[Pelai Vancar]

Thanx a lot! Just was I was looking for, really handy!

MacPro Quad 2.8 4gb RAM, OSX 10.5, FCP 6.04, QT 7.5
MXO + Cinema Display

[Pelai Vancar]

Hi David, ironic is the word I agree. I hope apple will take a look at this exporting issue in future updates. Until then I too will have to change my workflow.
I’m thinking of trying to edit my HDV footage coded into Prores from now on but am afraid my FW800 connection to disks will not make this easy, and maybe even slower than HDV native.

Anyway I hope my tips have been able to help you.

Cheers!

iMac 24″ 2.8 extreme, 3gb RAM, 500 gb internal disk + 500 gb FW800 external drive.
OSX 10.4.11, FCP 6.02, QT 7.3

[Pelai Vancar]

Check out my thread here when I was having same problems as you.
+ Before exporting have you ticked all options on rendering, even full? Because if you haven’t that would explain the long exporting times.

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/964979#964979

the way I see it you have 2 options: before exporting rendering your HDV footage to same as codec and exporting likewise or rendering in a Prores sequence and exporting likewise.

Hope that this will help you.

iMac 24″ 2.8 extreme, 3gb RAM, 500 gb internal disk + 500 gb FW800 external drive.
OSX 10.4.11, FCP 6.02, QT 7.3

[Pelai Vancar]

Hi Andy,

answering your questions:

Regarding rendering HDV sequence to HDV.

[Andy Mees] “interesting. how long is “a while” for you? and are we still talking about a 32 minute timeline? what are your render settings ie Need Render, Proxy, Preview, Full etc ?
“

Well what I meant by a while is difficult to say, cause I rendered the timeline in 5 minute segments but I guess the total time was about 4 – 5 hours.
Rendering settings were all ticked even FULL.
Once timeline was completely rendered I then remarked all clips and hit the renderbar wich gives me the conforming message. That took about 1 minute.
Then exporting went superfast.

question 2:

[Andy Mees] “Your second option is to change your sequence settings or drop your edited clips into a Prores sequence. Rerender again. And this time exporting times will be very short as well.

correct. the export times would be consideraby shorter now as you are rendering to the much faster ProRes codec rather than having to conform to HDV’s Long GOP structure
“

Actually here you are wrong. Though rendering may be faster the exporting times are much longer than when exporting HDV (when I said short I meant a lot shorter than 8 hours) since files are much bigger and therefore longer time to write to disk.

iMac 24″ 2.8 extreme, 3gb RAM, 500 gb internal disk + 500 gb FW800 external drive.
OSX 10.4.11, FCP 6.02, QT 7.3

[Pelai Vancar]

Rafael,

No hard feelings I hope.
I understand now what your suggestion is by separating renderfiles and media on two separate drives. But here I must agree with Walter, I have never had that kind of advice rather the opposite, to always keep them together if you can.

And as Andy said it is the one FW bus that decides the speeds, if I were to, for some reason put a FW400 disk together with my FW800 disk the transfer speeds of the FW800 would drop to FW400.

iMac 24″ 2.8 extreme, 3gb RAM, 500 gb internal disk + 500 gb FW800 external drive.
OSX 10.4.11, FCP 6.02, QT 7.3

[Pelai Vancar]

Andy and Walter,

I see I have confused you. Let me try to clarify:

What I am saying is that when editing HDV material in an HDV sequence you get the choice of changing your rendering settings to Prores within the HDV sequence (Not the same thing as having a Prores sequence)
Why you would do this is because if you render as HDV, rendering times are much longer and this option permits you to work faster.

The problem arises once you have finished your editing and want to export it:
If you then have your whole timeline rendered with option to render as Prores and now try to export selfcontained or reference your exporting times go bonkers: 8hours.
Why? Because it doesn’t just export referencing renderfiles but recompressing the whole thing once again.

Solution:
If you on the other hand once finished your editing delete your Prores-rederfiles and rerender your hole timeline as HDV (change your rendering option to same as sequence codec). It will take a while. But once you try to export exporting times go down to 5 for selfcontained and 2 for reference.

Your second option is to change your sequence settings or drop your edited clips into a Prores sequence. Rerender again. And this time exporting times will be very short as well.

I asume by all this that the Prores-rendering option in an HDV sequence is only a meant as a temporary-while-editing solution by apple to help you work on your editing much faster than if you had to render to HDV while you were editing. It is not intended that you export a sequence from these renderfiles and therefore problems arise when you try.

