Why is my powermac slow?

[pianodude123]

(how come it never uses 100% of both CPUs?) it only uses about 1/2 of the total power...is there a way for it to put all system resources to this one app, cause i wont be doing anything else?

I am trying to have my computer encode video, from a project I make on imovie.

I used iDvd to burn the project. It goes through all the rendering/encoding, and it takes it an HOUR! This is a dual 2.7GHz powermac! The video is only 1:00 long! Then, the part that really annoys me is, once it is finished rendering, and all that stuff is complete, it goes to burn and the disc doesnt even spin up in the drive, when it says "There were errors found in the burning process"...or something like that??????
What is/am it/I doing wrong??

 

[Chundles]

I am trying to have my computer encode video, from a project I make on imovie.

I used iDvd to burn the project. It goes through all the rendering/encoding, and it takes it an HOUR! This is a dual 2.7GHz powermac! The video is only 1:00 long! Then, the part that really annoys me is, once it is finished rendering, and all that stuff is complete, it goes to burn and the disc doesnt even spin up in the drive, when it says "There were errors found in the burning process"...or something like that??????


ITS so Annoying!!! What is/am it/I doing wrong??

Is that 1:00 minute or 1:00 hour long?

If it's one hour long then real time encoding is pretty damned good.

 

[pianodude123]

Is that 1:00 minute or 1:00 hour long?

If it's one hour long then real time encoding is pretty damned good.

THat's 1:00 hour....its still slow....and it still doesnt burn....

 

[ChrisFromCanada]

I would try to save it as a disk image from iDVD then burn the resulting .iso file with either toast or Disk Utility.

 

[Dont Hurt Me]

Are you performance settings set to max?

 

[pianodude123]

how do you set the performance settings to max?

 

[Dont Hurt Me]

Go into your system preferences its under energy or screensaver or something. Our G4 doesnt have this so i dont know exactley but it in there somewhere for G5s.

 

[pianodude123]

k...i fixed that, but still "errors burning"

 

[pianodude123]

I have the worst luck with video editing, a completed DVD project is a rarety for me. I have about a 50% chance that a DVD wont get wasted. I switched to mac because of this, but still, no fix....I am upset with my computer

 

[Dont Hurt Me]

Bad DVDs? Iam a gamer not a video guru but there are plenty here. Im sure someone will see this thread and have advice to add, you can allways call apple or see the genius guys.

 

[pianodude123]

I am rendering another one....and....spinning beachball....

FROZEN...I cant believe it!!!!

This sucks


"
Want a crash course on the Mac? Lesson 1: It doesn’t crash. Built by the same folks who designed its rock-solid operating system and its award-winning applications, the Mac always starts up and never lets you down. "


Ya RIGHT!


...BTW, is there any way to get it to "start" responding...id hate to lose my progress..

 

[pianodude123]

I had THIS MUCH LEFT...and the F***er FROZE...

I HATE THIS PIECE OF CRAP!

EDIT:...i owe it some credit....it actually recovered itself...yayayayayay....but now the movie is going to come out shoddy.

 

[Laser47]

I had THIS MUCH LEFT...and the F***er FROZE...

I HATE THIS PIECE OF CRAP!

EDIT:...i owe it some credit....it actually recovered itself...yayayayayay....but now the movie is going to come out shoddy.

I absolutely hate when that happens.

 

[generik]

Wow, are you attempting to render the video in real time?

That's a pretty powerful machine if you ask me

 

[chaos86]

if the cpu usage never gets to 100%, thats because the bottleneck is in a different place, like the ram or the hard drive. the processor can only max out if the other components feed it information to chew on fast enough.

 

[Monyx]

I used iDvd to burn the project. It goes through all the rendering/encoding, and it takes it an HOUR! This is a dual 2.7GHz

Well to put it in perspective my old Dual Proc G4 would take 8-9 hours just to encode 1hr dvd, so your 2.7 is not slow - you just haven't experienced slow

 

[FocusAndEarnIt]

Well to put it in perspective my old Dual Proc G4 would take 8-9 hours just to encode 1hr dvd, so your 2.7 is not slow - you just haven't experienced slow

I agree. My G5 1.9GHz w/ 512MB RAM is sorta on the slow side when it comes to video editing . I hope when I buy RAM for it, this will change...

 

[nospleen]

Where did you get your 4 gigs of ram? Have you tried it with only the stock ram?

 

[reberto]

I agree. My G5 1.9GHz w/ 512MB RAM is sorta on the slow side when it comes to video editing . I hope when I buy RAM for it, this will change...

the "i" series computers are usually not to good at that

 

[hcuar]

I rendered a 1 hour video in iMovie in 1 hour and 30 minutes. I agree, I think the dual 2.7 should be faster than 1:1 rendering. Perhaps I'm wrong? I figured it'd take 45 minutes? Anyhow, that's still pretty impressive. My first computer would take your lifetime to render that movie. Be happy! I've had that same error when I rendered one of my movies. I redid the rendering, and it worked. Don't know why that happens.

