“preparing video for display” very long render time!

[Jerry Hofmann]

Which OS are you running, and how much RAM is installed on which Mac?

Jerry

Apple Certified Trainer

Author: “Jerry Hofmann on Final Cut Pro 4” Click here

Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D

[John Graves]

I’ve discovered this whole long-running issue on all the forums, and I’ve been reading all of the proposed solutions intensively. I am probably in one of the worst possible situations with regard to PVFD. Still, the project seemed manageable up until today. The client was here and the PVFD delays were unearthly. In one case well over 30 minutes for a single wait time. MOst of the waits were well in excess of 5 minutes. We had to call the session off until I can get this fixed.

I have been cutting another project, a full 5-reel feature, a very complex edit, for 3 years and NEVER had PVFD problems like this! The feature has gone SMOOTHLY because the captured takes were all short, in most cases a minute or less. Also, each of the reels never exceeded 22 minutes.

From what I can ascertain, I have the following problems which are contributing severely to PVFD on my current project:

1. The whole sequence is 48 minutes long.
2. The initial captures were huge. There are only 4 clips in the whole thing, the first two captures were about 1 hour 25 mins EACH. It’s a psychiatry session, so there are no breaks or slates in between, the material is running continuously. Still, if I’d known I’d have found a way to digitize in chunks.
3. I am using FCP3 with a gig of ram on a G4.
4. There are title renders throughout the whole thing. Simple, but burdensome.

I am certain I can improve the situation. It should be easy to break the 48 min cut into 3 smaller sequences. I don’t mind printing them individually, breaks are fine, no nesting required. I have upped the amount of assigned ram and I’m going to try some tests to see if PVFD improves.

best

-John

“Life is good, as long as it doesn’t take up too much of my time.”

-Gene

[Bret Williams]

I have no idea why it’s so long. Usually this is a 5-15 second annoyance when it starts happening. But the one sure fire cure is to quit moving things around. That is, always do an insert edit or a ripple edit or a ripple delete edit. For example, if you need to move a large chunk of timeline down to make space, don’t highlight all the clips and move them, insert a slug. It will be instantaneous. And when you’re done and you need to move the chunk back to close the remaining gap, mark and in and out and press shift+delete (ripple delete).

So anytime you can avoid picking up someting and moving it, that’s your best bet. You might even be better off cutting and pasting instead of moving with the mouse. If you have to rearrange things, you can do a cut and paste insert.

[Alexander Kallas]

John,
1. Are you using a different drive for media?
2. How full is this drive?
Cheers
Alexander

[John Graves]

Yeah, that’s an excellent suggestion about using ripple and roll, I’ll have to learn that. However, my method of splitting a 48 min project into 5 reels is working marvelously.

I’ve run into problems of this sort on audio NLE DAWs too. It’s a common problem that when your edit starts getting too big or too long, system performance begins to really sag…

thanks for wonderful advice!

BY the way, my media is on SCSI 160 drives, also a little bit of firewire 400

-john

“Life is good, as long as it doesn’t take up too much of my time.”

-Gene