Forced rerender when exporting to quicktime

[Ruth Ruthy]

Hi!
I just read your thread, and I’m having a similar issue – maybe you have some tips…

My set up:

FCP 6.0.6
QT 7.6.2
OSX 10.5.8
MAC Pro 16gigs RAM

My time line (and my source material) is set to XDCAM HD 442 1080p 50bps 25fps

I have my rendering set to render using ProRes HQ (as recommended by Sony and Apple). My motion graphics created in Apple Motion were rendered out of Motion using the Animation codec (so I could have an alpha channel).

Everything renders great and clean and smooth and looks great when played in the timeline.

With everything rendered, I select in and out points in the timeline to export a small section. I export to QT using “current settings” with “self-contained” selected. Normally a 2-3 minute clip exports very quickly.

For some mysterious reason, FCP now takes up to 30 minutes to output such a clip, and in the process, re-renders the entire timeline…I have no clue what the issue is.

I’ve checked all my settings, dumped cache files, dumped and re-rendered render files, nothing seems to remedy the situation. The only thing I have not done is determine if maybe my video card is overheating – but I have no way to measure that, and I’m not even sure if it would be a factor. In any case, the problem still is there if I shutdown for an extended “cooling off” period and start back up.

Any ideas and guidance would be most gratefully accepted. Thank you!

Regards,
-RR

[Jackson Childs]

I really don’t know! I’ve never figured this out. In my case I was trying to export 20+ minutes and it would crash FCP to have to do all that rendering at once. In my experience the re-render takes about as long as rendering it in the first place. It seems like for certain renders the re-render is standard. Smoothcam for instance is very finicky and so a variety of actions on the timeline (rendering something else for instance) will un-render those clips. Don’t know why. But so having it take 30 minutes for 1-2 minutes seems odd unless that’s how long it initially took to render. One thing that I’ve done is to take individual clips from the timeline and drop them in the browser, than export those. When you re-import whatever that was as a quicktime clip, no more rendering is necessary (unless you do some more filtering on it then). There may be some very marginal loss in image quality from doing this I don’t know. That can make it easier to work with problematic timelines, particularly stuff you’ve brought over from motion. Of course then you can’t go back and forth between programs (which is dicey anyway because Motion is unstable but you have to do it sometimes!).

[David Roth weiss]

This is an issue with the Smoothcam filter that was sorted out, for the most part, in FCP 7.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.com

Don’t miss my new tutorial: Prepare for a seamless transition to FCP X and OS X Lion
https://library.creativecow.net/weiss_roth_david/FCP-10-MAC-Lion/1

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums.

[Jackson Childs]

That’s great. Too bad I didn’t have money to buy that and then they discontinued that architecture 🙂 I feel kind of SOL right now.

[David Roth weiss]

[Jackson Childs] “I feel kind of SOL right now.”

Don’t we all…

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.com

Don’t miss my new tutorial: Prepare for a seamless transition to FCP X and OS X Lion
https://library.creativecow.net/weiss_roth_david/FCP-10-MAC-Lion/1

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums.

[Ruth Ruthy]

Thank you Jackson for your thoughts. I’m sorry to hear you have also not found a solution.

If I come across any solutions or answers of some kind, I’ll post them back here.

Thanks again,
-RR