Is background rendering an advantage or not?

[Jeremy Garchow]

You will find that a lot of X users will leave background rendering off. I know I do. I only render the section I need if FCPX can’t play the composite/fc stack back in rt.

Jeremy

[Steve Connor]

Switch it off, especially with 8gb RAM. Render when you need to, background rendering is a good idea that will hopefully be refined as FCPX matures

Steve Connor
“The ripple command is just a workaround for not having a magnetic timelinel”
Adrenalin Television

[Sandeep Sajeev]

Yes it’s a pain. I keep it off as well, it’s faster just to hit Ctrl+Shift+R, as opposed to selecting a specific section and hitting Ctrl+R.

I also turn on Better Performance in Playback Preferences. It does help in playing back unrendered sections.

[Jon Smitherton]

Please note that its not really background rendering per se – It’s more equivalent to auto-render on FCP7.
You’ll notice that the render dial stops when you are playing.
Having true background rendering either by half the cores assigned to this function or even better, a network cluster/render farm would make this program so fast it would easily retain FCP’s lost customers!
DO IT APPLE!

Jon

[Bret Williams]

There’s other issues here. If it renders while you work, instead of pausing, then it has to know whether you’re working on the portion of the timeline that it’s rendering. So its a much more complicated task than it appears. Which is the same reason exporting directly to compressor used to lock you out of editing in legacy.

The bigger problem, as I understand it, unless it was fixed in 10.0.4, is that FCP doesn’t manage the render files as well as legacy. It just keeps writing new ones and doesn’t delete the ones no longer used by the project. So your drive starts to fill up fast with tiny little render files that aren’t in use.

That’s why I turn off background rendering.