do i need to render before exporting to tape in cs4?

[Mark Hollis]

Give it a try — but don’t unless you want to risk needing to render anyway and redo your export.

Two things can happen with unrendered material:

• Dropped frames. This is the most noticeable issue when you have unrendered material that cannot play back fast enough.
• Audio loses sync with video. This is sometimes a little harder to notice when you are doing a playout but certainly noticeable on the back end.

Knowing your risks here, everything may work out just fine. And it may work out 90% of the time. But you have to justify the amount of time you have to take to redo anything that fails.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Jon Barrie]

If you are exporting a HDV timeline to DV then it needs to transcode down to DV. The render would be in HDV so that’s why it takes so long.

You can export the final timeline to DV, make a new timeline that is DV and then export that one to tape. Because it’s rendered out it will not need to render to DV (coz it is already DV).

Bottom line, you will always need to render something before going to tape.

If it’s rendered already you could try to have the playback set to the camera or tapedeck as the output and make sure the audio is going through it too. Make sure you have some colour bars or black about 10sec before your 1st frame of edited video, hit play on the computer, let the playback get to real time, which may be a couple of seconds (hence the colour bars) then hit record on the camera tapedeck. This won’t give you accurate timecode, but you get to export to tape quicker. It’s not the best solution, so do some tests. It might help.

Let us know how your tests go.

– JB

Jon Barrie
aJBprods
http://www.jonbarrie.net

[David Payne]

Thanks guys. With what I’m exporting time isnt a crucial factor as I use a seperate pc to export to tape which is on all the time, I was just wondering if I was rendering twice for no reason. I have only just learned that i do not need to render before exporting a HD mpeg unless I want to preview it on the timeline. This has saved me a lot of time and I wondered if I could do the same with exporting.

If there were dropped frames or syncing issues it would be bad news with what I’m exporting as the exported tape will then become the master copy, therefore I think I wont take the risk, and instead just render before exporting to tape.

In terms of the HDV DV point that you raised Jon, I am using a HDV timeline and exporting to a mini DV tape, but I thought this export would still therefore be in HD? Is that correct? As this is the master copy I wanted it to remain in HD. If it is not I will try to save all of the HD mpegs but thats going to involve a lot of drives…

Thanks for your great help
David

[David Payne]

does anyone know the answer to my above post?