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Lengthy Renders
After a 2+ hour render, I feel certain I’m doing something incorrectly with my workflow.
The plot:
Your basic car – hype commercial, complete with on-camera (or lack thereof) intro and close, insert vo with brochures and laden heavily with c.g.The procedure:
1. Lay down the on/off sound bites ensuring the length to be a 30.
2. Scan in the brochures @200 dpi
3. From FCP, send to Motion for the inserts and graphics.
4. Once there, painstakingly making graphics, masking brochures. No movement whatsoever on the brochures or graphics. Just edge and shadow (white, even)
5. Back to FCP and a 2+hour render.Using the work’s G5/Dual 2.0MHZ/2GB ram
There were 2 x 30 so the second one I exported a quicktime movie and dropped that in the FCP timeline, to see if that was quicker, which it was. More like an hour, but, after the first one, I started number two and split for the house, tending to a sore neck and sorer wife.
Went back an hour later and it was done, but had to tweak and re-render due to overlapping cg’s. What a pain.
The G5 reacts very slowly to modification in the Motion project once all the inserts and cg’s are in place.
Any and all input greatly appreciated,
John
Make money (and love, of course) not war…
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9 Replies
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Any reason why you’re keeping them at 200 dpi? NTSC is barely even 72 dpi for most print settings. At any rate I’d suggest reducing the size of the brochures down to just above your video resolution.
Noah
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What are the render settings for your sequence? If you set your Final Cut sequence video processing settings to 8bit YUV, things tend to render quite a bit faster.
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Thanks, Kevin and Noah,
I’ll give your suggestions a workout.
Make money (and love, of course) not war…
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John, please update us on your experience implementing the suggestions. I am curious as to the result.
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Hi Tom,
Thanks for your post.
It was done on the computer at work and the new upgrade for FCP studio software. I’ll let you know next week when I have time to try it.
Have you had similar experiences? I’ve had very long renders in the past doing it this way, as opposed to using Photoshop for the graphics and AE for the animations, which are much quicker. My AE software at work is the 5.5 pro bundle and has trouble importing the audio. That’s why I went with Motion this time.
Thanks again.
Make money (and love, of course) not war…
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Yes, John I unfortuneately had the same experiences with FCP6. I would send a clip to motion to add a particle reveal and a text effect. It would render in Motion in about 14 seconds. Then when I went back to the timeline in FCP the same clip took about a minute or more. I was told at the time that Motion uses the GPU to render and FCP does not, hence the speed difference. Since our desired workflow was not supported at the time and no resolution was imminent…we temporarily delegated the FCP for other duties. I wish the render times could be consistant for both apps!
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Howdy,
Motion projects (embedded in FCP or not) are always rendered on the GPU. One thing to watch out for is that FCP 6.0 defaulted the sequence settings so that Motion projects would get rendered in Best quality mode in FCP, regardless of the Motion project’s settings. This was changed in FCP 6.0.2, but the old setting will persist unless you’ve trashed your prefs (or manually change the setting). You can read about it here.
Best mode renders text extremely slowly, which can murder the render times. The only visible difference will be on some objects animated in 3D. I highly recommend sticking with Normal mode (the same quality in Motion 2) unless you see things looking chunky. Your render times will likely drop to much closer to what you get directly in Motion.
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Howdy, Jim,
Thanks for the heads up on the settings. I’ll fix that today. But here’s a thought (always dangerous) I had regarding my project; I sent the 30 second open, vo insert, and close over to motion so I could sync up the inserts with the vo insert. When I returned to FCP, I had one, 30 second layer with everything; open, insert, close. I imagine I should have deleted those prior to going back, leaving only the brochures and cg’s, which, I assume, lends itself to shorter render times. Is that what would/should happen? Or, maybe just send the vo over… Or, is it better/quicker just to render out to a qt in Motion and import into FCP?
Thanks again.
Make money (and love, of course) not war…
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Thats good to know. Unfortunatly for me, we do alot of
3D (really 2 1/2D) work in motion. The rendering hit there
is not accpetable.
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