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SLOWWWWWWWWW Exports
I have been working with FCPX since day one and love the editing process, where I have a huge hangup is that, when I export it takes forever. I work for a school district and have to edit small PSA style projects (takes 6-8 hours to render) all the way to 2 hour board meetings (Standard Def)(given to me from Board Meeting, takes 14-18 hours). I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions, I didn’t know if there was a hardware or other techniques that I could use to accelerate the process. My system specs are below. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Camera: Sony Z5U
Capture: Atomos Ninja 1 (With solid state drive) usually capture to ProRes 42227″ IMac:
Processor 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7
Memory 16 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
Graphics AMD Radeon HD 6970M 2048 MB
Software OS X 10.8.4 (12E55)Media Storage: Promise Pegasus R6
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9 Replies
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Are you rendering or exporting?
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Greg,
These export times seem ridiculously long for the system you have.
To what format are you exporting your timeline? Do you have many titles in your projects, or long scrolling credits?
– Ronny
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Usually I export to The Apple Compressor setting HD 1080p, but I also use the master setting and it is still painfully slow. As far as graphics, doesn’t seem to affect time much, at most I have lower thirds (maybe 3 or four) and animated intro that I attach that is a .mov. All of my projects end up going on youtube or our DIstrict Website, so ending file size needs to be around 2 gigs.
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Rendering is slow as well, but mostly during the export.
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There’s a difference between render and export, which is why I asked.
Is the timeline rendered before exporting?
With FCPX, I typically don’t render until I need to and I have backgrond rendering off.
If you bring in a simple movie to a project, don’t add anything to it, and then export it, is it still slow?
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There is something drastically awry here. Those numbers should be in minutes, not hours. You should definitely be using the master setting to export a project. Could be something wrong with your Pegasus. I nearly had the same setup as you last year. My R4 chasis went kablooey. It just had no throughput on one of the tb ports. Just editing was a problem.
Can you do the blackmagic speed test on your drive? Also run the pegasus utilities and see if there are any errors.
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Results from Speed Test are:
Based on 5gig load test
413.3 Write
347.0 Read
The results fluctuate up to 20 megs on average higher for both.NO errors in the Promise utility.
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Pegasus speed test seems okay to me. Are you experiencing any other slowdowns besides when exporting? How full is your system drive?
– Ronny
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Just wanted to chime in and say that something is definitely up with your system or perhaps how you are exporting. I have the same system and I do 2 hour projects routinely and and SD DVD for takes about 25 minutes to export and burn. BluRay takes some time and is just about real time. H264, faster encoding, is about 2x real time. I only use compressor for special stuff like x264.
When you say you are using Compressor 1080p HD, what codec. ProRes? H264? if h264 are you using best quality (2 pass) it will take considerably longer than faster (1 pass). If you are going to youtube, what happens if you use the built in YouTube share?
Also, 99.9% of the time I turn off background rendering and in fact never render. The only reason I do is maybe on a heavy composite, but I render just that composite. Render files are huge and most of the time unnecessary. I cringe every time I hear someone say that they are waiting for FCPX to render. My workflow is pretty simple, I work on one project, share to youtube or DVD for a proof and then move onto my next project while that shares are happening in the background.
——
T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque
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