With the new suite of ProRes features, will the process of log and transfer be faster now with FCP 7?

No changes have been made to the actual encoding engine or how it handles memory allocation for the process. They've only added more format conversions available.

The actual speed of the process is determined by your physical system assets, CPU speed, RAM, HDD's etc. The newer Mac Pro's with lots of RAM (more than 8GB) will definitely be faster at the task than the previous versions. Even the new MacBook Pro's will process faster than the previous generation but the margin of improvement isn't as great as Mac Pro.

What *might* change things with regard to process speed is Snow Leopard, as it will introduce yet newer methods for memory management, GPU/CPU workload sharing and potentially faster encoding times for both Log & Transfer and Compressor. Time will tell.

>No changes have been made to the actual encoding engine or how it handles memory allocation for the process. They've only added more format conversions available.

Do you know this for a fact Robert, or are you intuiting this? I'm inclined to agree with you as it goes, but didn't see (or hear) of this as definitive fact anywhere before.

>The actual speed of the process is determined by your physical system assets, CPU speed, RAM, HDD's etc.

No doubt, but one would assume the target codec should also be a factor, no? I'm guessing the transcode to ProRes LT or ProRes Proxy might indeed be a little faster than the encode to the higher bitrate alternatives, so it may be indeed be faster assuming one is utilising these new codecs.

Nothing in the ADC published white-papers talk about a change in the encoding engine, just the new formats being established and more cameras being supported. All the supposed *big* changes are being pointed to Snow Leopards new base-code changes.