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Rendering Issues/FCP Lagging
Hello all,
Having a tough time at work here and trying to streamline our process a bit. I am editing video with sequence settings as:
1280 x 720 HDTV 720p (16:9)
Pixel Aspect Ratio: Square
Field Dominance: None
Editing Timebase: 29.97Compressor: Animation
Quality: 100%The actual video files are from a program called iShowU HD and are:
1280 x 800
Linear PCM, Animation .MOV files.I’m having two major problems. First, I have to constantly render the video files when I bring them into the sequence, so I want to know if there’s a different setting I could be using for the video or sequence that will yield similar results. Secondly, Final Cut is experiencing serious lagging issues. I’ll click on the timeline and it’ll take a full minute or longer for the playhead to move to the point where I clicked. I suspect, through reading other forum posts regarding this topic, that this is due to the render files, which is why I am asking about finding a way to prevent the need for excessive rendering, but if there’s any other suggestions you all have for fixing this issue, I’d be excited to hear them.
I’m storing all of my files on an external drive with 150GB available connected through the Firewire 800 port.
Here’s my specs for my machine and FCP:
Version 10.6.4
3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3
100 GB Free space available
Final Cut version 7.0.2.I appreciate any help you can provide.
Thank you for your time!
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5 Replies
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The Animation codec is not ideal for editorial. You’d be better off with ProRes. Also, your footage frame size of 1280×800 isn’t a broadcast standard; your sequence size of 1280×720 is.
What are your actual deliverable requirements? If you must deliver 1280×720, you might consider changing the resolution of your computer and re-recording your screen capture at 1280×720 to avoid having to crop or scale the frame to fit a standard raster.
If not, you might be better off doing as much of the editorial as possible in iShowU.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
Hey Walter, thank you for your response. We’re looking into ProRes now as a new solution. As far as the size of the footage, we use lots of scaling keyframes so the actual size hasn’t affected us as much as the concern that perhaps the size difference is what’s creating the longer render time and other lagging issues. Will report back after we’ve been able to experiment with a few different changes.
Thanks again!
Zubaer -
FW800 isn’t nearly fast enough for Animation codec which is basically an 8 bit uncompressed format. A fast RAID is needed. As Walter said, convert all to a standard frame size ProRes422 codec which can run off a FW800 drive.
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Thanks Michael, I’ll definitely experiment with the ProRes codec…hopefully it’s all I need to remedy this problem.
Thanks
Zubaer
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Wot they said! Make sure you lose Animation as a codec, and convert all of your source footage to an FCP friendly codec too. I’d use Compressor or MPEG Streamclip to convert to ProRes. Make sure you convert to a broadcast standard media size – so, try cropping to 1280×720 if you can afford to lose some image, or scale to 720 vertically if you won’t notice the slight ‘squish’.
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