MacBook Pros; Powerful Enough?

[SPC]

On occasion I'm having issues running larger sessions with Pro Tools 8 on my MBP (2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB ram, OS 10.5.6). While trying to work in certain sessions I get the following message:

DAE can't get audio from the drive(s) fast enough. Your drive may be too slow or fragmented, or a firewire drive could be having trouble due to the extra firewire bandwidth or CPU load. (-9073)

I have 2 1TB drives (7200rpm) connected via USB2, to a D-link hub, to the right side USB port on my MBP. These 2 TB drives have been partitioned into a total of 4 500GB drives. My Playback Engine settings are 512 Samples, 2 Processors, and 90% CPU Limit. The DAE Playback Buffer Size is Level 2 and the Cache Size is Large. Picture is the standard quicktime video window blown up on a second monitor.

I'm thinking about losing the luxary of having a mobile laptop and selling it in order to buy and powerful enough Desktop Mac Pro. My questions are:

1) Have you found work-arounds for large sessions on you MBP?
2) Will the new MBPs solve these problems?
3) Which used MacPro (and specs) can I get away with to solve my problems?

Thanks,
SPC

[Pete Gates]

Your drives are the problem - and especially the hub. Pro Tools works best with internal IDE/SATA/SCSI drives or external Firewire but not USB(2). Dump the drives (or just use them for offline use) and get some decent Firewire ones and you'll be fine.

Pete

[SPC]

Hi Pete,

These drives are also firewire capable (Rocstor Rocpro 850 Hard Drive - 1TB - 7200rpm - USB 2.0, IEEE 1394b, Serial ATA/150 - USB, FireWire, SATA - External).

I began using them as firewire drives but something was funky with my setup a long while back and the solution was to use the drives as USB2. I think it had something to do with my MBP's firewire 400 & 800 port availability and my Mbox2 Pro. The details have faded but the solutions ended up being my current setup.

Thanks.

[infiniteloop]

yeah, USB 2 is terrible for sustained transfer. Think about putting another firewire bus in on the ExpressCard port for the Audio, maybe.

[SPC]

I see. Any recommended Expresscards, off the top of your head? If I understand this feedback correctly, my MBP should be just fine in handling large sessions? In other words, hold off on selling to get a beefed up Mac Pro?

[infiniteloop]

well, that kinda depends on what "large" sessions constitute, but just to give us an idea, used the "System Usage" tool to tell us how much RTAS capacity you're using on one of these sessions. I am guessing you won't have to get a new computer :)

As for Expresscard firewire adaptors, I don't know, I just know the the more separate firewire busses you have, the better :)

[SPC]

The CPU (RTAS) of this particular session is only 8%. We're talking 8 audio tracks of music files, 11 audio tracks of sound effects, one video track and 5 stereo aux channels. One aux send on a total of 11 tracks. And 1 or 2 instances of plugs on 5 of the auxes. I hit play and I get the (-9073) 2 seconds after.

In another session, the CPU (RTAS) is 21% and the "Disk" reads 83%. This session has 13 audio tracks, 1 video track, 8 aux channels, 12 instances of aux sends, 20 total plugs. Same result; I hit play and I get the (-9073) 2 seconds after.

My MBP has 2 USB ports on opposite sides, 1 firewire 400 and 1 firewire 800. I thinks my goal was to keep the Mbox2 Pro and the firewire drives off of the same bus. So the Digi tech support guy and I landed on using USB2 for the drives and living the Mbox2 Pro on the firewire 400 alone. There was also something about using the USB port on the right side of the MBP, if memory serves correctly. That's how I think it went (it was a while back... sorry).

[Ayush Ahuja]

Apparently, the firewire 400 and 800 on the MBP are on the same bus, so running two intensive firewire peripherals will not free things up. Why not try 1 drive on each USB port, that might help even things out a little, i've never come across much trouble from using one usb port more than the other i.e. I think they're both the same.

Here's how i've setup in the past for working on film reels (plenty of tracks) on my MBP.

usb port 1 -> Mbox 2 (not pro, so usb suffices)
usb port 2 -> to unpowered hub, attached dongle and a lacie d2 quadra drive for all audio. Ocassionally i used a second drive on usb which was a sound library clone, but i made sure it was set as 'T' in the workspace, so any audio i required off it would be copied to the main project drive.
firewire 400/800 -> dedicated to the video drive for glitch free playback.

I've also managed to have a similar workflow with the video file on the macintosh hd, which then provides an opening for another sound drive. Make sure your mov is well encoded and not too heavy for protools to display. If you're working off a single screen on your MBP, then you could even shrink down the video file and put less strain on PT!

If you keep your sound and picture on separate media, and put minimal workload on your macintosh HD (which is running the pro tools app) i've found it to be almost always successful for a reasonable track count for sound to picture.

Yush

[arvid.lind]

the CPU itself might be powerful enough, but the rest is not. I did some postwork on a G4 powerbook, using the ExpressCard slot for extra FW input( wich macbook Pro doesn´t have?) couple of years ago. Everything sounded right when bouncing, but the result sounded different. Pans way out of sync, etc, etc.

Yor way of better with any desktop.

[Eric Seaberg]

Even though your MBPro has two FW ports, they are on the same buss. I've had no problems over the last 8+ years using ANY firewire gear once I learned that, and placed PCMCIA or Express cards in my system for all FW drives, keeping the built-in for interfaces. I even have a PCI Firewire card in my G5 for the same reason.

The Express card I'm currently using on my MBPro is a StarTech #EC13942 with two FW400 ports. I also have an SIIG FW800 Express card depending on requirements.

Go to Other World Computing http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/noteb...ress34_Cardbus to see what they've got.