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Improving workflow (spending less time waiting for rendering)?
Hello,
This is my first time posting here, but I’ve lurked on and off for several months.
I’m a wedding videographer, using FCP, and I find a lot of my time is spent waiting for clips to render. E.g. Right now I have a series of clips lined up for a ceremony video, and I’m watching it to spot problems that need to be addressed. Whenever I find one, such as camera shake that could be lessened with Smoothcam, I stop, apply the filter, render it, and then resume playing the video from that clip.
This process ensures that I don’t miss anything, but so much time is spent waiting for FCP to render. Is there a more efficient way of doing this? I suppose I could play it through, using different colored markers to indicate problems that need to be addressed, and then go back and apply the necessary corrections, then render the whole thing at once. But maybe there’s another method that I haven’t even thought of.
Any help would be appreciated,
Thanks
Kevin
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4 Replies
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Yeah, apply the filter to an exported portion of the original media file. Soothcam looks at the whole source media file, not just what you’re using.
Export only what you need, then import it and apply the filter. You’re working with tape? That means you could have an hour of a clip to render if the source is from the hour long capture.
If not, faster machines mean faster renders. CPU’s and GPU’s both matter. not ram or drive speed as much.
Jerry
Apple Certified Trainer, Producer, Writer, Director Editor, Gun for Hire and other things. I ski. My Blog: https://blogs.creativecow.net/Jerry-Hofmann
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Jerry makes a great point on the trimmed clip tip. Smooth cam does render in the background, so I’d place that filter and then continue down the timeline. What are your system specs and what filters / adjustments do you seem to run into the most?
ashercastillo | principal creative
cityrhythmcreative.com -
Thanks for the advice. I’ll definitely smoothcam a clip and then move onto the next while it’s processing.
My machine is a 27″ iMac 2.8G Quad Core, 4 GB RAM, Snow Leopard.What tends to happen is I run smoothcam on a clip, and then after it’s done, I tweak the setting (e.g. turn down translation smoothing on clips that have flashes causing the footage to jump). I find I often have to tweak clips three or four times, which means it has to render 4 or 5 times.
I’ve thought about increasing my RAM, but I’ve also heard that FCP mostly relies on the CPU, though even my machine isn’t fully used because FCP isn’t 64bit yet… (Something we’re all looking forward to).
I should also mention, the media and rendering files are all on a 7200rpm external hard disk drive connected via Firewire 8. (Unfortunately my iMac doesn’t have an esata interface.
With large files I leave them to render overnight, though I recently read that it’s best to divide longer sequences into shorter sequences, which are rendered separately and then combined and exported in a master sequence.
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Gotcha. Yeah, I’d recommend letting the smoothcam operate in the background or waiting to work with it on your ‘final pass’. I usually edit, get picture ‘locked’, send to color to grade, apply effects / filters, etc. If you wait to apply these filters during a final pass / locked picture scenario, you may consider media managing your timeline to trim unused media, helping with file size and render times. This will also trim your clips to shorter legnths which will be faster processing with smoothcam as Jerry mentioned.
ashercastillo | principal creative
cityrhythmcreative.com
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