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my favourite FCP tip – Bouncing Renders
After years of taking from the Cow forum, here’s a post to give a little back:
I’m a big fan of FCP, but I’ve never been happy with it’s render management. It should not decide which renders I’m done with and automatically delete them. And if you have a particularly high-render-time filter on a clip, it would be good to save that render so that any dissolve or effect you place on top of it doesn’t involve re-rendering the whole thing. So here’s…
Rob’s favourite FCP tip – Render Bounce
1. At the finder level, locate the render folder for the project you’re working on (it’s on your scratch disk in ‘Render files’) and drag the folder to the sidebar. This creates a quick shortcut to your render folder.
2. Render a file in the timeline.
3. Click on your render folder shortcut and arrange by ‘Date Modified’
4. The file FCP has created for your render is at the top of the list, named something like ‘YourProjectName-FIN-000000c3’
5. Drag the clip from the finder window directly into your timeline and drop it on the track above the clip you rendered.
6. Optional – Label the clip red (or whatever colour, I’d create a keyboard shortcut for this). This allows you to keep track of what clips in your timeline are renders. If you’re working on an offline project, you’ll want to delete these ahead of the online. Make sure that any further effects you add to the render clip are copied onto the clip below.What you’ve done is forced FCP to consider the render file as a media file no different from your rushes. This means that FCP won’t delete it, and what’s more, if you do a dissolve to a clip on V3, you don’t now have to re-render the clip to see the dissolve – it’ll happen in realtime.
If it’s a quick render, it’s not worth doing. But if you’ve got a particularly heavy composite, or a filter that takes a while, this can be a time-saver.
Enjoy.
Rob
Rob Tinworth
http://www.1021.tv -
9 Replies
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Sweet…
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Very awesome tip. Thanks for sharing it!
This part, though –
[Rob Tinworth] “If you’re working on an offline project, you’ll want to delete these ahead of the online.”makes me want to ask the COW FCP community, how many of you do offlines, as opposed to working at online (or delivered) resolution from the start?
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Lars,
We’re still HEAVY users of the classic “off-line to on-line workflow”. For us, it’s all about storage. We do reality TV, and the amount of media created is just staggering. Our shooting ratios range from very high to absurdly high. So… we bring it in at Off-line RT and then up rez (conform) the locked cut.
Would I prefer NOT to use this workflow? Absolutely. However, until someone wants to give me a petabyte or two of storage, I’m stuck in the old school workflow.
Mark
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I think it’s a nifty idea for heavy composites, but that’s what nested sequences are for. Same effect, and all your timecode data is retained and an online or redig is not problem. For a heavy comp I want to protect, I think I’d export it to a folder that isn’t the render folder and consider it an animation file just like anything I created in AE and imported. I don’t know about everyone else, but I tend to manually delete render folders at the finder level all the time, knowing that I can just rerender. So the “protect the render” aspect of it wouldn’t apply for me anyway.
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Rob, thanks for reminding us of this, been a common practice for many years in my shop.
Most Adobe products and most other NLEs (so I’ve been told) have a direct route (or a script) for quickly and effectively exporting and reimporting/replacing. It’s a feature we’ve been asking for in FCP for a long time.bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”
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Rob
thanx for the tip! I use to do that all the time with MEdia100!
just cuz i am kind of an old geezer, and my memeory aint what it used to be, i do this:
1. when a section of my timeline starts to get kinda layer heavy, like i am comping 5 or 6 video clips in varying shapes and sizes, i select all the relevent clips and make a nest.
BUT
I export the nest native qt (command e) to a folder inside my capture scratch called “renders animations”
or “Non TC Media” or something kind obvious like that, and then import it and put it in my sequence in place of the nest result.doenst take a lot more time than “bouncing renders” and it keeps it all to-gether!
hope this helps
“I like video because its so fast!”
Bob Flood
Greer & Associates, Inc. -
I’ve never heard anyone ask for that, but I’ve been asking for destructive compositing forever. Which is the same thing, just more organized. Avid works this way. If you render a section of the timeline, it only becomes unrendered if you change the actual clips. It does not become unrendered if you add a layer above the rendered clips. Genius huh? Well, it’s been that way at least 12 years that I know of. Avid utilizes the render file as the source file to mix with the added clip. Exactly what we’re all describing here, except Avid keeps track of it all. When you’re done with your edit, it is often common practice to ditch all your render files, and do a clean “final” render that would be a single pass render.
So simple.
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Yup – the way Avid deals with renders is much better. And you retain the control to clear unused renders when you need to free up space. Ah, those media tools. That and different coloured markers are the main things I miss from Avid. Wouldn’t wanna go back mind, even though I see they’ve finally introduced a ‘select all to right’ button to MC.
Lars – Most of my work is long-form, so I still use an offline/online workflow. Interested in trying out ProRes, but I still have a couple of G5s kicking around that I use for capturing and odd jobs.
The “Bounce’ folder is another thing that’s in my folders shortcut. Useful for saving heavy renders I didn’t pull out of the render folder and can’t locate. Also great for smoothcam and speed ramping. I capture long 5-15min clips, so the smoothcam takes forever to analyse a shot. And speed ramping with a completely flat green line is impossible. If you match frame a clip from the timeline into the source window, it retains the in and out points. Export from the source and you retain timecode+tape number. Drag the clip back into your project and you’ve got a clip that’s much quicker to smoothcam, and possible to speed ramp.
There’s a couple of daft workarounds to get FCP to do things that should just work, but the few times I’ve had to go back to the Avid, I feel like I’m editing with one hand tied behind my back.
Each to their own of course…
Rob
Rob Tinworth
http://www.1021.tv -
[Bret Williams] “It does not become unrendered if you add a layer above the rendered clips. Genius huh? Well, it’s been that way at least 12 years that I know of.”
Right. That’s because Avid has always been an offline machine and never giving a damn about any generation loss.
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