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Which
G4 Power Mac Runs Final Cut Pro 2.0 The
Fastest? May
11th, 2001 Any
dual processor G4 is going to give the very best
performance since FCP is both AltiVec and MP
aware. Even the Dual G4/450 was faster than the
"solo" G4/733 and it's selling for only
$1595
at Club Mac. Apple supports Blue'n'White
G3's running Final Cut Pro 2.0 but not Beige
G3's, according to their documentation. I tried
running FCP 2.0 on a Beige MT (rev 1) with the
XLR8
MACh Velocity Dual G4/500 but FCP kept crashing.
I don't know if it's the compatibility issue or
something else. When
I tested the G4 Beige and the XLR8
Carrier MPe Dual G4/400 for the 9600 with Final
Cut Pro 1.0, they were both about equal to the
G4/733 in the Render test. I'm
still waiting to receive an RTMac board from
Matrox
that was promised back in March. If what I saw
at the January MacWorld is true, you won't have
the ultimate Final Cut Pro "machine" until you
add either the RTMac "real time render" card
from Matrox or the RTMax from ProMax.
Both cards are supposed to eliminate most or all
of the render time. TEST
NOTES TEST
HARDWARE: Dual G4/450 (Gigabit Ethernet),
PowerBook G4/500 Titanium, "solo" G4/500 (AGP),
Dual G4/500 (Gigabit Ethernet), Dual G4/533
(Digital Audio), "solo" G4/733 (Digital Audio).
See Apple's Tech Library for specs on G4
Desktops
and the PowerBook. All
test machines had at least 256M of RAM and Final
Cut Pro 2.0 was given 160MB. All were booted
from the same internal ATA/100 hard drive (IBM
60GXP 40G courtesy of OWC).
Final Cut Pro was launched from that drive and
used it for the scratch drive and export drive.
The only exception was the Titanium PowerBook
which booted from, launched from, scratched to,
and exported to a Granite
Digital FireWire enclosure with an IBM 75GXP 30G
drive courtesy of Trans
International. TEST
SOFTWARE & SETTINGS: In all cases, Mac OS
9.1 with QuickTime 5.01 was used, Virtual Memory
was OFF, Disk Cache was DEFAULT, and Appletalk
was OFF. The
first clip from the iMovie tutorial "dog bath"
was used. It is 7 seconds and 24 frames long. I
applied a Gaussian Blur (Alpha+RGB channel, 2
pixel radius) to the entire clip. Tests
performed with the use of a stopwatch
included: 1.
Render All (Hi Res) 2.
Export Final Cut Movie (DV NTSC 48KHz
SuperWhite, Video & Audio, Self Contained
Movie) 3.
Export QuickTime Movie without Pre-Rendering (2X
CD-ROM Sorenson Video) RELATED
TESTS Final
Cut Pro 1.2.5 versus Final Cut
2.0 FireWire
drive varies depending on model of
Macintosh WHERE
TO BUY FINAL
CUT PRO 2.0 upgrade can be purchased through the
Apple
Online Store
for $250 (or $125 if you are a educator). Or if
you don't own it, it's $999 for civilians, $499
for educators. Small
Dog and
Club
Mac have deals on
Dual G4 systems for as low as $1595. Both Sonnet and XLR8 Dual G4
CPU upgrades are available at great prices
through... See
my HOT
DEALS
page other deals on speed products. BARE FEATS HOME SPEED
TEST RESULTS
from Bare Feats (by CATEGORY) LINKS
to SPEED tests on other web sites HOT
SPEED DEALS DOWNLOADS
that add more SPEED SPEED
UPGRADE
guide © 2001 Rob Art Morgan
by rob
ART morgan,
Bare Feats Mad Scientist
with a little help from his DV Friends,
René
Sadae
and Paul
Minar,
and Richard Wood.The
new 2.0 version of Apple's Final Cut Pro is
definitely faster
than the old 1.2.5 version as you might have
seen from my comparison
test.
So what is the ultimate Final Cut Pro "engine"?
PERFORMANCE
ANALYSIS
... Small
Dog Electronics
... Other
World Computing
...
MacGurus
"BARE facts on Macintosh speed FEATS"
Feel free to email
, the webmaster and chief mad scientist