Crazy Marathon Export Times

[T. Payton]

[Alex Ojeda] “Im going insane here, honestly. “

Hopefully we can talk you off the ledge. Your specs look good.

[Alex Ojeda] “No much filters, mostly generators, lower thirds, titles, etc. ive created in Motion 5. And most of them with drop zones, behaviors, keyframes. Very little almost to none filters, because it already happened a while back, as most generators are in 3D, that the filters didnt render as they should in FCPX, so I took them off a while back.”

Ahh Motion 5 Generators, those can add HUGELY to your render/exporting times. Especially things like motion blur and 3D shadows. Add drop zones to those and I could see it taking that long. 3D=three times as long and 3 times as much $$.

If you must have that I would strongly recommend testing your export in Motion, and perhaps building elements there. You will have a much better chance of getting export times that you can live with.

I’m not understanding you exactly, but did you mean to say that removing the 3D generators still results in long render times?

Why don’t you try this as a test. Put about 4 minutes of h264 video on your timeline, copy and paste some kind of color correction on all clips, and then add a title over all of it. Share that Master File, with ProRes and h264 and see what kind of results you get from that.

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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque

[Alex Ojeda]

Hi, Dave,

No, ive never ran Disk Warrior, I just visited their website. I bought yesterday Digital Rebellion Pro Tools, in the middle of a crisis here trying to solve this issues. So if it helps solves this problem I wouldn’t doubt buying it. I read your thread.

Many thanks for the info!

[Alex Ojeda]

Yes, theres quite a few Motion 5 Generators. Some of them with 3d shadows, no motion blur though. I didnt knew that, that they will add so much rendering and exporting time.

Ok. So you mean, adding the images in the Motion project drop zones, and exporting it as a movie, so instead of having the generator in FCPX, I will have the .mov clip?

Ive been doing some tests, and I think youre right about the generators. The export takes about 10 minutes to export 44% (at the beggining of the clip I have a 3d shadows generator), but the it really slows down, and the next 20 percent takes about an hour and a half. In the middle of the clip I have a generator with drop zones, and a motion 5 overlay I made stacked up on top of it.

When I remove the generators it is much faster. Not lightning fast as your numbers, but faster.

Ok. I will do that test and let you know about the results later today.

I dont know if this has anything to do with it, but my footage is AVCDH from a Sony Camera, imported and transcoded to ProRes422 (which took ages to transcode).

Ive noticed that when I export the clip, on the background render window, it says “processing, transcoding”. I dont know why it should be transcoding if it already took more than half a day to transcode my imported clips.

One last thing ive noticed, and cant get rid of it. I add an opener generator to the beggining of my timeline, it has 5 footage drop zones and a logo drop zone and 3d shadows. It renders, I preview it, and it looks good. No problem. Then I add next to it a 20 seconds footage clip, and a cross dissolve transition. It renders, i preview it, and now the footage on the drop zone do this weird flash, kind of like a stutter, and the logo shifts its position for a half a second, making it look weird. I though this had to do with the computer not being able to preview it as it should, but I exported, and those behaviors exported as well to the output .mov clip. I changed the transition, and the same happens. I remove transition and clip, and all well again.

Another situation just arose yesterday, its that sometimes, when I publish a generator in Motion 5, it takes a few minutes then an error message shows up: “Media Server Application Unexpectedly Quit”. But it does publish the generator.

As I mentioned the computer is brand new, and this is the first project I work with it. I removed and reinstalled Motion, trashed preferences, but it still happening.

Many thanks for your time and help, Payton! I really appreciate it.

[T. Payton]

Alex,

I don’t know how experienced you are with editing and heavy compositing, but generally you are always going to need to plan and evaluate the best workflow for each project. NLE’s can create a bunch of cool effects with generators, etc, but overall I have found that it is best to render heavy motion graphics or effects work in a separate compositor, typically After Effects or Motion, or even FCP. If you think of a NLE as a really good “assembler” it might help. Evaluate the elements in your project. Figure out what is the best way to create those elements. If they are truly going to be unchanging, create it in motion and render out the clip. If it is something that you really need to change, like the timing of an effect then go ahead and let that composite happen in the NLE timeline. From what you are saying about your project I think you are spending unnecessary time, not because of a fault of FCP X but making it continually render and re-render parts of your project.

