won't render

I've seen similar posts to this one, but none of the solutions offered seem to solve my problem. When I hit apple R, or go to the menu and hit render or hit option R, a progress bar pops up and then goes away, with no results.

I've trashed my prefs, which didn't help.

It's only in this project: other projects render fine. It's a document geared for the net, created in flash, then transfered to qt, so the settings are a bit unusual: 500x375, 24fps. The sequence settings match the clip settings and I don't need to render to edit, i'm just doing a couple of motion fx, slowing things down here and there, as well as a difference matte, and I can't render anything.

This is time sensitive. Any help would be really appreciated.

Thanks,
Tom

Are you experiencing the RED render bar over sections of you project? If you have rendered before and not moved a section that was rendered, you may not need to re-render?

Sorry to not be more clear. Yeah, it's the RED bar. Can't watch any of it.

Every time this issue comes up, I want to ask this silly little question, and from Tom's description it's very unlikely to be the problem, but I have to ask it:

Is the Timeline window active when you do Option-R?

If not, it won't render anything. It's bit me many times, and always when I assume, say, that dragging a filter from the Browser makes the Timeline active, when in fact the Browser is still active.

Also, Apple-R is Render Selection, and if you don't have a clip selected, or the one that is selected doesn't need rendering, then nothing will happen - no matter how many red render bars there are. Should use Option-R.

Tom says it only happens in one project, and that makes this really doubtful, but it's worth mentioning.

Scott

Thanks, Scott.

Unfortunatey, yes. I've tried it every way I can think of, and certainly the timeline is active; I've tried it on each of the clips that won't render (two motion fx, 1 Luma Key) with the necessary clips highligted, and nothing.

Any other thoughts?

Thanks.

This bites me every now and then - when it happens to me, I have zoomed in to the Timeline and somewhere there I have set either an In, Out, or both.

Just a thought...

Hm. And here I thought this was going to be an easy fix...

I don't think it's any little thing like that. I keep trying it periodically, hoping it will magically work. I feel like it's a setting thing, maybe? Thanks for the responses; please keep them coming.

Tom

Also, if this is any help, it WILL render audio, but only when I go to 'render for playback.' Make any sense?

Could it have anything to do with format? My source clip is H.264 at data rates of 308.9 K/sec. I thought of this because every time I get to one of my fx, it stops playing, and tells me the usual dropped frame message. But RT is on Safe, I have only one sequence open, and i'm running 5.1.1 with a G5 Dual w/1.5 gigs memory.

Thoughts?

Weird clip and/or timeline settings can cause something like this...

Have you tried:

a) Deleting all render files with Render Manager to force a complete re-render?
b) Disconnected the media and then reconnecting?
c) Copying and pasting everything to a new project file?

Sigh. You gave me hope, but alas...

There actually are no render files. It hasn't been able to render anything, so therefore no video render files have been created.

Tried disconnecting and reconnecting. No change. It's all one piece of video--a movie almost completed in Flash that they hired me to tweak and trim and work on audio. Not sure if that's relevant, but...

Tried copying and pasting. No change.

I did discover that if I do an export using compressor for Internet streaming, that it would take about 45 minutes to export the 3.5 minute clip, but that it would allow me to at least see the fx I've done. One hell of a work around, but...

Sorry to hear that. I've run into a similar problem but not as bad: On two or three sessions, different stations, I've seen Final Cut Pro suddenly lose the ability to respond to my usual render shortcut, OPTION-R. In all those cases, only APPLE-R worked (without anything selected, APPLE-R renders the whole timeline). I think perhaps your issue is an intensified version of this.

What happens if you re-exported your media using identical settings?

One more thing: What is your Scratch Disk set to? What happens if you change the Scratch Disk setting, send the render files somewhere else?

Another good theory, but...

I was wondering if that might be part of the problem (but then it works for other docs with the same settings), I have my capture and render files going to internal drive, and my docs going to Documents Folder on system drive. Don't want my media going to my system drive. FCP likes to set all these up in one place, but I've got them seperated. Tried moving the render files back to system folder, but no luck.

Thanks so much for all your help.

> I was wondering if that might be part of the problem (but then it works for
> other docs with the same settings), I have my capture and render files going to
> internal drive, and my docs going to Documents Folder on system drive. Don't
> want my media going to my system drive. FCP likes to set all these up in one
> place

Theoretically speaking, this shouldn't be a problem, but there's a "voodoo" factor in there. Go ahead and try setting new Scratch Disk, Autosave Vault and Thumbnail Cache locations. Worth a shot.

I'm back...

Well, I never figured out the render thing, and I simply did qt outputs--uncompressed for the client to see the parts that couldn't be played straight through. Not ideal, but good enough.

Now I'm done, and I can't do an export of the whole movie. Every time I try, fcp crashes. I can do like 10 seconds from the timeline (even over the unrendered parts), but when i try to do the whole thing, no go.

*If I do QT Movie, it says "Codec Error."
*If I do QT conversion, uncompressed or any other way (client wants highest possible quality, and will compress when bring back into flash), it crashes.
*If I use Compressor, it works, but I haven't found the right setting to give it enough quality.

Thoughts???

Thanks.

I had the No render problem twice before--
to fix I trashed preferences and it fixed it--Jay--