8 GB RAM (will upgrade later)
- Way better graphics :silly:
-256 GB Flash Storage


I like the thought of being able to upgrade my current computer to what ever hard drive I want, and HATE the fact the hard drive cannot be upgraded on the Retina Displays. I also do not want to spend the money on a new computer if I do not have to.

Thank you for the help!

you don't say what percentage of your hard drive is available but with that much ram if you're running fcpx and your projects and events on the same drive thats contributing to your bottleneck. replacing the 5400 with a solid state drive would help but more so in conjunction with moving your projects and events to an external drive. your macbook pro has usb 2 so thats gonna keep you bogged down a bit. you don't have thunderbolt on that 7,1 either leaving just firewire as a faster option for your external drive connection. any other external drive should be at least usb3 for when you do get a faster mac with usb3 connections.

i'd get a mac mini quad core i7 and max the ram. throw an ssd drive in there and move your p&e's to an external usb 3 or thunderbolt drive and save a good grand over buying that 15" macbook pro. that will give you the best result for least cost, imho.

Your GPU is the biggest bottleneck, then it's the core 2 duo, then it's the 5400 rpm drive which you probably have your projects and events on.

If you're gonna spend $2,100 on a new machine, but a nice powerful new iMac with 4GB of video RAM, that makes a huge difference.

Your computer is not worth upgrading.

Hi Spencer,

If you have your Events and Projects on your system drive: that's the number one cause for slow rendering. Getting a decent external FireWire drive (do NOT use USB2) and putting all your Events and Projects on it will already help a lot without breaking your bank.

And even if you do get a new computer it will be useless for serious editing if you don't get a good external drive with it.

- Ronny

Thanks everyone! I was under the impression that keeping all of the project properties and files on the internal hard drive would speed it up. I think I will explore my options with this new knowledge, thank you for the help!

Would a Firewire external hard drive and a solid state drive do the trick?

Both will certainly help. FireWire 800 is good for normal HD editing as long as you are not doing any multicam. The external drive will speed up your current FCPX work, but it won't make your slow laptop fly.

I don't know if it's worth putting an SSD in your laptop anymore. You might as well save the money for now and add it to your budget for a new system. Some good advice has been given in this thread on what other hardware options you have. If you are serious about editing, one day or another you will have to bite the bullet anyway.

- Ronny

soarininmotion wrote: i'd get a mac mini quad core i7 and max the ram. throw an ssd drive in there and move your p&e's to an external usb 3 or thunderbolt drive and save a good grand over buying that 15" macbook pro. that will give you the best result for least cost, imho.

While this is a good suggestion for people who are really on a tight budget, it's not one I would want to have to work with all the time, especially if render time is the biggest issue.

I have that exact configuration here that we use as a network / render machine when we're really busy and need to offload some stuff so we can keep working. It renders at about half the speed of my 2009 Mac Pro (5770) and less than a third of the speed of my MacBookPro 17" Quad i7 (all machines are 16GB ram). The MBP Rentina is by all accounts even faster than my current MBP, so the Retina would be the option likely to last the longest in terms of usability going forward.

The older GPUs are unlikely to keep people satisfied as FCPX leans on it more and more in the coming updates.

We also have an iMac 3.2Ghz Core 2 Duo in the office and I would consider it a difficult machine to edit on fluently for anything other than proxy files due to the need to render all the time. Core 2 Duo is not really up to the task, and is painfully slow at rendering.

I guess I should elaborate, I enjoy having a laptop for the versatility of it all. My current computer is by no means slow, just not the quickest when it comes to editing. This is why I thought maybe a SSD and Firewire hard drive would work.

However with the holidays coming up, do you think it would be better to save (and get some help ) to get the modern 15" and then use the firewire port? There is no way I am paying a $1000 just for the thunder port haha.

tl;dr: What is the best laptop/ external hard drive set up to have?

Thank you all again for helping a noob! :lol:

Hello guys.. I'm hoping you can help me with a similar issue. Or should I say question.

I produce several videos per month for various companies and sponsors. I've invested a good bit of money into equipment, but I'm just not getting the performance that I would have expected. It may be that I need to lower my expectations, or it may be that I needed to invest in another direction (newer mac?). I'm willing to do either, but not having anyone to really talk to about this stuff has just left me frustrated.

Here's what I currently have:
Mac Pro (2008) 8 core 2.8 GHz.
18 GB Ram
ATI 5770 (genuine Mac video card)

INTL Drives:
1 x 1TB Boot drive
2 x 250GB SSDs software striped (buries the needle on Blackmagic disk speed test)
1 x 3TB TimeMachine Drive

EXT Drives:
4 x 750 Software Striped / eSATA 4 bay (port multiplier) for off loading events and projects from the SSDs

I'm editing full 1080p HD video and that seems to go ok, but will drop frames when previewing until things are rendered. Once editing is complete is where I have my question. Most of my videos are under 10 minutes and include Picture in Picture, lots of text overlay, and photo cutaways.. Nothing too fancy.

Now my question, and thank you for your patience to this point, "Sharing" the edited project to 1080p computer takes what seems like forever. I'm guessing 1.5 to 3 hours, depending on the content. That's when it works. I recently upgraded to Mavericks and I will occasionally get the "quicktime -50" error when sharing. I'll delete all the render files and try again, sometimes it works, sometimes not. Everything's happening to different storage locations. FCX is on the boot drive, projects and events are on the SSDs, I generally "share" to the EXT Array.

For giggles I duplicated the project (and clips) to an external Buffalo Thunder Bolt 1TB drive and connected it to my 15" macbook pro: i7, 8gb, 750GB drive, GT 650M. I left the project on the external drive and tried to "share" it to my desktop. The MBP is stuck on 14% and the Mac Pro, which I started about 30 minutes after the MBP, is already up to 31%.. so the older Mac Pro is definitely faster.

