[Chris Dillingham]

Ah… I must have missed that particular Macbreak episode. 😉

I just did some reading on image masks and tinkered with them a bit in Motion. It looks like I can get the effect I’m after by using two layers of the video and apply a black and white effect (such as the smoke generator) as an image mask to the top one. Then I can adjust either video layer separately to achieve the desired effect. Is that what you were suggesting, or is there a cleaner way?

Thanks!

[Chris Dillingham]

I’m having a similar problem. Even when I set auto render to render all open sequences, and leave the computer idle for way longer than the number I have set, it’s only rendering the active sequence. I have the other two unrendered sequences in the timeline, but they’re not active. I’m assuming that “Render RT segments” should be checked if I want segments that are already playable in real-time to be rendered fully. Still nothing. Is there something I’m missing?

Thanks a tip I picked up here, it may be a moot issue. If I had three sequences each with an hour render, I previously had to come back to it after each one rendered to start the next. I was hoping auto render would solve that issue, but it turns out I can select them in the browser window and select render to have FCP do them all. I’d still like to troubleshoot and understand this one.

[Chris Dillingham]

I wouldn’t say it’s a cruel, sick joke, but I do have to admit it’s too limited to use much. When I’m trying to render a broadcast safe filter on 4.5 hours of footage, it’s worthless, because I’d have to render it before I can send it through compressor to farm it out.

The manuals and the “quickcluster” options are actually not as hard to set up as I initially thought, and if you do a lot of conversions of completed videos through compressor, it’s probably worth checking out.