One more thing that makes me wonder what kind of Prores codec the rendering option in a HDV sequence gives you is that if you try to put an HDV Prores-rendered clip (from HDV sequence) into a Prores sequence. FCP will automatically tell you it needs rendering weather the sequence is Prores 422 or Prores HQ, 8bit or 10 bit.

Hope it’s a bit clearer now.

iMac 24″ 2.8 extreme, 3gb RAM, 500 gb internal disk + 500 gb FW800 external drive.
OSX 10.4.11, FCP 6.02, QT 7.3

[Pelai Vancar]

Rafael,

I did not mean to offend you, though I admit I was sounding a bit harsh. I do appreciate you trying to help and am glad for your advice I just don’t understand why you continue to asume that I use my internal drive for media when I have stated several times that I don’t.

How could having one external mediadrive be a bottleneck as opposed to several, on my system?

First of all my external drive is a dedicated drive for media and renderfiles. Secondly, I keep it as empty as I can to bring up speed = I never use more than 60% of the disc capacity.
Thirdly there is only one FW-bus on the iMac though one FW800 port and one FW400 port.
This means that daisychaining several FW disks can only bring speeds down if a disk is FW400 or keep it aligned if they are all FW800. But there is no way of increasing my speeds by getting several external disks and putting them into a raid as the true bottleneck is the FW800 connection to the computer. That said I do have a Raid0 enclosure for my external FW800 drive to make that drive a 1T (2 x 500gb drives) raid if I have a lot of media for a project.

Since FW800 is the fastest transfer I will get I edit HDV in it’s native form despite of it’s other inconveniances.

iMac 24″ 2.8 extreme, 3gb RAM, 500 gb internal disk + 500 gb FW800 external drive.
OSX 10.4.11, FCP 6.02, QT 7.3

[Pelai Vancar]

Hi Arohaj here’s my workflow:

[arohaj] “Capture and edit in native HDV. Do you change the render control tab in sequence setting to ProRes during the editing process to bring render times down? “

– Exactly

[arohaj] “When you have completed your edit, do you drop the HDV timeline into a new ProRes timeline or do you change the compressor in sequence settings to prores and re-render then export a QT file? “

I drop the edit in a fresh sequence just to be on the safe side but you could just as easily change your initial sequence settings after editing.
The Prores sequence-setting I chose is Prores HQ and 10 bit.

The one thing I make absolutely sure is that I use rendermanager after step one but before step 2 to get rid of all previous renders so there will be no confusion as to which Prores renderfiles the final movie refers to before outputting. And make sure when rendering final sequence that rendersettings are all ticked: even FULL.

This should do it. I’m glad I could help and get back to me if you have any problems.

iMac 24″ 2.8 extreme, 3gb RAM, 500 gb internal disk + 500 gb FW800 external drive.
OSX 10.4.11, FCP 6.02, QT 7.3

[Pelai Vancar]

Good News!
It was as I suspected. I did a few tests and putting HDV material in a Prores sequence and then rendering makes the exporting times just fine.
This means that the Prores option in the rendering tab when editing an HDV sequence is only to bring down rendering time while editing. When outputting you have to decide either to move your edited clips to a new Prores sequence + rerender or keep them in your HDV sequence but reset rendering option to “same as codec”.

I hope this can help anyone else that was having the same troubles as I.

[Pelai Vancar]

Borijs,

I did try as quicktime conversion which didn’t change anything.
It’s quite interesting that you succeed in doing this.
If I may ask: do you put your HDV editing in a Prores sequence or in an HDV timeline with option for rendering in Prores.
My workflow was editing on an HDV timeline and on the rendering option chosing Prores.
Please let me know, maybe this is the issue all along. Maybe when rendering an HDV sequence in Prores and then exporting it, somehow recompresses once more to HDV which is why exporting has not been working out.
I am still puzzled though as to why a reference file would not work though.

And to Rafael,

I don’t understand why you fail to read my posts and reply the same thing over and over again.
I do not use my internal drive as scratchdrive nor do I render to it, this is the reason for me using an external fast FW800 drive.

Secondly, my iMac is the latest and most fast of the current iMac line, even though not a Macpro, so saying it it too slow is just absurd. Specially when there is apparently a difference when exporting HDV-rendered or Prores-rendered footage.

iMac 24″ 2.8 extreme, 3gb RAM, 500 gb internal disk + 500 gb FW800 external drive.
OSX 10.4.11, FCP 6.02, QT 7.3