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Best Frame Size and Rendering Question
Greetings COW Gurus,
I have a question about a monthly project I am now tasked with producing and what the best workflow would be. Here is the scenario:
Roughly a 1 hour talking head shot on a JVC GY-HM700CHU @HDV 720p30.
Since this is shot on SD Cards I just drag to my External Raid then into the timeline and the FCP matches all the settings.I then bring in approx 30 Power Point Slides (converted to PNGs) and one addition title/logo slide (also PNG) that stays up the entire program. The the video is scaled to 33% and put into the bottom right corner of the frame. The Power Points are Scaled then justified to the left of the frame and the other slide is then placed above the video frame. (FYI All slides also on the external raid)
End result is this:
No Filters, FX or Color Correction and all transitions are cuts. My issue is that when I go to render this, it takes a few hours for what seems to be a realatively timeline.
Can I do anything to my work flow to improve rendering? Also, My question about frame size, this video is delivered as a 640×360 wmv. Would I be better off designing this as a 640×360 instead of 1280×720 and scaling down for delivery? Thanks you in advance if you made it all the way through this posting, any help is GREATLY appreciated.
Jeff Mather
Mac-Mini
OSX-10.5.8
2GH Intel Core 2 Duo
2GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRam
FCP 6.0.6 -
3 Replies
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With compression workflow, it seems the proof is usually in the pudding. You should try a few things out and see what you get. At that size, you may not be able to tell the difference or it may be very obvious which is the winner.
As far as render times, if you make your sequence smaller it should render faster.
Naiche
Mac Pro
Dual 2.8Ghz Quad-Core
16GB RAM
ATI Radeon 256MB
320GB 7200rpm
3TB 7200rpm Internal Software RAID0
Blackmagic Studio Card (working good so far) -
Naiche is on the right track. You’re having FCP and your Mac spend a lot of time compressing video and resolutions that doesn’t matter to your final product. You’re compressing below SD, so you can start shooting in SD rather than HD-since you can’t tell the difference with your final output. Also, I’m not sure what format the JVC transfers in as? But you might want to try use ProRes or AIC for the codec for your sequence and that should help spend up the renders.
I’ve found that FCP usually takes a long time to compress from an HD format down to a small streaming/downloading file. There’s a lot of compression that the computer is doing.Good Luck,
Todd at UCSB
Television Production -
2GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRam
This sounds like the problem.
1. For rendering and any kind of intensive graphics editing you need a decent amount of RAM to process large amounts of information at the same time. 2GB isn’t very much at all. I’d recommend 12GB / 16GB.
2. RAM speeds are measured in MHz and the average speeds these days are 1333MHz and 1600MHz, so with just 667MHz what minimal RAM you have got can’t process its 2GB as quickly as you expect it to.
3. DDR2 is now outdated and slow architecture, most people already have DDR3 and even DDR4 is publicly available.
All of these things contribute to the slowness of your PCs memory. Unfortunately, to get RAM with these specs you’ll need to replace all your current RAM because DDR2 and DDR3 are incompatible and your motherboard will be incompatible as well. I’d recommend a good RAM kit, but judging by your Mac I would assume you don’t know a great deal about computers and you’re probably not able to build one. So here’s a list of ready-built computers that would fit your needs.
Yes, they are PCs not Macs. I’m not trying to start a flame war and I can see you already have a Mac, but a Mac of these specs is almost three times the price and I really wouldn’t consider it worth it.
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