Anyone using FCS2 with a 24" Imac

[Jason Bowers]

Hi all,
Is anyone using the 24" Imac for a editing solution? If so how well does it work with all applications? Will it do or should I invest in a mac pro. Not doing Hd.

Thanks

[Jason Bowers]

ooopps... scrolled down and got my answer.

[David Scattergood]

I'm not running FCS2 but I've been running FCP + Dvd Studio Pro + Soundtrack Pro + Live Type + Compressor + Logic Pro all at the same time (I'd forgotten to turn quit some of these) all on a 24"iMac (2gb Ram).
These macs never fail to surprise me.

[Peter Rhalter]

I've got the same setup as David and the whole Studio runs great on it. Excellent responsiveness for SD. HD is another story.

Best wishes,
Peter
___________________________
Best Grand Canyon views guide
http://www.parkfilms.com/gcviewpoints.html

[David Scattergood]

Originally Posted by Peter Rhalter

I've got the same setup as David and the whole Studio runs great on it. Excellent responsiveness for SD. HD is another story.

Best wishes,
Peter
___________________________
Best Grand Canyon views guide
http://www.parkfilms.com/gcviewpoints.html

Problem with HD Peter?
I'm running an external HD purely for music and images. Unfortunately this is USB and is fairly slow response time wise. I'm soon to start shooting HDV and plan to use a FW800 G-raid drive...although apparantly HDV doesn't necessarily have to run on FW800 as FW400 would suffice?

[Jim Fields]

I use FCS2 on my 24" iMac with 2Gb memory, and the Invidia card.

Everything runs good so far except Color. I am editing a new Music Video for Dramarama, trying to use color with that 1080i HDV footage is killing me.
Responsiveness is slow in Color, rendering takes forever, even for a 2 1/2 minute video, and sometime Color wont do a proper return to FCP when done. I found some of my clips offline, and the aspect ratio off on some clips.

Otherwise Motion and all of the other programs work fine. Color is going to cause me to upgrade to a Mac-pro I think. I dont want to, i love my iMac.

Oh, BTW, FW400 drives seem to work alot better than USB2.0 drives, even if I am using SATA II drives with a setting of 3.0 and not 1.5. FW 800 works the best, but after daisy chaining more than 2 drives I found it chokes the other FW400 drives, I think it shares the voltage to both the 800 and 400 ports on the iMac. If I use USB 2.0 for more than 8 hours I find that the iMac slows down, and sometimes the finder will crash repeatedly until I force quit the USB drives. I put a SATA II 750 GB drive in the iMac and use that for current project storage and get the best transfer speeds by doing that, and just transferring finished projects to an external drive for storage.

Installing the Drive was pretty easy, last time I did it I took plenty of photos of the process incase someone needed them to do a drive swap on their own.

[David Scattergood]

Originally Posted by Jim Fields

I use FCS2 on my 24" iMac with 2Gb memory, and the Invidia card.

Everything runs good so far except Color. I am editing a new Music Video for Dramarama, trying to use color with that 1080i HDV footage is killing me.
Responsiveness is slow in Color, rendering takes forever, even for a 2 1/2 minute video, and sometime Color wont do a proper return to FCP when done. I found some of my clips offline, and the aspect ratio off on some clips.

Otherwise Motion and all of the other programs work fine. Color is going to cause me to upgrade to a Mac-pro I think. I dont want to, i love my iMac.

Oh, BTW, FW400 drives seem to work alot better than USB2.0 drives, even if I am using SATA II drives with a setting of 3.0 and not 1.5. FW 800 works the best, but after daisy chaining more than 2 drives I found it chokes the other FW400 drives, I think it shares the voltage to both the 800 and 400 ports on the iMac. If I use USB 2.0 for more than 8 hours I find that the iMac slows down, and sometimes the finder will crash repeatedly until I force quit the USB drives. I put a SATA II 750 GB drive in the iMac and use that for current project storage and get the best transfer speeds by doing that, and just transferring finished projects to an external drive for storage.

