Video Export speed?

If you have 50% of your hard drive left, the problem will definitely not be the hard drive usage. If you do a lot of editing and want to spend money on a hard drive, rather think about getting an external FW800 drive, since it may slow things down significantly if your footage and your export folder are on the same hard drive as your system and software.

As for the export: I need some more information from you before I can judge if this is a normal rendering time. First of all: What are you exporting as? If you chose an H.264 codec for smaller file size, the export will be slow and 17 minutes is quite expectable, since the codec is pretty complicated. If you are going for ProRes, it should be faster... And secondly: What are you doing in Motion? If you did a greenscreen masking, some tracking and added 10 flame balls and a bunch of animated text, then of course your export will be very slow because Motion will render all of that on export. If you just put in your footage and export it without any effects or compositing, it is of course much faster (although a little useless... )

What he said^ And how complex is this graphically? What filters do you have applied? Filters and motion blur can make a render crawl. I had a 5 second comp that would take 4-6 hours to export from After Effects depending on the tweaks I had to make. 17 minutes for 7 minutes? pfft. consider yourself lucky.

Yeah, w/o more info no one can say if that's normal or not. It's like asking if it's normal to take a hour to get from point A to point B w/o telling us where point A is, where point B is and your method of transportation.

One time I helped a fellow editor who was complaining that just rendering a few seconds of text over picture in a FCP timeline was taking 10mins. When I looked at his project the 'text' was actually a massive PNG file. When he resized it down to HD in PS and tried it again things went much faster.


Lethal

more importantly, isn't Motion GPU based? MBP's aren't known for their beefy GPU's.

matteusclement said:

more importantly, isn't Motion GPU based? MBP's aren't known for their beefy GPU's.

Click to expand...

Yes and no. Most particle effects will be rendered on the GPU and a notebook will certainly perform less powerful there. However, the H.264 encoding on export and e.g. keying and some other compositing is done on the CPU.

Anyways, it all doesn't matter until he tells us what he wants to render and what he want to render it into.

17 minutes for a 7 minute video sounds suspiciously like applying no serious effects and rendering into H.264 on export. Then I would guess a time in that range.