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Dumb question of the day
Here’s something I’ve always wondered about…
I do a half hour bi-monthly medical show for a client. The show consists of a three camera switched show recorded directly to hard drive and imported into FCP. No rendering is involved to just play the show. Added to the show are animated lower third titles and finally a lower right corner “bug” that says up throughout the show. Basically three tracks on the timeline. Pretty straightforward.
Before laying off to tape, the timeline, of course, needs to be rendered since it won’t play back at full quality in real time. No big deal either.Here’s the question:
It’s a half hour show. It won’t playback at full quality without rendering. When I render the show, it only takes about 8 minutes to fully render it. This is about 3-1/2 times faster than real time to render. Get the picture?
So if this machine can render at over three times the real time speed, why can’t it PLAY the timeline in real time without rendering? It seems to me that while rendering, it is processing the data faster than is necessary to actually play in real time. So why can’t it play in real time? Make sense? Not really…Hmmm.
Inquiring minds want to know… 🙂
Tom -
11 Replies
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When you “play” in realtime you’re seeing a somewhat degraded image so that allows the system to play in realtime. It may look pristine, but there are some limitations to what can be played in realtime. This allows all of us to work more efficiently by editing in realtime. But for layoff to tape, you still need to render.
As for the rendering speed, this has improved dramatically with FCP 6. Why you still need to actually render instead of the system allowing you to play off true realtime to tape, like my old CineWave could do, that’s a question for Apple engineering.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.All Things Apple Podcast! https://cowcast.creativecow.net/all_things_apple/index.html
Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi
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Tom,
Are you having one of those days? Not enough to do? Just kiddin. Hi from Texas!
Alan
formerly from Pixelmax -
“As for the rendering speed, this has improved dramatically with FCP 6”
Except for H.264. I had a 4 minute DVCProHD segment that took over an hour to render in FCP. I don’t remember 5.1 taking nearly that long.
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[Christopher Wright] “Except for H.264. I had a 4 minute DVCProHD segment that took over an hour to render in FCP. I don’t remember 5.1 taking nearly that long.”
You do that in Compressor. 4 minute DVCPro HD timeline takes about 5 – 10 minutes to compress to H.264 here.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.All Things Apple Podcast! https://cowcast.creativecow.net/all_things_apple/index.html
Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi
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Good question Tom.
I can’t answer that directly, but I was wondering if you might have a Decklink or AJA Kona card that you could use to key your bug with their built-in keyer as you’re playing out to tape. Then you’d only have to render the lower thirds. Maybe then it would only take a minute or two to render?
Just a thought. -
Yea, I have both an AJA Kona3 and an AJA IO on the system. U usually use the IO for SD but I suppose I could use the Kona3 and make use of the downstream feature. Good Idea.
Actually the render times aren’t bad. It’s just a rhetorical question I’ve always wondered about.Alan, you DOG! So how’s life treating you down in the land where people taawlk funy? Email me a phone number sometime and we can get caught up on things!
TomPS: Yea, I’m just sitting around with nothing to do, like usual.
I wish.. 🙂 -
Here’s my best guess, but it’s only a guess as I really have no idea.
When something isn’t rendered and you place the playhead on the timeline it takes the computer a bit before it can process that frame (b/c the playhead parked anywhere is essentially how it will look rendered ie full quality). It’s basically caching that frame to ram for now. When you render, you are actually writing to disk what the computer has computed. Any realtime playback you are getting is a lower res version of the video that can be played back by your systerm depending on the speed. Load 1000 jpegs on a timeline and you’ll see that realtime has a time limitation as it will be realtime for a while but then you’ll see a red render bar b/c the sotware is saying ok, this is all i can handle (since it isn’t actually writing any of it to disk and all the processing is heavy machine lifting. The fact that you can render at 3 times faster than realtime just means your machine is fast. To playback at full-res they’d have have final cut not lock up while it’s rendering (ie no render bar that makes the program not accessible. Then you could start the render and then a second later you could start playing back, and the render would keep ahead of the playhead.
-mattycRaising money for Blood:Water Mission to help build wells in Africa. I’m
putting my hair on the line to raise some money.
Check it out https://rattail.callac.com -
Actually I just had to render a 2 minute title roll sequence (animation + alpha) in an SD project within FCP which also took an inordinate amount of time to render. With 8 gigs of Ram on a new Intel octocore I was expecting better FCP performance than that. Looks like I may have to farm out the heavy duty rendering composites to AE, combustion or RED again ;>( …
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Title rolls always at an obnoxious amount of time to render. They even take a long time in our Smoke systems. When we need credit rolls we always do it in our old linear room and we get a smooth roll with no render. Down side is no copy and pasting function into the old Maxine.
-mattycRaising money for Blood:Water Mission to help build wells in Africa. I’m
putting my hair on the line to raise some money.
Check it out https://rattail.callac.com -
Tom
Not a dumb question at all. Sounds like something is wrong here. Are you using multicam or just regular clips?
Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK
Unique plug-ins and tools for Apple Pro Apps
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Avid2FCP
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