Motion 5 and iMac 5K

I have a new 5K iMac, loaded with i7 4ghz processor, 24 gigs of ram, 1 TB flash, Radeon R9 M295X with 4 gigs.

All updates have been done to the OS and software. Running Motion 5.1.2.

I am not a pro user when it comes to vide0 work, I just do simple little things here and there for friends functions. I have a video, ultra simple. It is a painted picture of a little village at night in the winter. I have use the particle emitters in Motion to have snow falling, and thats it. I get constant beachballs when scrolling through this 5 min video. The entire project size is under 10mb.

The video properties are:
Preset: Presentation - Large
Width 1024
Height 768
Pixel Aspect Ratio: Square
Field Order: None
Frame Rate: 30.00 fps
Duration: 350 seconds
Theme: None
Background colour: Black
Background: transparent

If Motion is beach balling with a simple thing like that, I cannot imagine doing any heavy work. I am curious if this is a problem with my machine, or this is just the way things are with this type of video work or if a problem with motion. I could send over the file I have created if someone else wanted to let me know how it works on their machine. Hoping to find someone with similar specs to my iMac for a proper comparison. I really do not want to lug this thing into the Apple store only to be told this is normal.

Depends on how heavy the particle emitter is. How many particles? Life, speed, etc?

Also, for video it is always best to put your media and projects on a secondary drive. In your case, a USB 3.0 or T'bolt external drive. Free up some of that very limited bandwidth from your system drive.

Also, in the Render menu, top right of the Canvas, turn off everything you don't need. Like lighting, shadows, reflections, frame blending, etc. And in the Render menu there, set the quality to normal or draft, and Render to half. See if any of that helps.

Motion is a power hungry app. I will chew up and spit out GPU's like nobody's business. That iMac you have is driving a hell of a display. Not sure how much GPU resources are left over for something GPU hungry like Motion. Haven't seen any bench marks about that.

But try those Render menu settings. See what happens.

BenB... Wow! Words of wisdom there! SimplyMac has this model in their store down the road from me. Maybe if I have some time this weekend I'll head up there and conduct some test. Would be nice to know before I commit to one. No matter what it's gonna burn up my 2009 2.66 i5.

Well I did make it better thanks to BenB pointing out the render menu. I scaled things down, turned off all the lighting, shadows, blending, etc etc. Brought the quality down to half. Thinks run MUCH faster now. Still some beach balling but nowhere near as bad as before.

I am not sure how heavy the particle emitter is, I have not tweaked it at all as I was happy with it as it was.

In regards to bandwidth, what does that mean? I have a lot of free space on my hard drive, 600+ gigs of free space and it is flash, so it is very fast. I am not sure what the benefit would be of putting it on an external when working on a project.

Particle system are notoriously complex and take a lot of processing power. I'm glad that turning off the thing Ben suggested has improved matters but remember a particle system is a system, and so unlike a video frame is dependent on all the information that has come before. For example if you skip forward to ten minutes the iMac has to process the snowfall for all the previous frames to give you you final image. Assuming 25 fps the particle system has to work out 25x60x10 frames worth of info. That's enough to make any system, regardless of how powerful, beachball.

Seamusvfx wrote: Particle system are notoriously complex and take a lot of processing power. I'm glad that turning off the thing Ben suggested has improved matters but remember a particle system is a system, and so unlike a video frame is dependent on all the information that has come before. For example if you skip forward to ten minutes the iMac has to process the snowfall for all the previous frames to give you you final image. Assuming 25 fps the particle system has to work out 25x60x10 frames worth of info. That's enough to make any system, regardless of how powerful, beachball.

Seamusvfx is right. Also, if the particle system has any behaviors on it or its cels, those too will need to be figured out based on the frames that come before it.