quad core Mac Boot Camp issues
by Mary Waitrovich
on
Aug 4, 2008 at 7:32:52 pm
My manager decided my new machine was going to be a nice fast Mac Pro and I'm limited to XP Pro (rather than Vista) because our tech support isn't supporting Vista yet. My first ugly surprise was that the machine in Windows XP can only see 2 of the installed 4 GBs of RAM and apparently there is nothing to be done about that. (I already knew to forget about virtualization via Parallels or VMware because they don't support firewire).
So when I go to the task manager I see 8 processors. When I'm rendering with Vegas, I would expect to see all 8 processors cranking away. What I do see is full activity on the first processor, and a very small amount of activity on the other 7 processors. The rendering doesn't seem any faster than my old 4 year old PC work station. In fact, with HDV footage it seems a lot slower. Right now I'm rendering from 1080p HDV to NTSC widescreen avi and it's taking about 4 hours for a 13 minute video. Yes, there is a fair amount of green screen and compositing, but it seems like a long time.
I've also been getting a LOT of hanging and crashing with Vegas 8.0b on the new machine.
Is there anything I can do to improve this situation? Thanks for any thoughts anyone might have.
Re: quad core Mac Boot Camp issues by Allen Zagel on Aug 5, 2008 at 5:32:06 am
Hi Mary
I'm not sure but I don't think XP will see the extra RAM. I think you need Vista but I could be wrong.
My suggestion is to also post this in the Apple Mac forums. I just bought a MacBook Pro but haven't used BootCamp to install XP yet. I did get Final Cut Express to learn though. So I really don't know about the Mac Pro except that I plan to get one to replace my current HP editing machine.
I do know those forums there are also great for help. Not sure now many here are using Macs with Xp/Vista installed.
Re: quad core Mac Boot Camp issues by John Rofrano on Aug 5, 2008 at 12:34:51 pm
It's important to remember that multiple cores can only solve problems that can be multi-tasked. Your project may have an FX on it that is single threaded and so it doesn't matter how many cores you have, only one will be used. You might also be rendering to a format that does not have a multi-threaded codec and so again, it can only use one core.
As a test, place a DV AVI file on the timeline and render to DVD quality MPEG2. This will eliminate any FX as the problem and I know for sure that the MainConcept MPEG-2 render is multi-threaded because it maxes out my 4-cores. This should help you see how many cores Vegas can really use.
I believe that Vegas can only use 4 cores right now. I say this because in Options | Preferences | Video the maximum number of rendering threads is maxed out at 4. If Vegas brings your CPU utilization up to 50% that's as good as it will get (4 of the 8 cores would be half). You will need to wait for Vegas 64-bit to utilize all 8 cores but that will require Vista64.
Re: quad core Mac Boot Camp issues by Mary Waitrovich on Aug 5, 2008 at 3:33:46 pm
Thanks much. This is very interesting. I had no idea that multi-threading in rendering was dependent on plug-ins or formats. I did the test you suggested and was able to see all 8 processors chugging away and it was fast. It also worked as well for m2t HDV files without any effects. When I opened the project discussed above, I realized that I had HDV footage in a project file with HD project settings, and that no doubt caused the slow rendering and the problems. When I adjusted the project settings, with all my effects on, and rendered to mpg2, I only saw four of the processors working, so that must be from one of my applied filters.
I found the plug-in! by Mary Waitrovich on Aug 5, 2008 at 3:40:48 pm
I suspected that the plug-in affecting the application of all processors to the project might be Aav6cc, because it is an older third party plug-in and I was right. When I turned it off, all 8 processors were working. This is a shame, because I love Aav6cc. It allows the hue, saturation and lightness to be separately manipulated for 6 different colors. I mostly use it to pump up the saturation of green on green screen footage and it makes keying a lot easier.
Re: I found the plug-in! by Rick Wise on Aug 5, 2008 at 6:24:52 pm
Your comments about Aav6cc interest me very much. I have found that the only colors Aav6cc will actually change are Red and yellow. I posted about this a while back, and replies indicated that others have the same problem.
Rick Wise
director of photography
Oakland, CA
www.RickWiseDP.com
email: Rick@RickWiseDP.com
Re: I found the plug-in! by Mary Waitrovich on Aug 5, 2008 at 6:40:27 pm
Really? With a green screen clip, I apply the filter, set the "vector" drop down to green then increase the saturation slider to max. increasing lightness usually brightens the green a little too. I just tried it again and was able to change all 6 colors with the plug-in. I've been using it continuously since about Vegas 5 and am now on Vegas 8.0b and it still works.
I noticed the website for the plug-in no longer exists:
www.moosehill.se
I tried to email the developer, but haven't heard back yet.
Re: I found the plug-in! by Rick Wise on Aug 5, 2008 at 9:31:34 pm
I doubt that you'll hear from the developer. I did find that if I check, "Invert" I can get some action with green, etc. In normal mode, only yellow and red work. Wish I knew how to fix this.
As for boosting your green screen without using this plug-in, you could try secondary color corrector/select area dropper, and then push the green.
Rick Wise
director of photography
Oakland, CA
www.RickWiseDP.com
email: Rick@RickWiseDP.com
Re: I found the plug-in! by Mary Waitrovich on Aug 6, 2008 at 3:35:08 pm
Rick,
you might be interested to know I removed aav6cc from my project and that dramatically improved my render time, by about 75%. So, for me, that's that for aav6cc. I tried the secondary color corrector, but I wasn't able to improve the key as much, and I actually found that my results with no change at all to the green were just as good.
Mary
