Newbie questions for Motion

I've been using FCP for years, but I recently started using Motion.

According to Apple, you should be able to:

"Drag any Motion project into Final Cut Pro or DVD Studio Pro without exporting or rendering. Instantly see updated motion graphics in either application after you save changes to your project in Motion"

That doesn't seem to be working for me. Is the above statement hardware dependent, or do I have something wrong with my settings? (my hardware listed below). I've created some incredibly simple motion titles using identical settings to my FCP project (NTSC DV 720x480 29.97) and I have to render them when I bring them into FCP or make any changes. Even basic text with transparent background takes a significant amount of time to render in FCP. It took about 20 min to render a total of about 1 minute of still text with nothing behind it. How is this any simpler than using After Effects? Granted, I can change the motion file and see it change in FCP, but the render takes longer than exporting a new file form AE and importing it. Help me figure out what I'm doing wrong.

Thanks!

My hardware:
Mac Pro 8 core (2x2.8 GHz)
2GB Ram
NVidia GeForce 8800 GT

My software:
Final Cut Studio 2

You will always have to render your Motion projects when you bring them into your FCP timeline - this is because they contain an alpha channel, and need to be rendered to your timeline codec.

I believe the quote means that you don't need to render a movie out of Motion and then bring that movie into FCP.

Okay, that makes sense. But still, it takes forever to render. If it takes 20 minutes to render one minute's worth of static titles, I doubt I'll ever use Motion to build complex effects. Should it really be taking this long?

No, something is wrong. In FCP, in User Preferences, the Render Control tab, make sure that the Quality setting for Master Templates and Motion Projects is set to Normal. Also, there are known issues with your graphics card.

As Mark says, the video card used in Motion is critical. Motion and other Apple software use GPU power as well as CPU power to perform graphical tasks.

If you plan to use Motion or Color, then you need a BIG BAD video card! I am not sure about the 8800 issues but I have heard the X1900 is faster in Motion than the top of the line card Apple sells today.

Good info. I dropped the quality setting from best to normal, and render times improved. Much faster. Now, is this a setting that I just want to use during the editing proccess and then re-render at best quality at the end of the project, or is the normal setting adequate for DV and HDV?

Eventually I'll get a beefed up video card when I can afford it. I can deal with normal render times for the time being. Mark, any references as to the known issues with the 8800GT?

Thanks for the help

You only need best quality when dealing with vector shape and text that are up close to the camera.

Lots of discussion about that card on the apple forum:

[discussions.apple.com]