FCP needs to render after applying mask effect

[Jeremy Garchow]

FCPs rt engine profiles your system for rt capability. While processors have a lot to do with it, your hard disk drive speed also has quite an effect on performance. If you have a slow disk drive connected to your iMac, FCP will pair down your rt. What kind of storage did you have on the Avid, and what kind of storage do you have on your iMac? What codec and frame rate are you working in?

Jeremy

[Paul Escandon]

Hey there,

What version of FCP are you using?

FCP has two settings that determine real time playback – Safe RT and Unlimited RT. Unlimited RT is the engine that will dynamically attempt to play back filters that support it based on your CPU and GPU. If you haven’t set Unlimited RT from the RT drop down in the timeline then there is a stricter criteria on what gets rendered and what doesn’t. Make sure you’re set to Unlimited RT and see if this works out for you.

Paul Escandon
Apple Certified Trainer – Final Cut Pro 6
https://www.oremusproductions.com

[Spinnerlys – human being]

@JeremyG: We, us students, got a external hard disk drive with firewire and usb, It has 7200 RPM and 8MB of cache.
I used it on both editing computers, so speed is the same.
It is all DV material (VX2000), encoded in DV-PAL for FCP and quite small.

I just think FCP’s engine’s strengths are lying somewhere else than rendering some effects through the CPU.

@mr. escandon: I’m using FCP 6.
It was set to SafeRT, after playing around, and reading the according manual pages, I set it to unlimited. It worked, but it stutters (of course, frames are being dropped).
It’s really strange how an 1GHz computer surpasses an 2x2GHz computer with a Mask effect.
It’s only having black boxes on top of your picture, adjusted to my own wish.

At least it renders faster, if I need to.

Thanks for your input.

[Rafael Amador]

[spinnerlys – human being] “It’s really strange how an 1GHz computer surpasses an 2x2GHz computer “
This is possible if the the system of the 2×2 is not properly maintained.
Permissions, caches, directories..There are many things that can slow down a computer.
i.e, do you have the “Processor Performance” set to “high”?
rafael

[Spinnerlys – human being]

It’s a school computer, I only have restricted (having almost forgotten this word, as a non english speaking native of european descent) permissions.

As far as I know, this iMac is new, three months old maybe.

I can ask the admin about permissions, cache and directories (what do you mean by this especially?).
And having an iMac for myself, Aluminum, but only the 20″ variant, I can’t tell where to set the Processor Performance to high. Isn’t that only available on a laptop Mac? (iBook>System Preferences>Energy Savings)

Avid is older, so they have maybe the more advanced Render system.

It’s okay, I can use the Widescreen effect, it can be configured to: Offset, Border,.. ; so I’m not stuck to the presets entirely. And it doesn’t need to render.

Thanks again.

[Rafael Amador]

[spinnerlys – human being] “where to set the Processor Performance to high. Isn’t that only available on a laptop Mac? (iBook>System Preferences>Energy Savings)”
I guess the IMac have it in the same place: System Preferences>Energy Savings>Options.

[spinnerlys – human being] “As far as I know, this iMac is new, three months old maybe”
Is not a matter of the computer, but the System. In the moment that you instal a System and some applicatios, and you start to work, the System start to need maintenance. Things like:
_ Repairing permision whenever you install anything.
– Let the computer switched on at night or run Maintenance or similar application.
– Ant THE MOST INPORTANT: Run regulary (at least once every two weeks or so)
DiskWarrior or TechToolsPro.
I live like 2.000 miles away from the nearest Apple service. I can not look for any help if I’ve got a problem, so for me to have the my Mac running smooth is vital. I get it like that. No crashes, not hangs. If you want FC works 100%, first you need to have your System 100% optimized.
Rafael

[Jeremy Garchow]

A ha, I misunderstood your original post. The mask effect, is not an rt effect. FInal CUt Pro does not handle transparency very well. Avid is much much better at handling transparency. You are right, FCP is no good at this. This is where faster drives come into play. If you had access to a faster drive, FCP would do a better job of crunching through this effect using unlimited rt, bit it still wouldn’t be perfect.

Jeremy

[Dan Riley]

I have one of the better systems going these days. I get up to 500 MB speed
according to the AJA tests. I have an 8 core 3ghz per core system with
8 gigs of memory. I use an 8 drive Sonnet D800 RAID. KONO 3.

Yet, take a single video track, add a track with a drop shadow on a box,
BING, no longer even green RT. You must render.
Do a key with an alpha, BING, render city. Try to do any Chroma Keys,
BING again, render for many many minutes. CGM transitions, BING,
render again. Nattress film effects, MANY MANY minutes or hours of
rendering. Almost anything Boris, LONG waits for renders.

FCP, even after having 8 cores to deal with, still does not have Real,
realtime abilities. Even when the line is green and plays back, you can’t output
to tape or make a quicktime to upload without rendering. Thus any
efficiency of so-called realtime is lost when having to get the show
out the door any faster today than three years ago.
And I’ve got one of the fastest systems available.

The reality is you do not get all these multiple tracks of real time
in the real world, day to day of editing where, guess what,
you don’t just edit with one track of video.

If FCP can’t do real time editing playback with 8 cores,
what is it going to take? 18 cores?

Dan

[Jeremy Garchow]

This has to do with FCP and transparency. As of now, there’s no Apple native codec that is rt enabled and carries an alpha channel. This is why FCP is so horrible with anything transparency with media that’s in motion.

The plug ins that you mentioned are all heavy lifting plugins and would have to render on ay system. Unfortunately, the more simple one’s you mention (like the drop shadow) have to so with the lack of a native codec that handles an alpha channel. The Animation codec can carry an alpha, but it is not exactly rt enabled.

Jeremy

[Rafael Amador]

I don’t know why Final Cut Pro still does not support real-time effects for third-party codecs. This is a pity.
There are more and more people filming in 10b and rendering in 16 or 32b. But when they need an Alpha channel they have to relay in a 8b Animation codec. Oldfashioned, I think.
The people of Bit-Jazz are asking Apple to support RT for Sheer since a long time. Would be great, but at the moment no chance.
Rafael