BTW: you wouldn't want your PM to use 100 percent of both processors! It'd actually lock up. The system and other processes need some cycles to keep things going... Like your screen, mouse, keyboard.

 

[840quadra]

Lay off the crazy juice , step back and look at this closely.

1. What software is running at the same time?
2. What type / brand RAM is installed?
3. How big are your drives, and are you encoding from the SAME drives as your OS ?
4. What DVD's are you using, were they cheap and plentiful, or the other way around?
5. Do you have all the most recent updates, and are you running iDVD from ilife05 or older?

Some Troubleshooting steps.

1. Close ALL other programs running that you don't need
2. Reduce your memory to the level that came with your system (or run only 2 DIMMS) to see if it is more or less stable with less memory (your system will obviously be slower now)
3. Be calm, and document what is going on when it crashes, and look at the system logs.
4. Be sure to "Repair disk permissions" after a system crash that makes you shutdown your system, if you don't crashes in applications like this may stem up more often.

 

[DaftUnion]

If your saying your having consistent problems with burning...did you ever think that you may need to have the SuperDrive replaced in it? Yes, these things should always work perfect, but occasionally they don't...my iMac had burning problems but The Apple Store replaced the drive and everything works perfect now...remember too it's hardware--this stuff can malfuction--and has nothing to do with OS X. Try popping in a blank dvd, and try burning some data files onto it...if the disc fails then...it's comes down to incompatible dvd-r media -OR- if you go into applications/utilities/console and click on some of the triangles, you can get a description of what these error messages mean and find out if it's a malfunctioning SuperDrive or imcompatible media.

One last note: you need to try a DVD-R in it and not a CD-R if your going to see if it can do a successful burn because there's two different lasers in a SuperDrive--one for cd/one for dvd--different wavelenghts...so even if you are able to burn cd's, your laser for the DVD may be broken...just my two cents.

 

[Aurora]

Lay off the crazy juice , step back and look at this closely.

1. What software is running at the same time?
2. What type / brand RAM is installed?
3. How big are your drives, and are you encoding from the SAME drives as your OS ?
4. What DVD's are you using, were they cheap and plentiful, or the other way around?
5. Do you have all the most recent updates, and are you running iDVD from ilife05 or older?

Some Troubleshooting steps.

1. Close ALL other programs running that you don't need
2. Reduce your memory to the level that came with your system (or run only 2 DIMMS) to see if it is more or less stable with less memory (your system will obviously be slower now)
3. Be calm, and document what is going on when it crashes, and look at the system logs.
4. Be sure to "Repair disk permissions" after a system crash that makes you shutdown your system, if you don't crashes in applications like this may stem up more often.

Good advice, but repairing permissions would be pretty useless for this issue.

Also, if possible, be sure to remove any devices connected to unit (printers, hdds, hubs, etc etc etc). If still having issues, consider creating a new user account (with admin access) and try burning the project there. Be sure to copy your project over to the shared folder before doing such.

If the issue is not recreated in the new user, then we know there's something corrupt in the main. There's several options here. One, you could try removing the caches folder: hdd>users>home>library>caches and the idvd plist: users>home>library>preferences>com.apple.idvd.plist. Once removed, log out and then back in.

Or you could simple drag your prefs folder to the desktop, log out and in, and then test burning. This will reset all user-specific prefs (from the doc, finder, mail, etc etc etc etc etc), so be careful. Maybe be worth it, and prefs can always be dragged back to the new prefs folder that is populated in the home library after the logout/login.

Um...let's see. Another thing you may wanna do if none of that sounds cool is to just check your login items. In tiger you click blue apple, go to sys prefs, and then click on account. Unlock the window, and the choose the main account on left (should already be chosen). Click the tab above that says login items. It's best to have this as bare as possible. Leave itunes helper in there if you have an ipod. Otherwise...most stuff won't be needed. Delete what you can and restart.


One more thing, you can boot to tiger install dvd (put in dvd, restart holding down "c" key). Go passed select language screen, and then click utilities on the menu bar. Choose disk utility. On the left column choose mac hd (or whatever you named it) and then on the right choose repair disk (NOT repair permissions, trust me it's useless for this issue). Maybe it will find something in error. Maybe not.

Ok, gotta go, hope this stuff helps.

 

[Morn]

If it's not using 100% CPU then power management, ram, CPU should be working fine other whiles you'd expect it to be 100% and slow....
No, a likely possiblity is you're being limited in speed by the medium you're getting the data from.. encoding from off the hard drive or a DVD drive that's not keeping up with the G5?