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Weird FCP render issue on Edit to Tape..
Hey everyone,
I just finished an hour show in FCP 5.1.2 in 1080i DVCPRO HD format. There are a ton of comps and layered graphics in the animation codec in the project so naturally it’s taking a long time to render all these out on the timeline.
The thing that I don’t understand – and maybe some of you are familiar with what FCP is doing under the hood here in this situation – is that when the timeline is entirely rendered out from beginning to end and I go to “Edit to Tape” to master onto tape, FCP wants to render video and from the calculation it’s giving me… 7-8 hours, I have to imagine it’s rendering the video all over again. Does anyone know why Final Cut wants to render the video all over again if everything is currently rendered whereas if I just wanted to crash record it would play from beginning to end with no hiccups? Our deadlines are tight and this could be a disasterous problem if I don’t figure it out soon.
The weird thing about this problem is that in another edit bay, an editor working on a different episode with the same exact situation (DVCPRO HD project, lots of animation graphics already pre rendered in final cut) was not having the same problem… it edited to tape almost instantly. My work around, which seems silly, was to render out an hour movie from the timeline using Export to Quicktime, and then to bring it in to a new project and Edit to Tape that way. It took about an hour or so to render and edited to tape instantly – a far cry from FCP originally wanting to render all day.
Does anyone have any insight on what’s going on and why on a different computer with near identical specs is not having the same problem I’m having? I’d appreciate it much. Thanks!
-P. Escandon
Editor / Motion Graphics Artist
Outdoor Channel -
2 Replies
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P.
I’ve had this same problem time and time again, and of course it’s always during output so it’s always at the time crunch, and I’ve never had the time to dive in to FCP and figure out what exactly is going on.
I think it has something to do with nesting sequences, because I find that I never have this problem when nests in my sequence are not present, and I suspect that the deeper your nests go, the more trouble you’ll have. Nonetheless, this shouldn’t be a problem, because if a sequence is rendered, FCP should just be referencing the render files (not the media in the timeline), and thus shouldn’t need to render. Furthermore, it’s ridiculous the way FCP is designed to do this pre-output render, because it renders to a temp file which it DOES NOT maintain connections to after output… so if you have to output twice, you’ll have to do this pre-output render twice… but enough of me ranting about this never-fixed issue.
I’ve frequently used the same workaround you came up with – it’s really the only way around it unless someone knows how to get around the render issue in general. However, if your whole sequence is rendered, try outputting a QuickTime reference movie (by unchecking the “Make Self Contained” box in the export window. If you’re not familiar with this, it’s basically a very simple timeline, wrapped up in a QuickTime movie, that actually plays back other media on your HDD (just like a FCP timeline). The pros – it’s MUCH faster to export, because it’s only writing media reference for playback, not rewriting an hour of media itself. And for all intensive purposes, your system and all apps see it as a QT movie. The cons – if you move or delete the media (your render files in this case), your QT reference movie won’t be able to play. You cannot burn the reference movie to disc or upload it to an FTP – it needs all the media it’s referencing. That said, as long as you pay attention to all that, such a movie will work fine for your workaround.
Good Luck,
Ben
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If you have any tracks or individual clips with the “Clip Enable’ turned off FCP will re-render that clip during the ETT process. If you have lot’s of clips with “Clip Enable” turned off that could add up to a lot of render time. You can tell if a clip’s visability in disabled by it’s darkened color in the timeline. It won’t need rendering in the timeline, only when you try to ETT. The fix for this is to just delete the clip or clips.
Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.
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