-
FCP 7 Share feature
I was excited by the possibilities of the new Share feature. For one reason in particular: I am editing complex HD material with multiple layers – realtime playback is naturally almost impossible, and my normal methodology was to render out little bits of the timeline as Quicktimes to check how the work is looking. Of course I would have to wait whilst this was done.
I thought that Share would enable me to render out Quicktimes of parts of the timeline IN THE BACKGROUND whilst I carried on editing. In reality FCP seems almost frozen up whilst it is making the Quicktime. Playback – even of original shots in the bins – is very stilted and any real editing work is impossible until the (so-called) background process is finished. Not sure what is going on here – background rendering of Smoothcams (for example) works just fine without slowing down the computer.
I have a new 2 x 2.66 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor with 24Gb of RAM, running FCS3 and Snow Leopard.
Any advice most gratefully received,
Jon Felix
DIGIT POST
Marin County, California -
6 Replies
-
FCP doesn’t do background rendering of smoothcam. It does background analysis, which is very different and is done by the processor to the media file themselves generating a a data file. It does not require FCP at all. It would be really simple to code it to be processed without even opening FCP. Rendering however is an entirely different matter. For every frame that’s rendered the application has to be access to be told exactly what to do with that frame. It would be nice if it could be entirely in the background, but there really is no way for it to do that. And of course any work you do in the sequence that’s being rendered complicates it exponentially.
All the best,
Tom
Class on Demand DVDs “Complete Training for FCP6,” “Basic Training for FCS2” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy”
Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 4 Editing Workshop” -
Smoothcam works totally differently. Smoothcam actually start and stops depending n your CPU usage. The Share function, once started, will not throttle itself like the background processing of Smoothcam. The Share function basically allows you to export straight to compressor and still work in FCP, a feature that locked you out of FCP before. Since it sounds like your sequences are complex, then compressor is probably using most of your CPU. If you open the Activity Monitor application and click on CPU, you can tell what is going on in your machine.
Jeremy
-
Thanks guys for your clarifications. I was aware of how Smoothcam worked and I guess I was (perhaps naively) expecting Share to work the same way – pausing whilst one was working, then carrying on.
BTW – having been reading lots of posts on other forums in the past half hour – I am far from the only one with the expectation of being able to make ‘test’ Quicktimes in the background.
Another example I fear, of programmers not understanding exactly what editors need …
Jon Felix
DIGIT POST
Marin County, California -
You can work while running Compressor in the background, however, the material you are working with is probably too complex to do both edit and process video. You’ve got the “Perfect Storm” of too much bandwidth needed and not enough CPU speed. Have you considered with working with ProRes LT or the like? You might get a better workflow.
Kevin Monahan
http://www.fcpworld.com
Author – Motion Graphics and Effects in Final Cut Pro -
Isn’t there some setting that controls how much resources are assigned to FCP?
Memory usage, Stills cache, Thumbnail Cache. Do any of these concern rendering? Could one tweak these to get some juice out the CPU?———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India -
It’s a good thought, Neil. I’d like to see what would improve it. However, I think the best things you can do is buy a faster MacPro, get a faster video card on the hardware side and reduce the overhead of your sequence on the software side.
Kevin Monahan
http://www.fcpworld.com
Author – Motion Graphics and Effects in Final Cut Pro
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up