Why do files need to be re-rendered?

[Jerry Hofmann]

If the Render Settings in the timeline and/or the Preferences are set differently, you’ll lose connection to render files moved from one system to the other. They have to match exactly or the renders don’t get accessed by the system whose settings are different than the system the project was created on. Could this be the problem? It’s not a bug don’t think because I’ve not seen the behavior on my systems, and did just as you are doing this weekend. Went from a FW drive to a laptop internal using media manager, and all went well.

Jerry

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[Del Frost]

Thanks for the reply.

Do you mean the stuff in the “User preferences…” (alt-Q) menu under the tabs: “Render Control” & “Timeline Options” & the corresponding tabs in the “Settings…” (command-0) menu or should I be looking somewhere else?

[Del Frost]

I still can’t figure this out.

I went home last night, connected the external hard drive to my laptop, fired up FCP & all was well. No red sequences etc.

Did a bit of work, saved the file.

Got in this morning, connected the external drive to my main computer, fired it up & all the sequences that I waited 4 hours to have rendered yesterday are showing as red again!!!!

And while I’m on the subject, why is only one video track showing as red? Why is the other one okay? I mean, no footage is showing as offline & if the links are bad somewhere else, they’d be bad for everything, wouldn’t they?

What the heck is going on? I just can’t figure it.

[Todd Reid]

I seem to remember older versions of FCP having issues as you described.
Not sure if an upgrade would solve your render problems.

Have you double checked to see that everything is going to the external?

Its weird that your laptop continues to see the render, but another computer doesn’t. That makes me think that maybe something may be on your laptop and not the external.

Are you using the same fcp, os, and qt versions on both computers?
That could possibly cause some issues.

I have had similar results, but I’ve also had many instances where the render files followed the project just fine.
So I know that it IS possible to maintain the render files.

[Del Frost]

I think one of the problems for me is that I don’t know where to look for all of the things you mention.

Yesterday I copied the entire “Final Cut Pro Documents” folder from the laptop to the main computer with no success.

Both computers have the same external hard drive set as their scratch disk.

Where else could things be?

[Del Frost]

Sorry, that was the laptop’s “documents” folder & therefore separate to the external hard drive.

[Todd Reid]

under the final cut pro menu go to system settings.

make sure your settings all match (your external drive) including waveform cache/thumbnail cache/ and autosave vault (normal situation, I keep this on my harddrive, but we’re trouble shooting here)

The setting for your situation will be to make sure your video render is going to the external drive.

looking at my system settings now, it appears that your probably fine here, unless you have unchecked or manually changed these settings. Which leads me to think changing the other cache & vault probably wont help your render situation.

Probably comes down to different systems having different os and/or qt.
You may want to consider upgrading fcp to current version.

getting the right combination of fcp, os and qt is becoming an art form, and some combinations may not be stable. So only upgrade when your confident you have the right stuff.

Not sure if this will help, but there it is

[Del Frost]

Thanks.

The FCP, OS & QT versions are the same on both computers.