Here's a rookie question from my first project in FCS2-

Is it within the realm of good expectations for an 8-core 2.8GHz Mac Pro to require 4 hours to render a 5.5 minute project created from 1080i60 footage, residing on a 7200rpm PATA Firewire 400 external drive, rendered to 1280x720 H.264 (3000 kbps) for Vimeo, destination being the Desktop ie Main drive....?

I originally had the destination being a partition on the same external drive as the raw files, but thought putting onto the Desktop might speed things up?

I was seeing dropped files during preview of simple cross dissolves. The message said the source hard drive was too slow. Does that sound right?

Where can I find optimization recommendations for MacPro setup, both hardware and software?

thanks

hi,
It took my 3.0Ghz Octo Core Mac Pro machine about 20 minutes to do a 2:18 video into precisely the same type of .MOV.... The 2.8 and 3.0 mac pros are almost identical in performance, so there must be a messed up setting. Try redoing your Easy Setup or even porting you material into a fresh project. Also, I think that Mac Pro likes SATA more than PATA drives, but that might not be an issue since it is external.

Good luck!
-Steve

have you set up a virtual cluster for compressor?
http://provideocoalition.com/index.php/apple/story/compressor_3_a_virtual_cluster_makes_an_impressive_speed_boost/...

however, contrary to the specific direction in the linked article, I did read somewhere recently (haven't tried it myself) that allocating 1 less instance than the max available (ie 7 instances for an 8 core mac) would actually produce significantly faster results (else otherwise the OS is left fighting compressor for processing cycles which slows everything down) ... that perspective however is seemingly not bourne out by the results with the dual core MBP as reported in the linked article article

ymmv
Andy