Installing the Drive was pretty easy, last time I did it I took plenty of photos of the process incase someone needed them to do a drive swap on their own.

Some good advice there Jim. My iMac more than satisfies my current demands but I can see how it's limitations may one day impede on larger projects. But Mac Pro is some way off yet for me.

I'd be interested in seeing those photo's - I never thought about replacing the internal drive (currently a 250gb drive but following a fairly large project of late it's now around 30gb!).
Do you keep the FCP application on the same drive as the scratch files etc?
Cheers.

[Jim Fields]

David,

I keep everything together in the projects folder.
Example.

In my Projects folder will be say, Nelson Wedding, inside will be the render files, project files, Audio, images, Montage data, compressor exports, DVDSP files, everything is in that one folder, in a seperate folder for each item.

That way when I go to transfer the finished project to an external drive for it's 6 month storage, all I do is delete the footage, and then transfer everything else. If I need to work on that project again for whatever reason, I just do a batch capture of the offline footage and work off of the existing render files, re-render, make changes, then I am done.

I have tried many methods for a decent work flow for what I do, that seems to be the best. My wife connects her laptop to the iMac with a Cat 6 cable so she can work off of project files at the same time. Only thing I could see working better would be a file server so I can dump footage, and edit something else at the same time. A cheap G4 with a gigabyte ethernet card and 7 750gb drives would do the trick. I am just to lazy to go do that just yet.

[David Scattergood]

Originally Posted by Jim Fields

David,

I keep everything together in the projects folder.
Example.

In my Projects folder will be say, Nelson Wedding, inside will be the render files, project files, Audio, images, Montage data, compressor exports, DVDSP files, everything is in that one folder, in a seperate folder for each item.

That way when I go to transfer the finished project to an external drive for it's 6 month storage, all I do is delete the footage, and then transfer everything else. If I need to work on that project again for whatever reason, I just do a batch capture of the offline footage and work off of the existing render files, re-render, make changes, then I am done.

I have tried many methods for a decent work flow for what I do, that seems to be the best. My wife connects her laptop to the iMac with a Cat 6 cable so she can work off of project files at the same time. Only thing I could see working better would be a file server so I can dump footage, and edit something else at the same time. A cheap G4 with a gigabyte ethernet card and 7 750gb drives would do the trick. I am just to lazy to go do that just yet.

I should really use batch capture more often - I don't suppose you can get away with offline footage when using 'capture now'?
Your workaround sounds like what I need to do Jim...figuring out how to do this is another matter mind...not too keen on the fact that the FCP documents are on the same drive as the FCP app. I basically have it set up along the lines of this:

http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g1...ersnapshot.jpg

Do I have to create Aliases etc? I've pretty much no idea how I'm going to seperate the render/scratch/autosave et al folders/files but I intend to shift these to a new external FW drive very soon.

[Jim Fields]

Originally Posted by David Scattergood

I should really use batch capture more often - I don't suppose you can get away with offline footage when using 'capture now'?
Your workaround sounds like what I need to do Jim...figuring out how to do this is another matter mind...not too keen on the fact that the FCP documents are on the same drive as the FCP app. I basically have it set up along the lines of this:

http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g1...ersnapshot.jpg

Do I have to create Aliases etc? I've pretty much no idea how I'm going to seperate the render/scratch/autosave et al folders/files but I intend to shift these to a new external FW drive very soon.

I have not worked with offline footage before, it does have my attention, however, I dont see it working for me. I film and edit weddings, Bar/Bat Mitzvahs, some commercial events, and most recently, concerts/Music videos. So with the majority of my work being projects that have a short turn around, Offline is pointless for me. I keep the master tapes on file, but delete the actual footage files when done.

This is all I do.

In my DOcuments folder I created a "Projects" Folder, in there will be X Wedding, X Mitzvah, X Commercial.

