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Final Cut Render Time
I’m working on project where I’m doing some basic keying by sending some sequences to Motion (simple stuff, like keying out a window to add an outside scene). We’re shooting with a JVC GY-HD250, doing direct HD-SDI capture with a KONA 3 card. Our machine is a brand new Mac Pro G5, with 2 175GB hard drives, 8 GB of RAM, and 8 processors. It’s about as fast as it could possibly be. The problem is, when I go to render in Final Cut, it takes about 10 minutes to render 1 minute of video. Is this normal? Shouldn’t it be faster? What can I do to cut down on render time?
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8 Replies
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Render it in Motion instead and it’ll take anywhere from 1/10th to half the time. Then just bring the file into FCP. The bonus is it also won’t keep coming unrendered as you move it around and do simple stuff to it in your sequence. The whole round trip thing is kinda lame. Nice for organization, but horrible for time saving.
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Yes , that is a real drag. Hopefully Apple will address it soon. Its one of several reasons why the facility I work at decided to put FCP 2 on the back burner for a while.
I wish Apple could focus more on FCP, it really deserves and needs the attention. -
It’s not really a reason to put it on a back burner. Its always been that way. Just another case of knowing your system in and out and the most efficient way to do things. That’s why good editors and freelancers get paid appropriately. Someone that just let’s it render for 5 times as long needs to try different ways and approaches, and read the cow of course. Every system has workarounds and drawbacks. No reason to just put a system on the shelf.
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Actually it hasnt always been that way. FCP 5 didnt have the excessive render times for Motion 2 projects embedded in the FCP timeline at all. This is a new development.
And to be honest, its just one of several issues that engineering and administration determined were not suited to the work flow and general reliability including; consistant loss of renders when making copies of sequences (admitted to by Apple), inefficient workflow from lo res to high res and generally weak media manager abilites to manipulate media and projects).
It just doesnt work for us at this time. We will review its capabilities sometime in the future. -
Its always been that way in my experience. Including livetype projects. Most of my testing was with FCP 5 and Motion 2. Its a better workflow to render out to animation codec or to your native sequence codec and import most of the time. Even if the discrepancy wasn’t there, it’s still annoying when adjustments to simple things force a rerender.
As far as media management and uprezzing goes, it still has some flaws. I don’t ever uprez any more as storage is cheap. Which also solves the media management issue as well. Unless you’re into loading whole unlogged tapes, which I’m not. Call me old school.
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So what is the “Fastest” solution?
If you have a window in a scene, and want to put — say a “live” (moving) beach scence out the window – what is the best workflow?
We have to to dozens of these each day.
Is Adobe After effects better?
Hardware key one clip to an Alpha Channel on the Kona 3?Or do you need a virtual set technology like Orad?
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Are you tracking? Seems like FCP would be the simplest solution. Just use an alpha matte from photoshop.
Obviously there is a point where round trip to motion is more efficient. Especially Simple quick render stuff.
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the fastest solution to chromakeying is a switcher/effects unit. Doing keying in software will always be slower.
bogiesan
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