Ways to reduce render times

[Anthony Faulkner]

[Wayne Carey] “what kind of composite work are you talking about? Do you create images or are you doing video composite work, if so what programs are you using and how are you outputting this composite work?”

I create the images in photoshop and illustrator, and chroma key people into the scenes and animations i create. either in motion or AE. I make the files.
I do 99 % of my keying in FCP and then send the keyed footage into motion. To animate. Or if i am going to AE i will key in there. I really should spend more of my time in AE as i can import ai files right in, but its kind of daunting, and I really dislike its inability to playback audio tracks simply.

After that I drag everything back into the FCP and compile it all in there.
the clips i make in motion and AE, are all the same size and codec as my FCP sequence, except when i use the animation codec in QT to get an alpha channel for the motion clips. (maybe that is why my render times are so long on my motion clips?)

After i have finnished I make a QT movie with the same settings as the sequence. send it off to telestream episode so shrink it to the 720p H.264 i deliver.

I have magic bullet looks, and i tested the sample keyers they offer but the render times on all their software seems to kill my enthusiasm for their stuff despite the good results….

I will look into that matrox box, thanks for the tip on that one Wayne.

[Mark Maness]

From everything that your telling me, Anthony. It looks like everything is fine.

I think you may be expecting too much from FCP. Yeah, rendering does suck when using XDCAM HD but its what you have to do without a capture card to change codecs.

The only thing I would question about your workflow is why you key in FCP and not in Motion? Motion has the same keyers as FCP. It just does them differently. ANYTIME you use keying filters, you’ll have to render. Sometimes longer renders mean better quality. Personally, I’d trust the Magic Bullet keyers more than the free ones inside of FCP.

_______________________________

Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
https://web.mac.com/schazamproductions
schazamproductions@mac.com

[Anthony Faulkner]

thanks Wayne,
If i could key in motion i would be very happy, and i could if i bought the primatte keyer from magic bullet (I only downloaded the sample). But motion has very poor keying potential in the standard suite offered and actually I get very good results from the FCP keyer. I keep trying other programs and keep finding my way back home (so to speak) maybe its cause I know it so well that the application of it is very quick.

so with a capture card and capturing with pro res422 how much time would you estimate i would save? say on a 30 minute render?