So.. given what I have.. what can I do to improve "sharing" times. (I tried compressor.. OMG.. worthless). OR, should I just suck it up and realize that I got it pretty darn good and just deal with the long rendering times.

I really appreciate your help and input.

Cheers,

Rick

Hi Rick,

1. What is the original format of the footage you are editing? Are you working with the native footage or are you using optimized media?

2. What are your Project settings?

3. What is the format of the video you are exporting?


- Ronny

Ronny,

First of all.. Thank you for helping out.

I'm using a Canon Vixia HF G10 shooting 1080P at 30 frames per sec
Project settings match 1080P 30FPS

as for the "exporting".. I'm using a duplicated "apple 1080P" setting, that's simply switched from apple devices to "computer". It is saving as an MP4 file. Ultimately these are going up on my YouTube channel as 1080p. ( www.youtube.com/airgunweb )

I've tried sharing as apple 1080p and other settings.. it's still "slow" to me anyway. I'm contracted to produce HD footage so I have to have 1080p in the end.

Does that help?

Thanks again.

Rick

Rick--

Your system is faster than the one I am currently using yet I have had none of those problems. The first thing I thought to ask was whether you were using original or transcoded media, so I believe Ronny has asked you the three best questions to help diagnose your problem. I suggest using optimized media and, yes, making sure your Project settings match your media specs (frame size, frame rate, etc.).

Oh.. forgot to answer the question about "optimized" media. I'm NOT using optimized media that I know of. I'm just using the native footage.

Cheers.

Rick

Hey Rick,

It is quite logical you are experiencing slow exports although you have a decent system.

First: the Vixia records in AVCHD, which is a long-GOP format. Although you can edit AVCHD natively using FCPX you will have trouble playing 1080p30 AVCHD without any dropouts on a 2008 MacPro. That's the nature of this hardware.

Second: you export straight from your timeline to H.264 in an MP4 wrapper, another long-GOP codec. This means you are converting one long-GOP format to another long-GOP format, which is a very slow and processor-intensive workflow.

So I agree with Gabriel that optimizing your footage is the very first thing you should do. When you optimize you convert all your AVCHD video to ProRes 422. This has a lot of advantages:

1. You will edit much smoother using ProRes. ProRes is an all I-frame codec, ensuring smoother playback and better quality fidelity especially if you are adding lots of titles and effects.

2. All titles, effects etc... are always processed as ProRes anyway, so everything on your timeline will be full ProRes, which means:

3. You will be able to export a ProRes master file in a very reasonable time, much faster than you do now. You always need to have a full-quality master file of your edit anyway, so ProRes is your best choice. You can then use Compressor, QuickTime Pro or any good conversion software to produce your final MP4. Starting with a full-quality ProRes master instead of AVCHD the final export will also be much quicker.

If you are concerned with drive space (ProRes does take a lot more space than heavily compressed AVCH) you can always delete your Optimized Media once your edit is finished. If you ever need to work on the project again it's very easy to re-optimize your media from inside the Event Browser. But as you have lots of drive space I don't think this is an issue for you.

- Ronny

I'll echo what Ronny says, but add this:

When I edit on our 2008 MacPro with 5770 and use AVCHD as source media, the export is always a lot slower than with ProRes.

If I optimise to ProRes, which I'll do when ever time allows, the exports are much faster. To give you an example, an event we exported just last week was 1hr 20 mins with multiple title overlays, lots of colour grades in windows and colour masks etc and some picture in picture on a few of them. Exporting this 1h 20min video to a ProRes master took only 22 mins. I'm sure with a late model iMac this would have been much quicker. To export this to an H264 file (1080/25p) was around 52 mins. So, 1h 20m (80mins) took 52 mins.

If your system is taking 'hours' to export a 10 minute timeline then you really need to look at optimising your media.

If you don't want to optimise it all, just optimise the ones you're using by right clicking on it and choosing transcode (then choose optimised).

Guys I want to thank you so much for the help and advice.

My project just completed successfully (YEAH) and it's uploading to my youtube channel. Anyway, I'm going to try "transcoding" the event media into optimized media and then export a mater file and check the render times.

I'm new to FCX as I just transitioned from iMovie about 4 months ago. I gave up on iMovie when it lost all my edits after a 4 hour session. It was not a new problem, but it was the last straw. I've been pretty pleased with FCX and the learning curve was minimal coming from iMovie.

It looks like it's going to take quite a while to create optimized media for that event.

I have a backup Mac Pro that's virtually identical to my primary machine minus the SSDs and it has 12GB vs 16GB of ram. What I may do is dump the initial footage in the backup Mac and let it work on transcoding the media while I edit another project.

I know my mac pros are a bit long in the tooth.. will the newer models work these processes any faster.. significantly faster is what I'm looking for. (and a reason to purchase the new MacPro that's coming out )

Again.. thank you for all your help. I hope that I'll be able to return the favor to folks here. I'm not sure what good I can do, but I've got a bunch of experience of what DOESN'T work.. lol

Thanks again.

Cheers,
Rick

Knowing that you were able to successfully complete your project is reward enough.

If you have loads of footage the optimizing process might indeed take some time, so doing the optimizing on the other machine will certainly help.

Any reason is good to convince yourself you really need a new MacPro, so here we go: the new MacPro will allow you to do all this much, much, much faster

- Ronny

Thanks!.. That's all I needed to here.. Now I just need to go get a 2nd mortgage to pay for it

Thanks again guys.. I have more confidence that I'm moving in the right direction.

Thanks again.

Cheers,

Rick