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How can I make "Final Cut Pro" render faster? Using a 2.66 GH Quad Core. I put 10 GB of memory on.
Even when I make sure that the clips have the same settings, just one or two effects and it can take 11 minutes to render one minute of video. Or is that just the way things are?
Well - yes, it can take that long, but it depends on what you're actually doing - especially since you've provided zero information on what effects you're trying to use and not even what format you're working in, as well as whether it's the base-model 2009 or the base-model 2006.
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It is worth looking at Activity Monitor while the rendering is running to see what is the bottle neck. Look at if the CPU is at 100% or if the amount of used memory is maxed out or if the disk activity is high.
If the CPU activity is 100% then there isn't much that you can do about that other than get a faster machine as CPU upgrades are just not a good option on a Mac.
If the used Memory is maxed out and there is no free memory then you could add more memory. Also depending on what version of the Mac Pro you have you might have one of the ones that are tri-channel where you want to add the memory in sets of 3 instead of pairs for better performance. If it is a newer machine that may be the case and if so when upgrading you would want to buy a set of 3 instead of set of 2 or 4 dimms.
For the disk activity you should look at the peak and current disk speed both in data and in i/o. Desktop hard drive should be able to push 40 to 50 MB/sec. If you are getting to there with a nice solid line during your rendering then you may be i/o bound on the storage. You can fix this in a few ways. One would be to get a faster drive like an SSD and install it in the system to do the video work on. That may be a really expensive option. Another one you could go with would be to buy a couple extra drives (you have a mac pro so you have 4 drive bays) and set up what Alex Lindsay likes to call the scary raid. What you do is set up a RAID set with 2 or 3 drives in a RAID 0. This is a striped RAID not a mirrored RAID. There is no redundancy to this as any drive failing will make you loose all the data on the drives. But you get much better performance as you spread the work out over all the drives at once. You then use this drive as your work drive and save your projects and final product off to other storage.
If the CPU activity is 100% then there isn't much that you can do about that other than get a faster machine as CPU upgrades are just not a good option on a Mac.
If the used Memory is maxed out and there is no free memory then you could add more memory. Also depending on what version of the Mac Pro you have you might have one of the ones that are tri-channel where you want to add the memory in sets of 3 instead of pairs for better performance. If it is a newer machine that may be the case and if so when upgrading you would want to buy a set of 3 instead of set of 2 or 4 dimms.
For the disk activity you should look at the peak and current disk speed both in data and in i/o. Desktop hard drive should be able to push 40 to 50 MB/sec. If you are getting to there with a nice solid line during your rendering then you may be i/o bound on the storage. You can fix this in a few ways. One would be to get a faster drive like an SSD and install it in the system to do the video work on. That may be a really expensive option. Another one you could go with would be to buy a couple extra drives (you have a mac pro so you have 4 drive bays) and set up what Alex Lindsay likes to call the scary raid. What you do is set up a RAID set with 2 or 3 drives in a RAID 0. This is a striped RAID not a mirrored RAID. There is no redundancy to this as any drive failing will make you loose all the data on the drives. But you get much better performance as you spread the work out over all the drives at once. You then use this drive as your work drive and save your projects and final product off to other storage.
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