FCP6 output to QuickTime taking 13 hours

Hey there! I am desperate for some help!

I am doing an output much like I have a hundred times before. The footage is XDCam -no other settings are different from the many times I have done this before. There are no special effects, nothing fancy at all. Had titles done in After Effects - removed them as a test - and it STILL said it was going to take 13 hours to output to Quicktime. Tried Compressor - same deal. This is only a 2 hour feature, it should never even come close to taking this long. Plenty of room on the desktop as well as all my hard drives. I have seriously tried everything.

Project is due TODAY! Help! What am I suddenly missing??

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smutcutter
Hey there! I am desperate for some help!

I am doing an output much like I have a hundred times before. The footage is XDCam -no other settings are different from the many times I have done this before.

Is nothing different from before or is the XDCAM footage new to the mix? Please be as clear as possible. Is the footage XDCAM EX/HD/HD422/etc.?

Which version FCP are you using (6.0.?)? Mac OS X version? Computer model? Amount of installed RAM? Disk space on start-up drive and media drive(s)? Type of media drives (FW, internal SATA, etc.)?

Quote
smutcutter
There are no special effects, nothing fancy at all. Had titles done in After Effects - removed them as a test - and it STILL said it was going to take 13 hours to output to Quicktime. Tried Compressor - same deal. This is only a 2 hour feature, it should never even come close to taking this long. Plenty of room on the desktop as well as all my hard drives. I have seriously tried everything.

Project is due TODAY! Help! What am I suddenly missing??

If, indeed, you are using XDCAM footage (and that's a change), then you will normally experience render and output times up to many multiples of the project length, depending on your editing system's performance. If you are scaling your export and transcoding to another codec, it may take a long time. Have you fully rendered everything (as needed) before exporting?

It may be that you aren't missing anything, except for having done proper testing of your workflow at the start of your project. A good way to approximate your export and transcode times is to take a representative portion of your project (5 to 15 minutes) and time your exports, renders, and transcodes using that. Then, extrapolate that time to get a good estimate of the time for the entire project. Estimated times shown in various dialog windows are often quite inaccurate.

You probably won't be finished "today" (unless your day ends in more than 13 to 15 hours from the time you read this). Besides doing the render and export (depending on your project and sequence settings), you still should watch the entire piece after it's been exported to make sure there aren't any problems with the sound or picture.

Good luck! Try to be patient.


-Dave

Also, are you cutting in an XDcam sequence, or something else? ProRes?

Yea, we need more information. XDCAM even if fully rendered would take MUCH longer to export due to the Mpeg2 re-encoding, but the speed depends on the processing power of your machine and throughput on the arrays. Usually I'll work off a ProRes sequence during finishing just to save time on exporting.



www.strypesinpost.com

Unless you need to deliver in XDCAM, you'll experience better performance and stability by changing your sequence codec to ProRes. And it won't need to conform when you export so that will save time too.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

"smutcutter"?

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Yes.. SmutCutter. And?

I wanted to thank everyone for their help! Changing things things to ProRes seemed to be a big help!

Now I have a client I am sending Quick Times to - they look fine on my end, on his he says everything is heavily pixelated. It is coming off of old DVCam tapes but the picture is clear as a bell on my computer. I used his FTP to send the entire file and he says it looks really bad.

No clue what to do - thoughts?

"Looks bad" is way too vague. Are you actually sending him the entire ProRes file at full quality? It could just be a matter of him not having "High Quality" enabled on his end. Or if he's blowing up a 720x480 file to the size of a full computer monitor screen (most of these things come at 1440 across now, minimum), then a non-HD file will "look bad".


www.derekmok.com

To be honest, I think the problem is on the client's end.

Still working it out but thanks for the help!