Planing and refining your workflow is going to make all the difference in the world in regards to your efficiency.

If you would like some help evaluating this and your workflow, please feel free to contact me directly. my email is my first creative cow username without the period and space at my company name in my signature .net.

So in answer to some of your other questions:

[Alex Ojeda] “It renders, i preview it, and now the footage on the drop zone do this weird flash, kind of like a stutter, and the logo shifts its position for a half a second, making it look weird.”

Try putting the generator populated with your drop zones in a compound clip. Then put the transition on the compound clip. If that doesn’t work, just export just the generator range with some handles an then reimport and use that clip as your source.

[Alex Ojeda] “the background render window, it says “processing, transcoding”. I don’t know why it should be transcoding if it already took more than half a day to transcode my imported clips.”

That simply means that it is converting it to the destination codec. Totally normal.

[Alex Ojeda] “my footage is AVCDH from a Sony Camera, imported and transcoded to ProRes422 (which took ages to transcode). “

How much footage did you transcode? ProRes 422 is 6 times the data rate of AVCHD. It is always going to take some time to deal with transcoding that data. Especially since you are working on a non RAID system. (i.e. your MacPro internal drive is getting about 90 MB/sec on average, a decent RAID is 200+ MB/Sec)

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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque

[Petter Stahre]

[Alex Ojeda] “Ive been doing some tests, and I think youre right about the generators. The export takes about 10 minutes to export 44% (at the beggining of the clip I have a 3d shadows generator), but the it really slows down, and the next 20 percent takes about an hour and a half. In the middle of the clip I have a generator with drop zones, and a motion 5 overlay I made stacked up on top of it. “

Just to share a similar experience: I’ve just ended a Motion project which had the exact same problems due to to a particle emitter I used (and 3D). The beginning of the 20 seconds movie was rendered fast (still some 20-30 minutes), the last 5% took hours. And in the end I had to render parts of the project in to two different .mov-files in order not to get a quicktime render error (same happened no matter if Motion or Compressor did the job). The first 95% of the project was rendered with motion blur, but the last 5% I had to render without motion blur since the particle emitter had grown to much. (Luckily I didn’t need motion blur on that part.)

As mentioned in the thread, rendering from Motion to a .mov and then import it into FCPX could help a lot if possible.

[Alex Ojeda] “One last thing ive noticed, and cant get rid of it. I add an opener generator to the beggining of my timeline, it has 5 footage drop zones and a logo drop zone and 3d shadows. It renders, I preview it, and it looks good. No problem. Then I add next to it a 20 seconds footage clip, and a cross dissolve transition. It renders, i preview it, and now the footage on the drop zone do this weird flash, kind of like a stutter, and the logo shifts its position for a half a second, making it look weird. I though this had to do with the computer not being able to preview it as it should, but I exported, and those behaviors exported as well to the output .mov clip. I changed the transition, and the same happens. I remove transition and clip, and all well again. “

Sounds a bit like the bug that was corrected in FCPX 10.0.8 and Motion 5.0.7 although I only had the problem with random single frames (not half a second of rendering as you mention). Are you using the latest Motion (5.0.7)? If so, have you tried opening the generators in Motion since the upgrade and saved them again? This is just a thought – I’ve got no idea if should be needed.

Best,
Petter

[Alex Ojeda]

Hi, Petter,

Many thanks for your input. Yes, it sounds like we come across the same quick sands.

I solved most of my trouble with compound clips, and rendering complex generators in Motion, just like you mention.

I had another error though, in FCPX, on export, that read something like “frame error -1 on frame number 315” and aborted export.

Then another in Motion that read “media server quit unexpectedly” and aborted publishing. I removed Motion, preferences, and reinstall, but it still happened randomly.

Many thanks, again,

best,

alex

Alex Ojeda
http://www.alexojeda.com