Rendering prior to QT export.

[Scott Davis]

Thanks for the confirmation. I couldn’t test as all machines are rendering!!

Scott Davis

[Michael Sacci]

I personally do not render first. While exporting would be faster, I never feel that rendering/exporting is faster than exporting unrendered timelines.

I also send a lot of stuff straight to Compressor from within FCP. So I eliminate rendering and exporting. For some things I think this is just as fast when the whole process is timed out, and I can get better quality for some things.

But in the end you should do a test and time it. To me this is not a right or wrong way of doing so but a workflow strategy. My method words for the why I work.

[John Pale]

[Michael Sacci] “I also send a lot of stuff straight to Compressor from within FCP.

(comment not aimed at Michael, who I am pretty sure knows this).

If you are doing it this way…its definitely better not to render….FCP does NOT use your render files anyway when you send it directly…the sections that require rendering are DIRECTLY encoded to the target codec. It may take longer in some instances, but its cleaner, as there is no intermediate compression.

If you are not sending directly to Compressor, it may or may not be faster to render first. Depends on the codec and complexity. Hard to test. I tend to render first, so I am certain everything looks correct before I encode.

[Alan Okey]

Unfortunately, the “export to compressor” feature cannot utilize virtual or actual clusters set up via Qmaster. I work in an environment in which multiple computers are set up as nodes in a Qmaster cluster, so I typically export QuickTime reference movies and then submit jobs to the cluster in Compressor.