Does the “Print to Video” process always render the project?

[Ben Insler]

the print to video process should render everything that is either un-rendered or not full quality before printing to tape, including RT playback media. To be safe though, you could check all the “render selection” and “render all” options under the sequence menu, so that when you render it’s rendering everything possible. That’s how I keep FCP set up – I render whenever I want to see something at full quality, whether it can be played back with dynamic RT or not, and I render the entire timeline before outputting to tape. However, to address the last part of your question, FCP will NOT re-render things that you’ve already rendered simply because it’s printing to video. It will use the existing render files.

-Ben

[Jack Fox]

Thanks Ben,

It sounds reasonable, except that when the print to video fails the writing to video takes the same amount of time again. I guess print to video process must make a temporary render file that is destroyed at the end of the process.

jmf

[Matt Lyon]

Yes, if you look in your render scratch folder, you can see the temp files it creates. These get destroyed after the print to tape (even if print to tape fails – very frustrating). I’ve often been puzzled about why Final Cut sometimes decides it needs to re-render stuff, even when everything in the timeline is rendered. The longer the timeline, the more likely it seems that the print to video process will create temp render files. I suppose you could try to quickly grab a copy of the temp file, move it to another location and throw it in the timeline, but I’ve never tried.

Matt Lyon
CORE Feature Animation
Toronto