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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Dual quad core problem playing 2k proxies/wrappers

J

Joe Kane

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Hi

Am cutting a project in FCP with proxies (2K). I've just upgraded to a dual quad core (2.26GHz) mac pro and it struggles to play 2K proxies even with RT set to low quality. My older dual core 3GHz manages it fine with 2K, and I've used it on several projects with no problem.

the new machine has 12 GB of RAM (6 x 2GB) & OS 10.5.7 and I upgraded to a radion HD4870 graphics card. Am running the rushes off a GRAID which is also working fine on the older machine at 2K

The suppliers of the mac (Jigsaw) are telling me that FCP isn't able to make use of the 8 core and therefore effectively it's just like using 2 slower (2.26GHz) processors than the old machine.

Any ideas?

thanks
 
Presumably, your G-RAID is hooked up via FireWire? If that's the case, are there any other FireWire devices attached to the bus that might be choking the available bandwidth? Also, is all your software up to date (FCP, Quicktime, RED plugins, etc.)? If you open up one of the 2K proxies in Quicktime (not in FCP), does it play without dropping frames?

What Jigsaw is telling you doesn't seem to make sense knowing that you were doing fine on an old 3GHz dual. In fact, the new Nehalem Xeon cores are faster clock for clock than the previous Core 2 Xeon CPUs were. So more than likely, you can rule out the CPUs.
 
yes - hooked up via FW 800. no other devices, all software up to date and same as 3GHz machine. QT in 'stand alone' has the same problem dropping frames but that happens on the 3GHz machine too, but old machine plays 2K in FCP fine.

Jigsaw are now telling me that FCP isn't making any use of the 8 Cores and therefore treats the 2 quad cores as just two single processors that are slower than the old 3GHz.

is that true?
 
Well Jigsaw are often full of it, the point is that although the new Nehalem processors appear to have a slower clock speed they get much more done at a given clockspeed. So in your case your 2 Nehalem cores at 2.26Ghz should handily be quicker than the 3Ghz Woodcrest or Harpertown Xeons that were in your old machine.

Think "Mhz Myth" from the PowerPC days, the difference is that now its actually true...

Do a drive speed check to make sure that you are actually getting a decent data rate from your GRaid.
 
Switch to e-sata and you won't have playback problems. FW800 = 800 e-sata= 3000. Your killing the bandwidth by using proxies over FW800, your not sending the CPU enough data to process in real-time.

By the way an e-sata card for your Mac is anywhere from $40-$100.
 
Joe Kane said:
Hi

Am cutting a project in FCP with proxies (2K). I've just upgraded to a dual quad core (2.26GHz) mac pro and it struggles to play 2K proxies even with RT set to low quality. My older dual core 3GHz manages it fine with 2K, and I've used it on several projects with no problem.

the new machine has 12 GB of RAM (6 x 2GB) & OS 10.5.7 and I upgraded to a radion HD4870 graphics card. Am running the rushes off a GRAID which is also working fine on the older machine at 2K

The suppliers of the mac (Jigsaw) are telling me that FCP isn't able to make use of the 8 core and therefore effectively it's just like using 2 slower (2.26GHz) processors than the old machine.

Any ideas?

thanks
Click to expand...

What is the playback framerate of your proxies in Quicktime? I'm on an 8 core 2.93 (nehalem) and it says 12fps. What are you guys getting on a 2k proxy?
 
I actually average about the same frame rate using playing 2K proxies in Quicktime over a RAID-0 on my 8-core 2.8GHz Harpertown. When you play the proxies, your machine has debayer the video pulled from the R3D file on the fly.

Something tells me that as Quicktime (among other applications, like FCP) become more multiprocessor aware, we'll get faster playback because certainly, a 2-disk RAID-0 that pushes around 225MB/sec read (per AJA hardware test) should have more than enough disk bandwidth. My CPU monitors hover around 25-30% during 2K proxy playback. Does it justify my theory? I'm not totally sure, but it seems to make perfect sense...
 
Not sure if anyone is still watching this thread, but we've been having playback problems lately with the H proxies as well on our Quad-core Mac Pro.

About 6 months ago we cut a project in FCP with the proxies and had no problems whatsoever, even over FireWire 800. Playback, roundtrip through Crimson. Everything worked fine.

Now we are trying to do the same exact process, but we can't playback the proxies in FCP or even Quicktime without the footage dropping frames.

It has become rather frustrating, but for now we are working in ProRes 422.

Has anyone looked into this issue?

Our config:

Mac Pro 2 x 3 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon
10 GB RAM
ATI Radeon X1900 XT
BlackMagic DeckLink HD Extreme
 
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