Activity Monitor 101: System memory

Activity Monitor (located in Applications/Utilities) is a great tool for monitoring system resource usage, and is a great way of locating rendering bottlenecks in your system.

In particular, the Memory tab shows you a great deal of information (note: this is from Leopard; Tiger's Activity Monitor looks a little different).



But what does this information mean? What exactly is wired memory? Here is a breakdown of what each item in the Memory tab refers to.

(For clarification, a swap file is a file on disk used to store currently inactive memory in order to make room in the system memory for active applications. For example, if you have Firefox running and you minimize it and then open iTunes, there is a good chance that a lot of Firefox's memory will be written to disk and the space freed will be assigned to iTunes. When you restore the Firefox window, it will copy the data from the disk back into memory again. Your hard disk is much slower than your memory chips so it is best to keep swap file usage to a minimum. This can be achieved by adding more memory to your system.)

Free: Unused memory that is available for any application to use.

Wired: Memory used by the operating system that cannot be touched by other applications. This memory cannot be written to a swap file.

Active: Memory currently used by applications. Note that this might not represent all of the memory used, as some may be stored in swap files.

Inactive: Memory stored from an application that is no longer running. OS X stores application data in a cache so that you can quickly relaunch applications a second time. If you start running out of free memory, the operating system will automatically start using inactive memory.

To clear inactive memory manually, go to Applications/Utilities/Terminal. When it launches, type purge and press enter. Note: it takes several seconds to process.

Used: Memory currently in use that cannot be immediately written to a swap file or allocated elsewhere.

VM size: The size of the swap file.

Page Ins / Page Outs: How often OS X is reading data from and writing to the swap file.

When deciding if you need an upgrade, consider the following:

• Are your page ins/outs approximately equal to one another? Are they increasing rapidly?
• Is the majority of your memory wired?
• Do you have 10% or less of your memory free?

If the answer to any of the above questions is yes, consider more memory.

How to fully remove Final Cut Server

Apple has just released an Applecare document listing the files installed by Final Cut Server and detailing how to remove them. This follows on from the difficulties a lot of people had with removing it due to the large number of files it places in hidden system folders. This was further complicated by Apple not wanting fixes made public until they had a chance to address the issue themselves.

I will use this information to add support within FCS Remover shortly.

ATI Radeon 3870 due next month for Mac Pro?

AppleInsider is reporting that the ATI Radeon HD 3870 will be due "next month" for both current and legacy Mac Pros.

Details are scarce (and possibly fictional) but the card is said to include 512 MB of DDR4 memory and support for CrossFire mode (linking two cards up to boost graphics performance, usually in video games) within Windows.

More importantly for professional users, it provides a mid-range alternative to NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GT which has ProApp performance issues.

Color users are particularly advised to invest in an ATI card because they support rendering in 10-, 12- and 16-bit modes in addition to NVIDIA's 8- and 32-bit offerings. The NVIDIA card gives you a choice between best and worst, with no in-between values. This can cause problems for people wanting something higher than 8-bit without the massive performance hit when working in 32-bit mode.

At present, the only way to get a mid-range ATI card in your new Mac Pro is to buy one of the ones from the old Mac Pros and update the firmware, although this has the caveat that you have to install it in an older Mac Pro first in order to update it. This news would appear to be the answer to many professional users' prayers, although I hope that Apple introduce a driver update for those that have already upgraded to the 8800 GT.

Apple releases 8800 GT for old Mac Pros

Early Mac Pro users can now use Apple's NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT Upgrade Kit to add the latest graphics card to their machine.

However, before you rush off to find your credit card, I would advise holding off for a while until Apple fixes the performance issues with an updated driver (these are normally included in operating system updates but sometimes are offered separately).

And if you're planning to use it with Color, you're better off with the original ATI Radeon X1900 XT as the NVIDIA card supports fewer working bit-depths.

But if you're a gamer, you're grand.

My Compressor issues solved

UPDATE 11/9/2008: We've now released a tool to automate this fix, called Compressor Repair.

I recently experienced the dreaded "Unable to submit to queue. Please restart your computer or verify your Compressor installation is correct" error message when submitting batches with Compressor. I noticed that it listed "No Value" under Cluster instead of "This Machine".



