Warning: very long post, sorry!!
I am trying to find ways to improve SA4's performance, so that I can record movies using autowrite as I am painting, and end up with a movie that reflects as closely as possible what I saw on the screen while painting.
This was not possible at all with 3.5, but with 4 I can almost do it, so of course, instead of being happy and just enjoying the improvement, I find myself more and more frustrated with the limitations :-)
The limitations I am talking about are due to the strain on system ressources when SA is trying to both process my painting actions and record a movie at the same time. Which involves taking 24 or 30 snapshots a second and saving them all to disk. Boggles the mind if you think about it...
The result is twofold. On the brushes first: some become sluggish and only follow my stylus with a delay. Others protest by transforming what should be a smooth curve into a series of straight lines.
But the worst problem is with the movie recording: instead of recording 30, 24 or even 15 frames a second, SA skips some of them. This results in all my movies playing back in accelerated motion, like very old movies played on a modern projector. I can compensate, to some extent, by slowing them down when editing, but it can be visible, and it's hard to know by how much I should slow down, especially since I think the number of dropped frames will change depending on the type of brush I use, and how much strain it puts on the system.
So. I have been experimenting with this, first to confirm my suspicions and then to try to improve matters.
I made several tests by timing myself with "always autowrite" activated. I paint for one minute and then close the stream and check how long a movie I have recorded.
The result is between 27 and 56 seconds, depending on the canvas size and the movie's frame rate. 56 seconds compared to one minute is not too bad, but I can only manage it with a small canvas size (768 x 432 pixels) and a recording frame rate of 15 frames per second.
I would like to improve on these if I can. I have been working at 1280 x 720 pixels lately, and I like that format. I can probably live with the low FPS, because I won't need to slow down the movie if I can manage to record at the "true" speed.
I just bought (last summer) a MacBook Pro with a 2.8 GHz Intel Core Duo processor, and all I can do to improve its performance is buy more RAM I guess. I ordered it and should have it next week, but I'm not sure how much of an impact it will have. I'll let you guys know of course.
I don't know if anyone has the same kind of requirement, because most of the forum discussion seems to be about processing existing movies with paseqs and such. But if anybody has suggestions to improve performance when using the paint synthesizer, I'm all ears :-)
You need to be a member of Studio Artist to add comments!
Replies
here is one site that shows you how ( the info on the size of the drive is dated but the MBP still uses 5400rpm as the std hd drive. upgrade to 7200rpm or 10,000rpm and you will see a big difference)
http://mcnitt.com/how-to-upgrade-macbook-macbook-pro-hard-drive-to-...
and the apple support site
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3419
My rule of thumb for heavy work is to use three drives: boot drive with OS and applications, largest fastest drive as scratch disk, and a third drive, fast too if possible, for source files.
Don't know if your MBP has a card slot (I just saw that at present only the 17" MBP has it, so dumb, I have an older 17" and was planning on getting a 15" soon, much more manageable, but without that card slot, it's not "good enough"), but I am using an SATA enclosure with Port Multiplier, and the speeds are phenomenal, even my old dual 2 GHz G5 (souped-up) can do 720p clips.
I trust a Mac Pro with the same RAID enclosure would do HD (1080p) without any problem.
Working also with an iMac (Intel), I can see that its main imitation is drive speed, and given it only has FW 400 capabilities, that limits greatly what I can do (it flies with SD material though).
But your MBP could use at least an FW 800 RAID 0 which should speed up things significantly, or if you have the MBP model that has a card slot (for one of these), you could go eSATA with an SATA enclosure with Port Multiplier, and you'll have access to speeds you won't believe.
I could smack myself for spending 500 euros on memory when getting a faster hard drive is probably much more effective in this case. And cheaper. Oh well, memory is always good I guess.
I just checked the Apple website, and it seems that my internal HD is a 5400 rpm SATA drive. I can upgrade to 7200 rpm. Do you think a FW 800 external hard drive could be faster?
Edit: you're right, I don't seem to have a card slot.
So I would start there, given you can always put the pulled drive into an enclosure, not a real loss, and see if that is good enough.
For what it is worth, I ran my SIGGRAPH course from an external FW 400 which booted SIGGRAPH's own iMac in Leopard (my configuration, it saved me the trouble of installing my apps and tweaking SIGGRAPH's computer to my liking), and all my Keynote material (many QT clips) was on a 2.5" SATA 7200 rpm drive inside a USB 2 enclosure.
I was surprised to see that it worked without my having to copy the stuff off the USB drive onto the iMac's internal drive. I credit the 7200 rpm speed more than the USB2's.
Then if it is not yet good enough, going for an external fast solution would be just about the best you could do.
And in my opinion, adding RAM is never a waste of money, never.
Bonne chance !
Well I can always start with upgrading the internal drive. I got notification that the replacement memory chips are available at the store, so I'll go there tomorrow morning and try to get a hard drive too. There is a 500 Gb Seagate that looks right...
-
1
-
2
of 2 Next