Render test

[Steve Connor]

I’ve noticed Looks isn’t very quick in FPX at all.

Steve Connor
“FCPX Agitator”
Adrenalin Television

[Oliver Peters]

The point of using Looks was to use a filter that was identical across all NLEs. In all fairness to FCP X, its own internal filters work better and render faster than any of the third-party options and often most of the freebees people have built when a lot of function are rolled in. But, it’s impossible to make a direct comparison between two different vendors’ equivalent built-in effects. To me, if you want to do a lot with a wide range of plug-in filters, then use After Effects, because it does the better job than any NLE.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Marc Lucas]

I know you used the MB plugin so that the test would be fair across the board but would a simple render of a file from one codec to another be a better comparison of speed from the NLE? Different NLE may be better at different tasks so without testing multiple scenarios the a true reflection can’t really be seen?

[Chadwick Shoults]

Yeah not a fair test. Each build of a 3rd party plugin is made differently for each application.

It’s good to know looks doesn’t work great in fcpx yet, but a better test would be something like a codec render like Marc said.

I’d love to know the results

[Chris Northcross]

Almost was a deal-breaker for me. My first couple of projects were PAINFUL because the in-app render was so bloody slow. Even when I was working in proxy res.

I’ve come to learn that I don’t HAVE to render even though my render bar tells me otherwise. Once I realized that, my render worries have decreased significantly.

“Whether you think you can or can’t, you’re right.”

[Marc Lucas]

Thats what I have found I haven’t really seen much of a different playing back when there is an orange render line there.

[Jim Giberti]

[Oliver Peters] “This preset combines Cosmo (MB’s face smoothing effect), diffusion, vignette and 4 color correction tools in the chain.”

On the Cosmo note Oliver. I’ve been trying to figure out how to deal with skin smoothing for my existing projects. I just got an email from Patrick Sheffield yesterday confirming that he was going to release a rewrite of EMA for FCPX. I’ve never used Cosmo, do you think it would be a good, immediate alternative?

One of my real, little frustrations with X development so far is the great and direct job they did with keying and masks in the Color Board, but I’m amazed that they don’t provide a way to attach a blur filter to the key. So simple to do and such an essential part of the process.

In fact Im going to take this over to the techniques forum.

[Oliver Peters]

[Chadwick Shoults] “Yeah not a fair test. Each build of a 3rd party plugin is made differently for each application. “

I disagree. It’s a completely fair test for Looks. Since each build is different, then each build is also optimized for that application. In the case of Looks, 3 versions are installed – AVX for Avid, AE for Adobe and FxPlug for Apple. Of particular note is FCP 7 versus FCP X and those are basically using the same rendering engine.

I’ll run another test later, comparing some internal effects. Codec renders are irrelevant, because most of the NLEs deal natively with the codecs. In this case, FCP 7 would be worse and a toss up among the other three depending on which codec you would be talking about. That could be completely skewed if I threw REDCODE in the mix, since as yet, there is no FCP X support.

Another thing that is hard to judge, is that both FCP X and Premiere Pro would render faster on export, because they then use full machine resources. Of course, then you have no render files to use during the edit. That’s why, with FCP X, it’s a good idea to avoid any in-app rendering if at all possible and let it render as part of the self-contained export.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Oliver Peters]

[Jim Giberti] “I’ve never used Cosmo, do you think it would be a good, immediate alternative”

It’s fine, but there are a lot of options, in general. Neat seems to be everyone’s favorite, though I don’t know if there’s an FCP X version. In the past, I’ve had nice results in FCP 7 for skin smoothing, by using blurs (gaussian and compound) as well as various settings in the CHV Silk & Fog filter. So, the bottom line is that I don’t really feel strongly about Cosmo one way or the other. Just nice that it’s included in Looks2.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Jim Giberti]

THanks Oliver,

I had built some nice trees for it in Color but going that route is so…32 bit, and kludgy. I got spoiled with Ema in terms of speed and render. This is something that I hope they’ll add to the Color Board. It would be a nice option right beside the Mask and Key.