[Alan Okey]

What are you doing in your edit that requires rendering? In Final Cut Pro, if your sequence settings are correct then rendering should only be necessary for transitions, speed changes, composited clips (text supers, keying, etc.) or filters.

When you drop clips in your timeline (without applying any filters), do you get a red or green bar above them? If so, then your sequence settings don’t match your footage. If not, then let us know what you’re applying to your edit that requires rendering.

[Alan Okey]

Rendering speed is largely determined by CPU speed, not by how much RAM you have, unless your system is seriously lacking in RAM.

What is the primary format (resolution and codec) of your video projects?

[Alan Okey]

Thanks, Roland. That’s a great list of answers, very much appreciated.

[Alan Okey]

More background on the Quicktime X transition:

https://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars/6#quicktime-x

Relevant excerpt:

“If QuickTime X is so much better, why doesn’t QTKit use it for everything? The answer is that QuickTime X, like its Mac OS X namesake, has very limited capabilities in its initial release. While QuickTime X supports playback, capture, and exporting, it does not support general-purpose video editing. It also supports only “modern” video formats—basically, anything that can be played by an iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV. As for other video codecs, well, you can forget about handling them with plug-ins because QuickTime X doesn’t support those either.

For every one of the cases where QuickTime X is not up to the job, QuickTime 7 will fill in. Cutting, copying, and pasting portions of a video? QuickTime 7. Extracting individual tracks from a movie? QuickTime 7. Playing any movie not natively supported by an existing Apple handheld device? QuickTime 7. Augmenting QuickTime’s codec support using a plug-in of any kind? You guessed it: QuickTime 7.”

[Alan Okey]

Snow Leopard includes Quicktime X, which is a whole new ballgame. Quicktime X represents the future of Quicktime, and it is a 64-bit application. It’s also a work in progress. Rewriting Quicktime from the ground up to be a modern 64-bit application and framework is a monumental task, and it’s not yet completed. As a result, Quicktime X does not yet have all of the features that you’ve come to expect from Quicktime Pro (7). Quicktime X is installed by default in Snow Leopard, but Quicktime 7 player is not.

In order to get back the functionality you have come to expect form Quicktime Pro, you’ll need to choose the option to install Quicktime 7 in the Customize box when installing Snow Leopard. This will install Quicktime 7 in the Applications>Utilities folder of your system drive. There is no longer any need to “unlock” Quicktime Pro. The Pro features are now included as standard when installing Quicktime 7.

For a more detailed explanation of the hows and whys of this, read here:

https://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars/16

[Alan Okey]

[Craig Williams] “Full screen capture at 1024 x 768. “

That’s considerable. Drive speed and/or buffering to RAM speed are likely the bottleneck here.

[Alan Okey]

Animation is a high-bandwidth RGB codec. What is the resolution of your screen capture?

If the video dimensions are large enough, it’s entirely possible that you won’t get consistent playback speed from a single drive due to the high data rate required to maintain smooth playback without dropped frames. If that’s the case, you may need to stripe several drives in RAID 0 to achieve the desired playback rate.

[Alan Okey]

SD and HD use different color spaces.

SD = Rec. 601

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rec._601

HD = Rec. 709

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rec._709

[Alan Okey]

Do yourself a favor: Pick up a copy of Conduit for $200 and learn how to build your own keyer.

https://www.dvgarage.com/prod/prod.php?prod=conduit2

At the very least, watch the demo videos to understand why learning how to build your own keyer is ultimately of far greater value than buying one that may or may not work for a particular shot.

[Alan Okey]

At my day gig they have an old dual 1GHz G4 set up with Logic Pro, which they use for recording voiceovers. A G4 is plenty snappy enough for dialogue recording/editing.