First time in FCP, rendering questions?

[GFLPraxis]

Hello all! I've played around with motion a bit and decided to take my first dive into Final Cut Pro. I had some captured clips to edit and threw them in and watched the training DVDs.

Something I keep running into though- when I throw video clips in there, just standard video clips that play fine under QuickTime, it just says "Unrendered" when I try to play back the entire project- I can only play the one clip individually.

Also, if I apply a filter, I can only see it in still images- I can't see even a preview with the rendered version.

So:
1) How do I force it to render the footage?
2) How do I see previews with the filters intact? I thought RT Extreme was supposed to do this live.

Sorry if these are noobish questions
My machine's got four cores, 4 GB of RAM and a Geforce 8800GT so it's hardly a slowpoke.

Thanks!

 

[LethalWolfe]

1. Read the manual. Some people at Apple spent a lot of time making a fine manual so the least you could do is thumb through it at least out of common courtesy.

2. Your timeline settings have to match to get proper playback. For example, if you captured DV footage you need to make sure your timeline is also setup for DV. The easiest way to do this is to choose the FCP Easy Setup that corresponds to the footage that you have. Keep in mind FCP is based around standard video codecs so if you have a bunch of odd-ball h.264 xvid wmv files you pulled off the web then you probably should transcode them into a codec that will play nice w/FCP. Making sure your project is setup properly will go a long way in improving your video playback performance.

3. To render your timeline hit command+R or go Sequence->Render/Selection/Only/All.

4. To do a RAM preview you can use the QuickView tool (option+8 or Tools->QuickView). This will load a 2-6 loop into RAM and play it continuously. Very hand for previewing effects as it's much faster than rendering and you can make adjustments to the effects in real time w/o the QuickView stopping.


Lethal

 

[ZballZ]

The first thing to do, when you start a project, is to define what type of video you will be working with. Normally by using the "easy setup". This defines the standard for all your material in a sequence.

Fx; DV-PAL-anamorphic.

Now when you import footage into this project, DV-PAL-anamorph-footage fits your settings, and wont need rendering. ANYTHING other than this, will need to render...

 

[ChemiosMurphy]

1. Read the manual. Some people at Apple spent a lot of time making a fine manual so the least you could do is thumb through it at least out of common courtesy.

Lethal

I second Lethal. Spend a few days and just read it. It'll teach you everything from workflow to exporting your final project. The manuals are VERY well written and you'll learn a lot. Lethal knows tons, so I'd go with what the guy says.