HDWarrior on Major problems with FCP X Editing

HD Warrior has an article on having major problems with FCP X’s timelines, especially very complex ones, that in fact may be show stopping.

I already hate the unorganizable timeline of FCP X, though I only used version 10.0, and this is problems with the latest and greatest 10.0.8. Too me an unorganizable timeline is next to useless, but one that has problems like this even more so.

Is this the deathnell for the new Apple MacPro

Arstechnica is reporting that Acer one of the leaders in Thunderbolt is dropping it for at least the next year. The entire new MacPro is dependent on Thunderbolt to act as it’s expansion, since it has no user addable PCI slots. So you must use expensive Thunderbolt expansion to add accessories to your new Cylinder MacPro. The thing is that so far Thunderbolt support is pretty underwelming. There are some good raid enclosures, but almost nothing for just hard drive housings for your old drives, and everything else is very expensive. In fact there are very few PC motherboards with Thunderbolt, and none with support for Dual Xeons, so it is very very niche!

Everyone is betting on USB 3, which is almost as fast (and plans on getting even faster, and has backwards compatibility), which every PC has, and yes the MacPro has a few ports, but not enough.

And Thunderbolt is not really a PCI replacement. It is fast, but not nearly as fast as PCI, so you can’t say put an external NVIDIA video card for CUDA support. It would just be too slow.

And without PC support it will always be a very Niche product.

Makes me think if I want to stay with Mac I will have to do a Hackintosh, which are notoriously unstable, but could at least run windows easily, and have everything I want internally instead of in a spiderweb of external expensive thunderbolt peripherals!

I don’t want to have to move fully to windows, but even now I am running bootcamp. And Windows 8 boots faster on my Mac than Mac OS X, and I can build a PC with almost all the expansion I want within a single case with a single power cord. I mean I already have such a serious snake of power cable is am surprised it doesn’t trip the fuse more often!

OS X Issues, Quicktime died but I fixed it, but Finder is still slow

Been having some serious OS X issues of late.

First quicklook died in my finder. Couldn’t see any quicktime movies, and I realized also could not open then in Quicktime, quicktime was basically dead. I tried booting as Root and the issue persisted so I realized it was not my user file, and was something with my system. The problem also persisted in Safe Mode, so it had to be a system issue.

Since my last major issue was a major system fault, I currently have a spare 2 GB hard drive, so I installed OS X on it and moved my user over to it using migration assistant to see if the problem persisted. Twice when I did it the computer froze. It was on, but all USB devices were unpowered, and pulling them and plugging them back in didn’t help, and the monitor was black. So I re-installed OS X a second time, and then started it before migrating my old user, and turned off sleep and it migrated fine. And that system worked fine, quicktime was good and everything was there. Since everything had moved over OK, and I now had a backup (beyond my Time Machine), I decided to try re-installing OS X over the old one using my new 10.8.4 recovery partition, and after that OS X booted fine (well a few things are weird, like Sugar Sync, X-marks and it seems Java is now gone for CrashPlan).

After the install my computer boot much faster. I have a PC NVIDIA GTX 670 for my graphics card, so it doesn’t show the mac startup screens until it goes gray and the desktop appears, and it was taking a good minute to boot, but now it boots in under 30 seconds, so that is great. And Quicktime now works fine, as does quicklook. No idea what happened to cause it, it just happened.

And I have already run Diskwarrior and TechTool as well as ClamXav, so I have no issues with drives or viruses. No idea what tanked my quicktime.

The one issue I have been having that persists is a slow finder. For the last 6 months or so my finder has been very slow and gets the beachball of slowness all the time. I mean all the time, and I have not been able to fix the issue, no matter what I do.

I have been trying to clean out my user to see if that is it, and have been using CleanMyMac 2, and manually cleaning as well. Nothing has helped the finder issue so far.

