NLE Mac / Final Cut questions from 2003

[Jeff Donald]

New 15.4 inch aluminum Power Books are due in 2 to 4 weeks once existing supplies of TiBooks are reduced. The features should be similar to new Power Books introduced at MacWorld in January (BlueTooth, AirPort Extreme, FireWire 800, and nVidia graphics cards).

[Don Berube]

As Ken suggests, you are best off with 7200rpm with the 8mb Princeton 911 buffer.

I use the LaCie D2 200GB drives. Super fast and problem free.

Jim Wiebetech is a great guy and his drives are also very excellent.

- don

[Christian Nordquist]

Please post your results with this fix...
just to get a handle on it's use.

Thanks.. :-)

[John Kaye]

Last night I had lots of renders to do so I figured I would do them today since I guessd it needs a good day to render all the effects.
So, 1) I saved my project 2) I did a "print to video" so I can take a copy with me home and look at it. 3) I turned off the computer and quit FCP. When I came in today I discovered that I did not have to render anything. All the renders were fixed!!!! I have to mention that on the VHS I took home with me, I was able to view the effects that I couldn't see before due to lack of rendering. Could Print To Video have rendered everything and THIS FAST? It took only 20 min to print to video!

[Ken Tanaka]

Yes, that's basically what happened. Exporting or "printing to video" forces FCP to tidy-up its render tasks before shipping the sequence out.

[John Kaye]

Thanks Ken. It's amazing how fast it renders. If I had asked it to render it would've taken at least a day to do all of them.

[Boyd Ostroff]

Might also have something to do with your render quality settings. Could be rendering at lower resolution. But I've also noticed inconsistencies. For example, if I choose export as a self-contained FCP file (Quicktime) that seems to take a lot less time than rendering, but obviously it renders everything fully. However in this case it doesn't generate any render files.

[Dick Walton]

My equipment is G4-TiPB-1GHz / OS 10.2.2 / 1024 MB RAM / FCP 3.0.4

Having read Ken Stone’s review of iDVD 3 (http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/review_idvd_3.html) I was a bit leery of how my first project might turn out. Never daunted, I created a 10 minute project in FCP 3 including 6 chapter marks and I burned a DVD. The burn process went smoothly (contrary to the indications in the review) but when I tried to select menu scenes based on the chapter marks (the text buttons were created in the ‘free position’ mode) more than one scene was selected . . . making it impossible to know which scene would be played. I’d be interested in other users experience with iDVD 3 and if any work arounds are known.

Thanks!

[Ken Tanaka]

Responding to the many complaints Apple has received about the noisy fans in its newest (released August 2002) Power Mac G4 desktops, Apple is offerring a free power supply exchange for quieter units. This program ends June 30, 2003.

To find out more visit the Apple site's page.

[Matt Stahley]

Dick I'm with you . I havent purchased iDVD3 yet but would like to just for the chapter feature but ive read numerous problem posts on apple forums.Anyone here used this yet?

[Richard DuPree]

I have searched the Apple website but find no leads on the replacement you cite. If you have more information, please let us know.

[Jeff Donald]

I'm not sure what your missing. Did you click on the link in Ken's post? If so, the details and links are all there. Here is the link to the order form to begin the process.

[Richard DuPree]

Duh! Thanks. I hadn't noticed that the text was hot.

[Dan Dorsey]

I use a G4 at home and at work to edit with FCP 3. The problem seems to be the firewire drives and their memory. They both have 7200RPM external firewire drives attached. LaCie and Maxtor are the brands which I know to be good. Inevitably, and especially when I am importing graphics, even the smallest PSD's, FCP will say "out of memory".

My Apple at home only has 256 MB of Ram but my Apple at work has at least 512, if not 768. But they both do the same thing.

The reason I think it is in the firewire drives is because I can copy the project to my local drive and it works fine. However the project on the firewire drive will no longer respond at all.

My first workaround I just stated, my second is to not use any PSD's, but use Targas. Even big Targa's with alpha channels will import and run just fine. But it would be nice to be able to use the layers from a PSD and besides I don't want/need to find a workaround.

At home my Maxtor drive has a memory allocation area (I think) but I was always afraid to change the value and just left it on the "auto" feature. The LaCie I'm not so sure about.

Sorry this is dragging on, but I wanted to give all of the facts before posting.

Thanks

[Ken Tanaka]

Hello Dan,
To my knowledge, the only memory involved with drives is the onboard cache memory. There is no memory allocation associated with hard disks on the Mac.

Contrary to your associative analysis, I'm confident that the difficulty you're having on your home Mac is strictly that of its very low base memory. With only 256Mb I'm surprised you aren't observing other anomalies with FCP3. Boost your RAM and I can virtually guarantee you that this problem will vanish.