Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and Editing suites

I just put my 2 MBPs through the paces with FCS2 and FCS3, including Color and Motion renders and am pleased to say no issues yet. Even threw in a quick Shake render without problems (Oh how I wish it were 64bit). Mostly presets on an old project with a mix of DVCPROHD, XDCAM EX and HDV, all rendered to ProRes 444 in Color. Only had 1.5hr to play with it but so far so good.

No time to test Premiere Pro and AEFx CS4, but I suspect it'll all run slower.

Issues with stills related programs are mentioned here:

http://wetpixel.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=32066

Hi, does anyone know if Final Cut Pro 4 is supported by Snow Leopard?

Also is there a big difference in performance between the Quad and 8 core or "Octocore"

p.s just made that "octocore" bit up as it sounds quite funky....

Richard

Compressor is optimal at 4-8 cores, depending on machine bus speed. No idea about FCP4.

Hi, does anyone know if Final Cut Pro 4 is supported by Snow Leopard?

I would doubt that Final Cut 4 would be officially supported. Final Cut 4 was non Universal Binary, which Apple did not recommend for Intel Machines. Snow Leaopard is only for Intel Machines.

As to getting Final Cut 4 to run on a Intel Machine running Snow Leopard, well there is always the newest iMovie in case that combination drives you crazy

Snow Leopard doesn't seem to work with EX-1 workflow, and it may be some time before they work that out unfortunately... unless anyone on here has a fix

Final Cut 4 will certainly not work with Snow Leopard. FC4, additionally, did not offer any support for formats above DV.

There have been many upgrades lately from 3rd party companies so if you installed the new FC Studio you may want to check. There's even an update to Boris Calligraphy 2.2 which is found in FCS. Also Gen Arts Sapphire, Core Melt, Noise Industries, SnapzXPro and more I can't remember.

While I don't have an EX-1, what would stop you from manually bringing in the clips to your capture scratch and transcoding them to the Pro Res codec of your choice? You wouldn't even need FCP to be open until you got to the transcode step.

Steve

Snow Leopard doesn't seem to work with EX-1 workflow, and it may be some time before they work that out unfortunately... unless anyone on here has a fix

Simon, I know Sony updated the EX1 drivers in early sept. Google it.

Thanks for all the feedback, looks like I will have to figure the software into the budget as well.....

Simon, I know Sony updated the EX1 drivers in early sept. Google it.

Cheers - I just did, on creative cow it seems semi positive.. not sure i'd want to try it out on my only machine i'll try it on my old one next month

If it's your only machine, why use snow leopard? Too many unknowns sofar.

If it's your only machine, why use snow leopard? Too many unknowns sofar.

If it ain't broke. Why fix it?

Bingo!

 

If it ain't broke. Why fix it?

Latest and greatest syndrome maybe ... I'm sticking to what I know ... and thats very little ...

Dive safe

DeanB

I'm still waiting for Apple to send me their NFR copy of SL but there have been very few complaints on the editing boards and forums. Mary Lynn installed it and said she loves it.

Steve

I've got SL on my new MacbookPro (came with it), but I've not upgraded my desktop yet which is still running Tiger. Does anyone know what the advantages of SL are for a Quad core Xeon? I mean if everything starts running in 64 bit then it will be worth the upgrade.

Cheers, Simon

It won't start running everything in 64bit because most of the software is not written for it. It will, however, help you make better use of your cores cpu's and thus some things will be smartly speeded up. Compressor can be expected to run significantly faster.

Steve

It won't start running everything in 64bit because most of the software is not written for it. It will, however, help you make better use of your cores cpu's and thus some things will be smartly speeded up. Compressor can be expected to run significantly faster.

Steve

When I get a break in the action I will probably reconfigure my tower to make a new boot partition to see how it goes. Have been running FCS 3 a bit on the laptop and that has been a pretty good experience so far....

It won't start running everything in 64bit because most of the software is not written for it. It will, however, help you make better use of your cores cpu's and thus some things will be smartly speeded up. Compressor can be expected to run significantly faster.

Steve

Steve

Great news on Compressor, but any idea on an improvement to the speed of Motion? Motion runs really slow on my desktop and everything can grind to a halt at times, but that is probably be due to only having 2gb ram. I know I need to upgrade that as it is cheap now (would have cost a small fortune two years ago), but it is one of the many things that I've just not got around to doing!

Cheers, Simon

When I get a break in the action I will probably reconfigure my tower to make a new boot partition to see how it goes. Have been running FCS 3 a bit on the laptop and that has been a pretty good experience so far....

Are you getting speed improvements on FCS3 Drew, or just a general good upgrade?

Are you getting speed improvements on FCS3 Drew, or just a general good upgrade?

Overall Simon it seems a bit perkier, though I have not done any real A/B testing on the speeds and my Laptop is not really loaded (only 2 Gbs of RAM) and the hard drive is getting kind of full, in fact I dumped alot off the hard drive to get room for VM. It is set up right now via Ethernet to my Tower and some of the internal drives on the Tower and also external drives that are on the Tower via eSATA. Have been doing work with it fact since I have a few things that I am juggling right now and off loaded some rendering and Compressing to it and have been pretty pleased.

I could put through some more paces for you, but was able to encode a 30 second clip from my 5D Mark II to Pro Res in about a minute and a half, the Tower took about a minute (though to be fair the Tower was also running renders and other things in Color at the same time ) Also did some rough editing of the clips on the recent trip to San Diego in my hotel to just play around. Had all the clips and render folders on my laptop (which was pretty close to full at that point), all big no-nos for performance, but still was able to do things. When I upgrade the hard drive, which I hope to do soon, I will probably have a partition with Studio 2 and another with Studio 3 to do a better comparison.

There were enough little bits and pieces (and some bigger ones) in the upgrade that made it a pretty easy decision for me, was only $299. But keep in mind, as Drew mentioned above, sometimes going with if it ain't broke don't fix it is a pretty good piece of advice. The Studio is still new and going to have some issues to iron out. Unless you have dedicated drives or partitions, or can otherwise roll back, you may want to hold off. Of course if you have the dedicated drives or partitions and do not mess with stuff that works, it is something that looks very worthwhile so far.

No dedicated drives or partitions here - that's where I become a bit of a technophobe and everything starts to sound like a foreign language! A speed boost in Compressor would save me an awful lot of time but I wont have to make a decision about upgrading the desktop until next year as I'll be field editing on the laptop (SL/FCS2) for the next 6 months or so. Hopefully all the kinks will have been ironed out by the time we get back so I can make a decision then.

Cheers, Simon

Compressor is dependent on I/O bus speed, RAM and number of processors. It isn't tied into the GPU yet (unlike Adobe CS4 in Vista 64). There is no significant speed increase for compressing files except due to ProRes LT, which quickens the output to Compressor. Otherwise it's still hardware limited since it's not 64bit.

I mean if there was a significant boost in rendering, don't you think Apple would be hooting it like they did from FCP to FCS2?

There are very useful new tools in FCS3, including ProRes LT etc, which will boost workflow speed a little. But since it's not 64bit (hence completely Cocoa), there's no significant speed increase. I say 64bit is about 1 -2 years away.

Right now, if you want faster file encoding on OSX with just one machine, try Telestream's Episode Encoder/Pro which is fastest for H264 and WMV encoding on OSX and also supports plenty of other codecs with more settings. With Flash, you want CS4 Flash or Squeeze 5 (for Flash).