I even found this Apple Support forum thread, where they tell you to try this terminal command to see what is installed as finder extension. “kextstat -kl | awk ‘ !/apple/ { print $6 } ‘”

For results I get:

com.microsoft.driver.MicrosoftKeyboard
com.microsoft.driver.MicrosoftKeyboardUSB
 
For my Microsoft Ergo Keyboard
 
jp.plentycom.driver.SteerMouse
 
For my Trackball
 
com.razer.common.razerhid
 
For my Razer gaming keyboard
 
com.sonnettech.driver.SonnetSATA
 
for my Sonnet Tempo SATA E4P PCIe via which I run my SATA drives for editing
 
com.SafeNet.driver.Sentinel
 
How I run Lightwave 3D
 
com.makemkv.kext.daspi
 
For makemkv
 
com.AmbrosiaSW.AudioSupport
 
I am removing this WireTap Studio KEXT to see if that helps
 
com.nvidia.CUDA
 
For my Geforce GTX 670
 
If anyone has any ideas on how to speed my finder back up without having to re-install everything on a clean OS X install I would greatly appreciate any help!

How will the new MacPro work with BootCamp?

MacPro-Black

Of course Apple has announced the new strange MacPro, though not answered all of our questions about it. And my biggest question at the moment is about BootCamp, which because of Windows limitations of only being installed within the computer.

hero_bootcamp

I know on Laptop’s the only solution then is to partition your SSD harddrive and install windows there, but on current MacPro’s you can use an entire secondary hard drive as your bootcamp partition.

The new MacPro is run by a single SSD harddrive, so as of now it looks like you will have to partition, and install Windows on that, which means you will need a very large and expensive SSD drive to fit a full working windows environment and a full working Mac environment.

My current MacPro’s boot drive is a 3TB hard drive, which has 1.43 TB used. And 902.4 GB of that is used by my user. The scary part of that is that is with all of my extensive iTunes library on an external SAS. And that still leaves 500GB of data for my system and applications on Mac, which is pretty big for an SSD drive. I know there are ways to move your user to a separate hard drive, but it isn’t easy and is easy to really screw up your system! And honestly I wouldn’t really want my user to be external to the system.

Of course much can be moved out of my user, I have 219 GB in Parallels, which I could easily stop using now that I use bootcamp. And I have 117 GB in MobileSync files, which seems like an awful lot of iOS backups. And I just looked and After Effects CC has 107 GB of Disk Cache in my Application Support folder! Youch! Need to figure that out. Hell I have 14.3 GB of Mailboxes for Mail! Youch that is a lot of files, but still files within my User folder that would take up too much space on a single SSD drive!

Well it is a moot point right now, as I have my old MacPro, and couldn’t afford a new model even if it was out and all the questions were answered, but what freaks me out the most is see myself leaning more towards building a bad ass PC, and I really don’t want to give up on Mac as a platform. So maybe a Mac Laptop and a PC, or so I got he Hackintosh route? Some say they are so unstable and hard to upgrade (as you have to wait till files are updated and hacked so you can upgrade), but then I could have a Mac and a PC and have what I really want, a tower bigger than a current old tech MacPro. Something like the ASUS z9PE-D8 WS motherboard in the EEB form factor with dual Xeon’s. That could literally stomp on the single Xeon in the new MacPro and i could run Dual NVIDIA Geforce for Titan’s for graphics. That would be an amazing machine, expensive sure, but I would have so much fast internal storage and I wouldn’t have to invest in a ton of money in Thunderbolt peripherals (especially since Thunderbolt has not really caught on, and it doesn’t seem to be catching on very big in the PC world which means it will always be a niche product).

New MacPro GeekBench Scores

Well the new MacPro (not the final release version) is showing up in MacBench scores according to MacRumors, and the results are pretty good. Currently getting a 23901.

My MacPro model stock rates an 11970, and mine currently rates at 13510, so it is about the speed of my stock machine faster. Pretty impressive. Still there are Hackintosh’s easily getting 28000 or higher (if overclocked), so it is not as impressive as it could be!