Going to Qmaster Preferences and clicking Start Sharing gave me a message saying that "qmasterd" was not running. This was the cause of the problem.

The first thing I did was look on Apple's support boards where I found many posts on the subject. Unfortunately most users found that they managed to solve their issues by removing and reinstalling Compressor or the entire Final Cut Studio. This is something I did not want to do.

I used the terminal command sudo qmasterprefs -reset (this seems to be equivalent to trashing prefs as far as I can gather) and then sudo qmasterprefs -restart to relaunch qmasterd. I then relaunched Compressor and everything worked as it should.

Except when I restarted my machine, at which point I was back to the same error messages again. I knew that a fix must be possible without a reinstall, and it was probably something simple. So I did some digging around and I discovered that the folder /Library/StartupItems/Qmaster had the wrong permissions. It was set to No Access for some bizarre reason, preventing OS X from seeing any files inside it. Note that this was not picked up by Disk Utility when doing a permission repair. So I set the owner back to system and clicked Apply to enclosed items to be 100% sure that the permissions would be correct for all files.



I restarted my machine and everything worked. Two restarts later and it still works.

I can't say it will work for everyone but try it if you are experiencing these symptoms.

Final Cut Pro 6.0.3 released

Can you see an update in Software Update called "Pro Applications Update 2008-01"? Well, confusingly, that's actually Final Cut Pro 6.0.3 and Compressor 3.0.3. It also includes Apple HDV Codec 1.4 and Plugin Manager 1.7.3.

Release Notes

Final Cut Pro 6.0.3

This update contains the following:

• XDCAM HD422 support
• "Project is too new or unreadable" error fixed (yay)
• Still images are now exported using their native aspect ratios
• FCP now uses the aspect ratio of the clip when stacking multiple filters in a mixed-format timeline
• When using XML import, FCP can now reconnect files that contain slashes (/) in their filenames
• You can now place generator clips in FXScript filter clip wells, although read the release notes for the caveats

If this update is not appearing for you, you must have OS X 10.4.11 or OS X 10.5.2 installed.

Compressor 3.0.3

This update contains the following:

• You can now create Apple TV movies with non-square pixel aspect ratios and there is now a Dolby AC-3 output for it as well

I was very disappointed that it did not fix any of the bugs with Compressor on Leopard.

Apple HDV Codec 1.4

This update contains the following:

• 4:2:2 support

Plugin Manager 1.7.3

This update contains the following:

• This fixes FxPlug plugins on FCP 5.1.4 that were broken my previous Plugin Manager updates

As always, never update a system mid-project. Don't update if you are not affected by the changes listed above - if it ain't broke, definitely don't fix it in the world of FCP. If you do update, make sure to make a clone of your system first.

You can get the update here as well, but you will need to have your Final Cut Studio serial number handy.

How to run Color below its minimum requirements

Color has some pretty stringent requirements. This tip will tell you how to run Color when you do not meet the minimum system requirements. Why would you want to do this? Well, maybe you have a slow machine and just want to grade a couple of simple shots or perhaps you would like to learn how to use the software before buying a new machine. Whatever the reason, here's how to do it.

Note that Apple doesn't set minimum requirements for the sake of it, and you may experience strange behavior from this tip. I wouldn't advise this for production use.

When you launch Color, it will tell you specifically what is wrong with your configuration. In this case, it is less than 128 MB of VRAM (graphics card memory).



1. Go to Applications, ctrl-click on Color and select Show Package Contents.



2. Browse to Contents/Resources.

3. Double-click minsys.plist to open it up in Property List Editor. Alternatively, you can open it in TextEdit. You might want to save a backup of this file before you change anything.



4. You will see several self-explanatory options here such as minimum QuickTime version and minimum system memory. Go to AELMinimumVRAM and change it from 128 to something lower. As I am running it on a system with 64 MB of VRAM, I will change it to 64. Just set it to something lower-than or equal-to what you currently have.



5. Save the file and open Color.

If your screen resolution is set too low, the Color interface will be tiny and unfortunately this is a side-effect of hacking the system requirements. Obviously they are there for a reason.

This tip applies to all programs in Final Cut Studio, not just Color.

