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Fastest workflow to render – export – encode video in FCPX (10.3.2)
Essentially, I’d like to know what people think is the fastest way of going from having an un-rendered project in an FCPX timeline to getting an exported and compressed video to something like YouTube.
Though having used FCPX for a few years now I’ve come to the conclusion that ‘sharing’ straight from FCPX to YouTube can take an absolute age, in comparison to manually rendering the timeline, exporting it as a master file, compressing it, then uploading it manually.
What is generally regarded as the best workflow to do this? For example share to “Apple Device”, to skip the loading into compression software phase, also seems to take horrendously long…
Am I doing something wrong?
On a Mac Pro (trash can) 6x core 3.5GHz
Thanks in advance!
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2 Replies
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I export and upload as two steps as I also find the direct to YouTube workflow a bit slower.
Noah
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[Ben Lithman] ” ..fastest way of going from having an un-rendered project in an FCPX timeline to getting an exported and compressed video to something like YouTube. ….’sharing’ straight from FCPX to YouTube can take an absolute age, in comparison to manually rendering the timeline, exporting it as a master file, compressing it, then uploading it manually…What is generally regarded as the best workflow to do this? For example share to “Apple Device”, to skip the loading into compression software phase, also seems to take horrendously long…On a Mac Pro (trash can) 6x core 3.5GHz”
One problem is your Mac Pro (while generally a nice machine) does not have Quick Sync so this penalizes it on H264 export. Ironically a late-generation MBP could be faster at exporting. This isn’t Apple’s fault; for a variety of reasons Intel did not put Quick Sync logic on any Xeon above 4 cores.
However the nMP is widely used so this should not be a show stopper. In general I find the fastest method is exporting to Master File>Settings, then using Format: Computer, Video Codec: H264 Faster Encode, and Resolution 1280×720. For most Youtube stuff, 720p is probably OK, and this reduces the upload time by about 1/2. Everything ABC, Fox and ESPN shoot and broadcast is exclusively 720p.
The bit rate FCPX uses is about 2x the minimum Youtube recommends so in theory you could compress it more but I prefer the faster export from FCPX and simpler procedure. Supposedly the performance of Compressor has been improved but I always find exporting straight from FCPX is faster.
Although FCPX does not usually require using background rendering, if this was enabled and if your timeline is render-heavy (say a lot of effects) this could reduce the export time.
In general FCPX is very fast at exporting (even on a nMP), and there’s nothing FCPX can do about your upload performance — that’s determined by your ISP. I always prefer to export then upload in two separate steps because it allows inspection of the video file, plus it differentiates between export time and upload time.
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