motion is killing me...

[nikolai.]

does anyone else have problems with motion files causing their FCP projects to slow down? it seems like anytime i do something in motion then bring it in to FCP, the simplest tasks take my system forever. from just trying to highlight a clip to render times. it's killing me.

nik.

[Ben Balser, ACT]

Motion files in FCP do not react as fast as QT files. But there should not be any slow downs to anything except rendering and playback of those specific Motion files.

Can you be more precise about what exactly is slowing down, and your system specs, and software versions?

[nikolai.]

ok. i'm running the first FCS on a powermac with a 2 GHz powerPC G5 and 1.5 gb of ram. tiger OS.
i know i need some upgrades but this is a work computer and our parent company is in bankruptcy. so i'm having to make do.
whenever i have a motion file in FCP, it takes a while for anything to register. say i just want to move the playhead. when i click down the timeline i have to give it at least 5 seconds for it to register what i did. that's a long time for such a simple command and it affects my workflow. every action has a slower response. can i export motion projects as QT files? i hadn't really thought of that.

[Ben Balser, ACT]

1st, upgrade to at least 4GB RAM for sure! Is your secondary (media) drive internal?

[nikolai.]

unfortunately upgrades are on a freeze. so you would say it's more of a RAM issue?

as for the secondary drive, its an external 500GB with about 160GB available.

[Ben Balser, ACT]

1st, upgrade to at least 4GB RAM for sure! Is your secondary (media) drive internal? Motion projects are pretty memory intensive in FCP. Outside of using min 4GB RAM if not 8, largest internal secondary drive you can get (larger is faster), and make sure ALL media and application project files are on that secondary (media/scratch) drive.

[Ben Balser, ACT]

Yes, internal SATA drives are way, way faster and give better performance than FW drives. And FW800 way outperforms FW400. Also, if you're doing any flavor of HD, internal SATA drives are a MUST. 1TB that's super fast is less than $200 (WD at Other World Computing.com).