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Exporting one hour long edit to h.264 -> problem
Hello.
Last friday I shot (with sony ex1) my friends one hour long band gig and I edited it with FCP just like I do shorter movies or commercials. But when I tried to export it as HD and with h.264 codec it takes ages to render it. First FCP says that it takes 4 hours and after one hour it says that it will take more than 5 hours. And again after few hours it says that it will take 9 hours and so on. I also tried to export it as QuicTime movie (timeline codec) and I took it to Compressor and the same thing happened.
How long it really takes to render a HD movie or is there some size limits for h.264 codec? What would you people recommend for me to do here? I would not like to wait a week for this. This is first long project that I have.
And also another weird thing. (not so important to this topic)
I only had about 10 Gb left on my internal hard drive, so I exported this to my external hard drive. When exporting I got this error message saying that my internal drive was almost full. I cancelled the export and after quitting FCP, I still only had about 100 Mb left on my internal drive.
Are there some temporary files somewhere that I need to delete? I tried to search them with spotlight, but I couldn’t find anything bigger than 1 Gb.
This thing was just a “side question” because I backed up some stuff and I got about 30 Gb free space for this project but Isn’t it weird that exporting a video to external drive it first goes to internal drive and I can not get that free space back? Also all my scratch disks are set to external drives.Thanks.
Mikko
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3 Replies
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Mikko,
H.264 encoding does take a long time, there’s no way around that unless you invest some substantial dough in a dedicated encoder such as Episode.
Also, maxing out your media drive greatly slows all processes on your computer and it’s a recipe for disaster too, because it does not allow the computer to create the temporary files it needs to large operations. This is precisely the reason you have encountered the missing space on your hard drive — the computer was encoding to a temporary file, which is normally deleted automatically, but it’s still on your computer stored as a hidden file. To get that space back try running the repair function in the Apple Disk Utility, or run Disk Warrior.
Hard drives are very inexpensive nowadays, so there’s no excuse for running out of space on media drives.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
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Thank you for your answers David!
Yesterday evening I took this video to my work where I have dual quad core mac and the conversion took only 3 hours! 🙂 This was the time I was looking at. I have just normal Mac Book Pro core 2 duo with 4 gigs ram at my home and apparently it’s not enough for this kind of projects.
I’m gonna buy some external drives so I can move all my photos and stuff to those and see what happens. By the way, I ran disk repair from Disk Utility but I didn’t get any free space back that I lost. :/
Thank you again!
Mikko.
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A bit more testing! Today I had some spear time at work to test this with this faster mac and first Compressor told that it will take ages to convert the video just like it told at my home. But after 50 % it finished it in an hour! I think that’s because of the Multi-Pass. Next time I won’t be so anxious and I will wait for the 50 % and see what happens next.
Thanks.
Mk
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