Rendering Graphics in FCP

[Rafael Amador]

Steve I think (as reel2reel says) that you better do it with Compressor, where you have much more control on the process. This doesn’t mean that you gonna get some thing perfect with Compressor. I’m about to have a try to BitVicer that many people had recommend me in this forum.
If you got any question, send a message to Uli Plank in this forum. He knows everything about DVD making.
Cheers,
rafael

[Steven Washer]

For me, Compresor is much too slow. I recently created a series of DVDs, about 30 minutes each, and tried Compressor at the 90-minute quality setting. I got a reading of about 33 hours to digitize 33 minutes of footage. Unacceptable in my environment.

Steve

[Ron James]

[Steven Washer] “I got a reading of about 33 hours to digitize 33 minutes of footage. Unacceptable in my environment.”

Steven, that doesn’t seem right at all. Did you try an entire render, or did you quit out after you saw how long it was going to take. I think that number is only an estimate that dynamically changes and isn’t necessarily true. I’ve never timed my MPEG-2 renders, but I’ve been doing feature-length projects and I’m they definitely haven’t taken longer than six hours or so (I would just leave it overnight, so it may have been even faster, for all I know). This was at a 7 – 8 mbps bitrate setting.

If you want fast dubs to DVD, a standalone recorder works well. At one workplace, I use a DVD/hard drive recorder. We dub to the hard drive and then you can make dubs to DVD whenever needed, and it’s very fast.

[Rafael Amador]

Steve,
If you had get such a long time to compress 30 minutes is because (probably) you set the ‘frame contol’ in CUSTOM and with the most demanding set-ups. If you make SD NTSC from standart SD NTSC movies, you should let that “off” becouse you don’t go to resize, nor change the frame-rate, not to de-interlace. When I make Two-pass VBR normally it takes a bit more than the double of the film duration to compress. Of course if you export from the FC time-line all the stuff will be re-rendered (even if has been already rendered) and can take ages. I used to export from the ti-line but now I export a refference moovie (when all the clips has been rendered in FC). Is faster and the result is the same.
Cheers,
Rafael

[Debe]

I have also noticed that when I have a graphics-heavy open, the time estimate goes sky-high, then drops dramatically after the first several minutes.

It’s as if the app assumes that everything must be this complex for the entire length of the timeline, and estimates that it’ll take the same amount of math for the entire conversion, when in fact, the series of talking heads and full-screen B-Roll afterwards is like playing hop-scotch compared to the open.

I’ve had conversions that started out as 18 hour estimates that dropped down to two hours that ended up taking 30 minutes or less for a 26 minute program.

You can’t trust the estimate. It’s just estimated based on what it’s doing right now and how long it will take to do what it’s doing right now to what’s left in your timeline.

debe