Crash on export

[stixnskin]

I'm new to this and ran into a problem. The first time I created something and exported everything was fine, a little 1 minute short trying to get me feet wet. Now when I start things get odd fast. First it doesn't recognize my Apollo interface so nothing plays. Toggle to built in and back and everything is good. After working for a little while the software becomes sluggish. Clicking to change parameter means waiting for it to allow me to change anything. I had the activity monitor up and I'm at 16% max. I'm running a mac mini, 2.3 intel I7 with 16 GB of ram. I can almost deal with the performance because I can still write but when I try to export It crashes the program. Any help would be appreciated.

Forgot to mention. on El Capitain

[Magic]

If your audio interface only works "sometimes", it could mean that another application is preventing Magic from accessing it properly. Are you running any other audio apps at the same time?

Sluggishness generally happens when your project becomes too complicated for your computer to handle. Keep in mind that Magic is a high-performance application, and it relies heavily on the graphics card. The computer you mentioned has a bit of an older graphics card (Intel HD 4000). There may not be enough GPU memory or power to keep up with a large amount of modules. Crashes during exporting are rare, but they almost always mean that the GPU has run out of memory.

Can you post some screenshots of your scenes, including all the modules in them? This will help me see what's going on.

Just fyi, one of my computers is similar to yours (late 2011 Mac Mini), and it is very slow even compared with my slightly newer mid-2012 MacBook Pro.

[stixnskin]

No other application is running. I was afraid that my video card was to old but when it worked the first time I got excited. I've also tried some simple ones with just one or two modules with the same results.

[Magic]

Your bottom two examples are running at 60fps so they seem fine to me -- are you experiencing any slowdowns with those?

It's only the first example that's running very slow (~7 fps). This is because the particular shader file you've selected (fractal1.txt) happens to be a very complicated one and will only run smoothly on a high-end graphics card. If you select a different shader file it should go a lot faster.

Let me know if it helps.

[stixnskin]

I'll look at it this afternoon. Odd thing is this is exactly the one that ran the first time? But doesn't now. I'll try a simpler set up. 1 scene. 1 module and report back. Is there a suggested Mac combo you could recommend? If need be I'll upgrade my Mac because I'm enjoying the results of this program and I know I've barely scraped the posibilities.

Thank for all your help.

Couldn't resist, had to go try. Ok, I made a simple star field and exported the movie. Yay! This makes me believe that I'm trying to do more than my 4 year old mac can handle. Thoughts. Is there a better choice in the PC world? Will a new MacBook Pro handle this or a beefy Mac Mini? My mac handles all my Pro Tools work fine so a dedicated video machine isn't out of the question.

[Magic]

For graphics performance, a PC is definitely the best bang for the buck. There are a few topics on here that have discussed hardware, for example: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=854

[stixnskin]

Thank you for all your help. If I understand all this the basic computer isn't as important as the video card and ram. Since the mac mini is what it is and near impossible to upgrade I either need to get a newer machine with a better video card or possibly just upgrade my video card in my older Intel Mac Pro. Time to go research.

[Magic]

Yeah the graphics card is probably the most important thing.

Magic doesn't actually use a lot of normal RAM, but VRAM (graphics memory) is very important.

Obviously the faster the main CPU the better though. But given a certain budget I'd still focus on the graphics card.