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Strange problem in Motion?
Hello all,
this is my first post on creative cow, but I did do a search and found nothing referring to this problem.
I am working on a 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo iMac with 4Gb of RAM
So, I am trying to make a DVD menu screen, using footage sent from FCP with some simple text fading in.
The footage is DVCPRO 1080i50. When I play the footage back in Motion, playback is incredibly slow, 3fps or so. So I render the footage, setting my in and out points then pressing command-R. The rendering dialogue window opens, and everything appears to be chugging along as usual. However, once the render appears to be done, I look at the timeline and there are still sections that have not been rendered. I make new in and out point around the unrendered section and repeat the process. Once that is done, I see more, unrendered sections, seemingly randomly dotted around the timeline.
Now, the really scary part is that when I try to export the footage, the playback is still really slow in Quicktime, worse than in Motion in fact.
As a test, I tried saving the project and seeing what effect it had on the clip in FCP and, after a quick render, the playback is fine.
I have tried again, but this time dragging the file into Motion from Finder and I still have this playback/rendering problem.
Has anyone heard of this before? Am I really going to have to keep going back and forth between Motion and FCP in order to see real-time previews of my sequence?
Thank you for your time, I really hope someone will come along and prove me to be an absolute arse by pointing out a simple factor I am overlooking.
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2 Replies
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Well several things.
I think we’ve all experienced sluggish performance with Motion, basically it requires a really hyped-up graphics card to run properly. I literally get the same performance running Motion 2 on a G4 Powerbook and Motion 3 on a Quad G5 (both with Tiger). 🙂
The spotty rendering in Motion sounds like a RAM issue; you might check out your RAM sticks.
The other issue may be that you are exporting movies in the Animation codec; at its highest setting it’s essentially uncompressed/lossless. So when you render it in FCP, you’re probably compressing it to a much more manageable codec.
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Hey Bert,
Thanks a lot for your reply. You were right about the Animation codec. I changed the export setting to DVCPRO 1080i50 and the exported file plays just fine in Quicktime.
The spotty rendering is still a problem, but I think that generally rendering the whole project is a bad practice to get into. From now on I’ll just render the small section I NEED to preview. When I do that, it seems able to render that section with no trouble.
Thanks again for taking the time to reply. If you want a free copy of “How To Keep Chickens” or “How To Spey Cast With Mike Daunt” you need only ask.
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