Performance on a Macbook Pro 17"

[Dave Cox]

Hey, I've done some searching on this topic (both google and here) and I'm really looking to get some answers or at least comparisons.

I'm currently working on a feature shoot as the data manager, as well as stills photographer (though I don't have a camera..). This requires watching a lot of footage through Redcine.

We're shooting in 4KHD with a guide track for audio, on build 17. Because we're pretty low budget and this loading station is still in construction in a few different ways, the external drives are usb2.0 and firewire 800 (raid). The macbook is a 2.4ghz high res 17" with 4gb ram and the nvidia 8600m gpu.

Right now playback tends to stutter pretty seriously, using the ctrl+f1 trick I see that it rarely gets up above 18fps even on 1/4 res medium, which is rather concerning to me, I was really hoping this hardware would be capable of smooth playback at least at 1/4 res.

Anyone else have similar experiences? are my drives not fast enough? is the video card wrong? should I just have an octo-mac for what I'm trying to do here?

in the meantime I will probably turn off audio playback since keeping up with audio causes some of the stuttering as it skips frames to keep in sync.

[Luca Immesi]

Hey, I've done some searching on this topic (both google and here) and I'm really looking to get some answers or at least comparisons.

I'm currently working on a feature shoot as the data manager, as well as stills photographer (though I don't have a camera..). This requires watching a lot of footage through Redcine.

We're shooting in 4KHD with a guide track for audio, on build 17. Because we're pretty low budget and this loading station is still in construction in a few different ways, the external drives are usb2.0 and firewire 800 (raid). The macbook is a 2.4ghz high res 17" with 4gb ram and the nvidia 8600m gpu.

Right now playback tends to stutter pretty seriously, using the ctrl+f1 trick I see that it rarely gets up above 18fps even on 1/4 res medium, which is rather concerning to me, I was really hoping this hardware would be capable of smooth playback at least at 1/4 res.

Anyone else have similar experiences? are my drives not fast enough? is the video card wrong? should I just have an octo-mac for what I'm trying to do here?

in the meantime I will probably turn off audio playback since keeping up with audio causes some of the stuttering as it skips frames to keep in sync.

I think it's a problem of format. 4k HD doesn't work well. In 1/4 res medium you can have real time or close to real time playback (24/25 fps) with 4k 16:9 or 4k 2:1.

[Dave Cox]

That would make sense to me. REDCODE isn't exactly lightweight :)

I guess it might be worth waiting for a quad core laptop with firewire 800 that runs os x..