maintain transparency–optimize workflow

[Jeremy Garchow]

[adam chesbrough] “when spread across the whole project one small change to other clips requires long rendering times. “

Render the whole project, then blade (control-v) just the parts that need fixing (right before and right after) so anything you change under the newly bladed clips will come unrendered and nothing else will.

[Adam Chesbrough]

Thanks, I actually already do that but like to maintain the clip lengths in case I want to change speed, add looks etc. Just seems like there might not be an optimal solution.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[adam chesbrough] “Just seems like there might not be an optimal solution.”

When there’s one clip above everything else that has transparency, it has to be rendered. If something underneath that one clip gets changed, the whole thing comes unrendered. If you divide that one clip up in to manageable parts, you will get less rendering. You can keep the length of everything underneath it the same, just blade the top layer accordingly.

[John Pale]

Both Blackmagic Decklink and AJA Kona can do this kind of downstream key in hardware, so if you are outputting to tape, the watermarking is realtime. The occurs outside of FCP, so there is no render. If you do not have a card, you can try nesting your fully rendered sequence, then keying your watermark over it….if you prepare it as a QuickTime file in the ProRes 4444 codec, a fast system will key it in realtime.

If you are doing file based output, you cannot avoid some sort of render as the watermark needs to be composited with the undelying image. You can, however, add the watermark in Compressor, after you are done editing.