Update: Our System Toolkit utility now automates this task. Just select the application name and tick Low Minimum Requirements.

Final Cut Server released

It's Tuesday, which means more goodies from Apple. Apple today released their long-awaited and much-delayed Final Cut Server software, based on the Artbox software they bought from Proximity.

Final Cut Server is an asset management system that allows you to keep track of your media. It is especially useful for facilities with a large stock footage library or companies dealing with large amounts of footage, such as news rooms.

It is also useful for smaller facilities as well. I particularly like the versioning system which tracks changes made to a file, showing you who made the change and when, and offering you a way of reverting the changes if necessary.

One of my favorite features is the event system. You can ask Final Cut Server to watch a specific attribute such as a metadata field and perform an action when that is changed, such as uploading files to a server.

The server software is Mac-only but the client software is for both PC and Mac (this probably had something to do with the delays). Here are the system requirements:

Server software
* A Mac computer with a 1.8GHz or faster PowerPC G5, Intel Core Duo, Intel Core 2 Duo, or Intel Xeon processor (Intel Core Duo, Intel Core 2 Duo, or Intel Xeon processor recommended)
* 2GB of RAM (4GB recommended)
* AGP or PCI Express Quartz Extreme graphics card (Final Cut Server is not compatible with integrated Intel graphics processors)
* Mac OS X v10.5 or later
* QuickTime 7.4.1 or later
* A CD drive for installation
* 500MB of available disk space

Client software for Mac computers
* A Mac computer with a 1.25GHz or faster PowerPC G4, PowerPC G5, Intel Core Duo, Intel Core 2 Duo, or Intel Xeon processor
* 1GB of RAM
* AGP or PCI Express Quartz Extreme graphics card (Final Cut Server is not compatible with integrated Intel graphics processors)
* A display with 1024-by-768 resolution or higher
* Mac OS X v10.4.11 or later
* QuickTime 7.4.1 or later
* Java for Mac OS X v10.4 Release 6 or later
* Final Cut Pro 6.0.2 or later for Final Cut Pro integration
* 20MB of available disk space

Client software for Windows-based computers
* A PC with Windows XP (SP2) or Vista
* 1GB of RAM
* AGP or PCI Express Quartz Extreme graphics card (Final Cut Server is not compatible with integrated Intel graphics processors)
* A display with 1024-by-768 resolution or higher
* QuickTime 7.4.1 or later
* Java SE Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 Update 4 or later
* 20MB of available disk space

Important areas to note:
* The server software is Leopard-only.
* You must fit a separate graphics card to the machine as the on-board graphics will not suffice. Also note that the G5 servers do not even have on-board graphics. This also affects any machine that you connect to it as well, which rules out MacBooks and low-end PCs.

Final Cut Server is now available for $999 (10-client version) and $1999 (Unlimited version). Interestingly, the upgrade for the 10-client version is $999 which makes it cheaper by a dollar to upgrade the 10-client version than it is to buy the unlimited version outright.

QuickTime 7.4.5 released

Apple just released QuickTime 7.4.5 to coincide with the release of iTunes 7.6.2 and Front Row 2.1.3. The coincidence of these releases suggests that the QT update specifically affects those applications and offers no specific benefits to Final Cut Studio. If you have a working system, DON'T install it!

On the other hand, if your system is not working, you have nothing to lose. I'd advise cloning your system beforehand though, as a non-working system could potentially be made even worse by this update.

Here are the links... use at your peril!
QuickTime 7.4.5 for Panther
QuickTime 7.4.5 for Tiger
QuickTime 7.4.5 for Leopard

I have also updated our list of QuickTime downloads.

Final Cut Server coming soon?

Apple just mysteriously added a new category to their discussion forum named Artbox. Now, if you recall Artbox was originally developed by Proximity and was purchased by Apple two years ago and turned into Final Cut Server.

It was announced at NAB 2007 and slated for release in the summer of that year, but never came. It was then pushed back to January 2008 but still has not been released. I hope this is a sign that preparations are being made for its release.

The most plausible answer of course is that it's just a support section for existing Artbox users (rather late though, considering Apple purchased them in 2006), although I am not aware of Apple doing this for Final Touch users before the release of Color.