What are your render times (FCP7 - Pro Ress 422LT 1920 Timeline)

[steveOooo]

Just checking what others render times are.

Mine are i think approx 1 hour per 1 minute of video on the timeline (2-4 filters used). Seq settings are

HDV Footage converted to Pro ress 422 LT 1920 1080 50i (PAL)

My spec

Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.66 GHz, 8GB RAM (fat load of use using FCPs 4GB Limit!), NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT
Is this normal? MPB was top of the range early 2009.

Im looking to get a Mac Pro as it gets a bit of a joke when trying to do any sort of compositing in motion - hit render / ram preview - once done, my com is very sluggish and intolerable. (1920 3d graphics).

 

[ppc_michael]

Hmmm! I work mostly with 1080p24 ProRes 422 HQ footage from film transfers. In Final Cut Pro I get anywhere betwen 10-20 minutes of footage rendered per hour with a few filters in Final Cut Pro. Apple Color renders footage at nearly real time.

I am on a relatively recently-built Hackintosh though.

 

[VideoCave]

re render times

Not sure if it should take an hour per minute to render, but lets break it down a bit.

Even though your MBP is still new enough and plenty powerful. There really not good for much more then basic editing. They just don't have the power of a MacPro Tower (hey that rhymed LOL). Anyways Motion is a killer when it comes to rendering/processing your playback. It doesn't take much to go from fast to a crawl when creating any motion graphics.

But one thing I wanna ask is other then the filters you have applied to the video with in FCP, are using the native Motion document in your timeline or rendering a mov from Motion then importing that into your FCP project?

Even though this is a convenient workflow, in the end it is not. Because instead of it already being rendered, FCP now has to do it on the fly, and if your Motion projects are complicated and if you have alot of them in your timeline this will take forever to render like it is now and it may not even finish at all and just crash FCP all together. Oh, and it may not render your motion files correctly as well. Trust me I have gone through all these problems before and had to figure WTF was going on at 2am in the morning.

Also when working in Motion even on a tower using a RAM Preview doesn't even work all the time if there is alot of effects going on at that point in your timeline. I will just render out to a mov of that little bit to see how everything is really playing back. And every once and awhile you need to go into your Motion preferences and clear out the RAM Cache to help things move along.

One more thing when exporting from FCP are you compressing to an h.264 mov or an uncompressed codec of somekind. This will make a difference on export time as well. If so try exporting to an uncompressed format first to see if it goes faster and then make your compressed versions from that. This way you have master to work from instead of having to work from FCP each time.

Also you may want to try just doing test renders of very small sections to see if things work any better.

Hope any of this can help you.