I have a 3 mhz 8 Core MacPro (first generation) with 2 gig of ram and a ATI 1900 card.  I had xpress pro and MC 2.8 and never had any problems.  when I upgraded to 3.0 I started getting weird errors that I believe are related to memory, specifically: out of memory (even though the AVID shows only 20% memory full) or "Exception:std::exception, What:st9bad_alloc"  which I believe is a memory allocation error?  

Basically the AVID runs great for about 15 min and then dialogue boxes start drawing white where they should be and the graphic part of the box is in the left hand corner.  This is usually kicked off by these errors and finally the spinning wheel of death.

here is what I have done... a FULL reinstall of leopard on a clean drive with a new user.  I have no other software installed on that partition so I could test it. I figure this is one of 3 things: 1) a bug in the 3.0 software, 2) I could buy more RAM (which I will do anyway), 3) ATI card?

I am thinking it isn't the card cause the software works great for a while, and I'm thinking it isn't really the RAM because the AVID is indicating that it's no where near it's full memory... I am running nothing too crazy, a DV project at 15:1, a few dissolves.. that leaves me thinking it's a bug.

anyone? help!

d

Actually, the first thing that I would think it was is the ATI card.  ATI cards are not approved/qualified to work with the 3.0 software.  Many other people with unsupported cards who were using 2.8 or earlier are now reporting trouble.

Hi, That is not necessarily true. Nvidia is only related to the PC side. ATI should be fine on the Mac side as long as it has the supported RAM.

Steve

Stephen Hawkins:

ATI should be fine on the Mac side

"

Minimum system requirements for Media Composer Software - Mac

Graphics Card:

• NVidia GeForce family
  • Note 1: Full Screen play feature requires a minimum of 128MB of graphics memory

"

the iMac (2.0GHz and 2.16GHz) are the only Mac systems listed in the Qualified workstation pdf that support an ATI card.

Hi Kenton.VanNatten,

Yes, I saw that also. In system requirements for MC 3.0 it indicates minimum 2.33MHz Dual Core, 2GB RAM with Graphics 128Mb for Full Screen playback. Has a note under PC that only Nvidia graphics are supported. No note for the Mac side.

BLKDOG then jumped into the discussion any indicated that any Mac graphics is supported as long as the overall system requirements are met.

The post is a couple of weeks old now.

Steve.

I'm running the Harpertown, 8-Core, 2.8ghz machine.  It's got the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT with 256 MB VRAM.  No issues whatsoever here.

 d,

Please tell us a bit more about your setup / workflow.

1. What type of storage are you using? Local? Shared?
2. What type of decks / cameras are you using? P2? XDCAM?
3. What format and resolution are you using? SD? HD?
4. Are you using any video effects? AVX Plug-ins?

Please send models and versions of the info above...

- Rob

I am using internal (local) SATA drives, not striped.  the footage was digitized over time in earlier  versions of the software, all SD DV footage at 15:1... not using any AVX plug ins and I am using some pretty simple dissolves, nothing too complex...

I am about to jump into some other projects to see if I can isolate the problem to the project ( I already used various user settings so I know it's not that).

d

Ok, so I upgraded to 8 gig of RAM, started a new project and copied the bins over, of course this is on a fresh leopard system.   works perfectly for 10 min still and then BAM - out of memory error... after that I can save but if I do anything but quit and restart it will spin out.

I'm thinking there is some corrupt media or something in my timeline that is causing this, because i don't think it's my hardware or OS otherwise others would be having similar problems.

What display resolution are you running?

We had a beta site report a similar problem when running with 2560 x 1600 on the Mac. Try setting the display to 1900 x 1200.

- Rob
 

"No note for the Mac side."

If you download the PDF for the Mac system specifications it does list nVidia cards support for MC3.0 - other systems do have ATI (but not the new Pro series). 

Hi Guys,

Just a note that on the MacPro,  only Nvidia cards are supported:

For Pre-2008 models, the Nvidia GeForce 7300GT

And for Harpertown: Nvidia GeForce 8800GT

The ATI X1600 card is supported on IMac only.

Cheers,

Kim

Not so Kim... the stock card in any MacPro is just fine.  I am running a Harpertown, 8-core, 2.8ghz with the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT.  No issues whatsoever.

Hey Todd just cause it works dose'nt mean it's support though.You may be one of the lucky ones

Just to allow user's some feedback of what is working, I am running MC3 on the new 20" iMac (Penryn CPU) 2.4 which has a ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT 128Mb with no issues. Full screen playback, all working.

Steve