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Final Cut – long projects are grainy
I’m working with Final Cut Express and with pictures only. When my project is over 30 minutes long, everything imported or added movement comes in unrendered. Everytime I change movement, length of picture, etc. I have to render it and the red bars turn purple. Because of this, I will open up a new sequence and have two 25 min sequences. The second sequence is more manageable to work with because I don’t have to constantly render it, as it is all green. When my project is finished, I copy and paste the second sequence into my first and then render everything together. The PROBLEM I’m having is that any movement to the pictures in a longer than 30 minutes project is grainy. It saves and burns grainy, and is no good. If my project is 20 minutes, there’s no problem; everything looks great. Even if I had a 32 min project and rendered it in one sequence, it turns out grainy. Is there anyone who can help.
Much appreciated.
David -
2 Replies
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David,
I’m not sure what is contributing to the strange behavior you are seeing–the only thing I can think that might be affecting your sequence length is something to do with how FCE is communicating with your media and render folders once the project gets big. What kind of system are you running? FCE version? Your storage/hard disks aren’t pushing capacity are they?
One work around, depending on your final output, could be to simply export the two smaller (25 min.) sequences fully edited and then bring the two sequence exports back into FCE and stitch them together into the longer timeline. Of course that leads to a bit of generational loss, but depending on your final usage, this might work as a stop gap while you try to figure out the weird reactions happening for longer sequences.
If I think of anything else, I’ll post again.
Josh
Digital Media, Thought Equity Motion
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Thanks for the idea. My system is OS X 10.4.11; 2 ghz Intel Core 2 Duo; 1 gb 667 mhz ddr2 sdram. However I tried this at a mac store on a new computer and the same thing happened, with the exception of going up to 40 min segments before being grainy. Is there something in the settings I’m missing? I have FCE 4.0.1 also. Thanks again, I’m going to try to edit and export the two 25 min. segments and see if that will work for now.
David
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