Rendering Hell Lucifer Lives

ok i may have some settings messed up or something but i just did a 40 sec video with only 5-.motn and 17-stills. there is a transition for every still ( cubes and wipes ) and i used 2 mattes.

i could have put this hold thing together in a little less than 3hrs but because of rendering it has taken 3 days@ 4-6hrs a day. my render time ranges from 1 minute to 31 minutes. This may not seem like its all that uncommon but it is what i am rendering that has me stumped.

Examples (fcp5 set to dvntsc 3:2 on a dual 1.8 w/ 2.5gig ram 64bit vcard):

A. i have a motion file on vtrk 1 and a still on vtrk 2. in this case i have to render the still its transition(even crossd). if i make ANY movement of that still or transition i will have to render again as if i just put it into the time line.

B. at times when i remove a .motn or still or transition that empty space has to be rendered and yes it take as long as i would have taken to ad a clip.

C. ANY modifications i do such as duration, transition direction, opacity also has to be rendered.

now some of this i am sure is just how things work but some of this i think is my lack of knowlege of ideal settings to help the render to become more efficient. Help before i amputate my foot with a butter knife and stick it into the computers rear bus.

pre-thanx

Any media of a format that is not what the project is set to, will need to be rendered. In some cases, you can get by with not rendering due to use of RTExtreme on a really fast G5 maybe, but in most cases, if it ain't DV then it needs rendering. AND - anything that needs rendering and gets moved by one nats hair will need to be rendered again.

What are you on? These post titles are very strange and the content is a mite strange as well.

Make sure your stills are 72dpi. Make sure your sequence settings match your clip settings. Start and new project, check that the settings are correct and then paste your timeline contents into it to see if this improves the rendering nothing issue.

so what your saying is that there is no way for me to even create a setting that will handle .motn and stills at the same time. about 40% ( the bread and butter jobs shall we say ) contain just those 2 type visual files and maybe one or two .aif.
is there a setting that would somewhat help? i am not 100% sure of when to use which setting other than aspect, bit dept, and hd. just the bear basics...

is there no answer for this other than the ones i have recieved. i wish that there was someone who could give me some kind of help on make this situation at least 10% better. i have 4 days to do 3 more of these. and yes it is behind schedual in 3 days but what editor do you know that never needs an extra day hmmmm?

There are lots of possible answers but they seem to exceed your hardware's capability and, if I may, your ability to understand them at the moment. That will change as your experience with FCP grows.

Every non-native media source (anything that doesn't match your sequence settings) that cannot be realtime processed by proprietary hardware must be rendered. You can reduce the amount of rendering by pre-rendering your background movies and reimporting them as standalone clips. But once you've done this, they cannot be changed (unless you re-render and export-import again). So it takes preplanning, careful file-naming conventions, excellent file tracking and a good workflow.

You design your effects so you can preview them without tremendous rendering by not applying drop shadows and other filters until the last moment. You learn how to use the tools so well that you can visualize the output without needing to render everything. You learn how to do partial renders by canceling a render run. You learn how to use QuickView. You learn how to do low rez precomps.

It's all quite confusing. A deadline is no place to be learning this stuff because it ain't easy.

bogiesan

Yeah, it's like throwing a child into the pool to teach him by forcing him to swim-- they used to do that in California. Traumatized a whole generation of tots!

Do what pan and scan or zoom you need to do on the stills-- they are likely what's holding you up, especially if you apply custom mattes and stuff to them.

1) Animate ecah to your desired effect.

2) Set an In and Out around each. Disable any background tracks you don't want to include. (You may need the backgorund if you're matting, of course.)

3) Export the animated still using the Current Settings (in your case, DV-NTSC)

4) Drag the existing raw clip into a special "Factory Clips" bin. You can always dive in here and return this clip to the timeline and revise the keyframing if you need to.)

5) Import the generated clip as you would any QT clip, and cut it in to replace the factory clip.

Your render times should shoot way down. I do this on occasion and I'mnot even on a G5.

- Lucifer
Today's FCP 5 keytip:
Paste Overwrite- Command-V.
Paste INSERT- Shift- V!

The FCP 5 KeyGuide?: your power placemat.
Now available at KeyGuide Central
www.neotrondesign.com

i guess you are rite i was just looking for the short cuts to the experience ( thanks lauren). I am quite savy with most of fcp as far as getting it to do what i want and maybe i am just really feeling the pinch since biz just picked up. more time editing means i see this more and i am wanting to cut down some time so i can have a life for 24hrs out of a week. oh i am still a little grey about tip 4.

bogiesan

thanks also and not to sound to on my high horse but i cant even start a project unlees i can see at least 80% of the edit in my head. but i am wondering about that export import thingy you had in there. wouldnt that take longer than the render itself? i am also thinking that you may have been refering to that workflow as being a help to those renders that result from the slight movements of the clip. where i usually would have to render the empty space. the uda thing is that i have noticed is that the rendering for stills that do not have a .motn as part of the overlay or back round do not need render. now i am thinking that is what lauren refered to in tip number 2.

i'm sorry if this thread is getting to long but these are some time saving tip that could have a smiley next to my efficiency rating.