When I open FCP and get ready to import footage, I set everything to X Wedding folder, FCP takes care of the rest. I save the project to that folder, and edit the project. When I export via Compressor, I make a folder inside X Wedding folder called DVD Files, and set Compressor to send the finished files there. When done,, Like I said I delete footage only to minimize space, and will delete render files if space is limited.

I use Capture now to import, main reason is I dont really need to worry about timecode, cinema tools, and all of the extras. Most jobs only take me 2 days to edit, export, make the DVD's and burn. And that is coming back with roughly 6 hours of footage.

To send everything to one folder, when you are going to capture footage, open your capture settings tab on your log and capture window, set the scratch disc to the new project folder. That is all I really do.


At one point I had seperate folders on seperate drives for each thing, render files, footage, thumbnail cache, project files, images, motion documents, etc. After loosing a drive, I learned it screwed me hard, so I do it this way now.

I have always thought of this being a sloppy way to do it, nice to know it might not be.

[Peter Rhalter]

I've been asked to explain my comment that the iMac and native HDV are not a great combination. My complaint relates to speed. While SD rendering is pleasantly speedy, HDV is sloooow. It is slow enough to break my editing flow and make me long for a faster system. I haven't tried using the intermediate codec yet, which may be the solution to editing HDV with an iMac, but if anyone wants to edit using native HDV I recommend a faster Mac. I am using a 24" 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 2 Gb RAM.

In regards to Davids question, "Do you keep the FCP application on the same drive as the scratch files etc?" I keep only my applications on the internal disk. Scratch, media and project files are on external disks. I learned to do this ages ago with other programs and it has served me well. Can't say for sure if it is really necessary with today's zippier machines.

Best wishes,
Peter
_____________________
Best Grand Canyon views
http://www.parkfilms.com/gcviewpoints.html

[Jim Fields]

I have the same machine you do, I have never, ever had any issues with FCP and my Internal 750GB drive. I have been using my 24" iMac since the day they came out to edit HDV video in HDV ( I shoot 720P 30 with my JVC HD110U ) and export it to SD via Compressor.

I am confused, my render times are nothing, I dont have to render unless I bring a motion file in, slap a half a dozen filters on each clip, Hell even using a 3 way color correction does not require a render.

If you guys are having that many issues with your 24 and FCS2, send me a PM and I will forward my phone number, and do my best to help you out.

[Dave Lammey]

Hi Jim: I'm using a Macbook Pro, 2.16Ghz with 2 G RAm, so roughly the same specs as your iMac, and I find that exporting from a native HDV timeline (1080i60) via compressor to an SD mpeg takes roughly 11 times the length of the project. So a 5-minute project takes about an hour, a 40 minute project 8 hours. Are you getting better export times?

BTW -- I tried an AIC project, and found that the export times did NOT improve. In discussing it with others, it sounds like AIC only hellps if you are using a lot of effects.

[Jim Fields]

Same, if not better.

Keep this in mind with FCP and Compressor...

Open up Activity Monitor before you export to Comp.
When you hit submit on Comp you will see your system go crazy. Comp takes so many resources that it leaves very little to FCP, when all FCP is doing is reading the render files of your project to send to Comp.

Take the same timeline, export 10 bit uncompressed NON self contained, project will take next to nothing to run through Comp than if you ran it through FCP.

Since I work on weddings all day every day, I have 4-8 items that need to go through Comp to get ready to burn, if I do it through FCP I am looking at doing it before I go to bed, If I export a QT movie uncompressed, I am looking at 2 hours.

I tried the same stuff on a MacPro, 4GB memory. Same render times, same export, well maybe a little snappier, but I found the iMac to be perfect for everything except a Shake render with 14 layers and 37 nodes.

Like I said, feel free to email me with a number, I have unlimited calling so I can call state side and help some of you guys out if needed.

[Dave Lammey]

Thanks very much, Jim ... so I'll try exporting to a non self-contained, 10-bit uncompressed QT movie first, as you suggested ...