Rendering A LOT of HD100 Footage
 

I have an hour and 39 minutes of HD100 footage that I must export for work. The file I'm working with is about 50 gigs big... I need to export it at 1280 x 545 resolution with pretty color correction... using my external terabyte drive where the original footage file is located the render was going to take me 8 days... which is just impossible... now this drive is not the fastest thing inthe world and I've had firewire problems in the past so I'm trying to just do this thing on my internal hard drive, is there any way to get this footage down in size? What can be done to expedite this render? It must be done this way, I can't break it up... sucks that it's so big I know... As far as doing the render on my internal HD, I think I will need to clear a lot of space in order to get the job done, does anyone know how on a Mac G5 OS Tiger one can see like a pie chart of hard drive space, so that I know where I could migrate certain files to allow for the render? I'm going to need about 100 free gigs to get the job done efficiently, Probably over the course of 2-3 days... there is a lot of junk of the computer I'm working with and I'm curious to know if anyone has had a similar experience rendering the hd100? What can I do to organize which files I want to move to allow for the render? How can I see the breakdown of files and see where they are clustered on a mac os x tiger g5 computer?! Any help will be MUCCCCh appreciated

Bruce, go to the Finder. If your computer is not shown at the top (for example: "Bruce Powermac) call the Preferences and checkmark "Computer" at the top.
Press OK, go back to the Finder, click on your computer's name, you should see the list of all drives. Right click on a black area of the pane, select "Show View Options". In the dialog check "Show item info". Now your computer will tell you, belowe the name of each drive, the capacity and free space.

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Paolo

Hi Bruce,

Thats a big old project, about feature length I'd say. I've kind of been thinking to myself that you've been working on something the last few months, with all those questions. Are we going to be seeing something of note from the Maldives? I'm thinking maybe we might but on the flip side what was all that wheelchair stuff about Bruce? I'm just curious you seem to be a bit of an enigma out there in the middle of the Indian ocean. Can you disclose anything?

Regards Greg

When a render takes much longer than I think it should, I ask myself what work is the computer doing on this export?

1-Is there a codec change, aka transcoding going on? A codec that requires a lot of horsepower to transcode to like h264?

2-Is there a unnecessary size (pixel resolution) change? I assume since you asked about 2.35 aspect ratio in earlier questions, your 545 dimension comes from that. Does having the end file of 545 active pixels inside 720 mess you up? Might be able to save time there.

3-What other processing? Color-correction? Motion graphics?

Something to know about how FCP operates is that say you have a timeline with color-correction in every clip, motion graphics everywhere, etc etc. But you have EVERYTHING rendered. If you export that timeline to say, h264, FCP starts with every frame from the original media, then applies all your effects in an uncompressed buffer state, THEN recompresses to your chosen export codec. In other words, it does NOT use your existing render files to make your export from.

I've found that sometimes the gross effect of doing exports that way was way more time consuming than just exporting the timeline is it's existing codec first, THEN recompressing it to whatever codec/format was needed using Compressor.

There are DEFINITELY ways to get the Apple suite of products working together faster, you just have to play around a little.

Bruce was from the Seychelles when he was on DVXUser.

Another thing to remember is that even when FCP uses the same rendered frames, exporting from FCP to Compressor means that FCP sends the whole stream, frame by frame, to Compressor. Probably using some Inter Process Communication feature of OS X. Just this process will take more processing power and time than export using "Current settings" and then loading the sequence directly in Compressor.

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Paolo

Bruce,

It it the render or the encode that will take 8 days? Nothing should take this much time on a G5.

As Nate suggested, if you are encoding to another format via compressor, it is MUCH MUCH faster to export as a quicktime movie proxy (do not make "self-contained" - use "current" settings) and then quit FCP and let Compressor take over.

BTW, I'm moving this into the FCP HDV forum.

Well to be honest, it's FX1 footage that I've put into a sequence preset that is set to HD100 settings AIC codec etc. 1280 x 545... I've applied magic bullet color correction and trinkets to the footage files... The render or the encode? I haven't rendered the footage and I exported using "current" settings although the footage file in the sequence may be of a different codec... What's a quicktime movie proxy? I did export it once before (original FX1 HDV foot) converted it to 23.98 via cinema tools and then imported it into FCP I forget which codec maybe it was AIC, then that was 16:9 stuff which I've now put into a new 1280 x 545 AIC sequence and have applied color correction... the magic bullet may be the problem? I'm already at 5% complete, it's been going on all day pretty much... what do you think?

Ah!!! MAGIC BULLET. That explains the extremely slow render. Is it v1 or 2 of Magic Bullet? Magic Bullet for Editors v1 is slow as molasses and apparently v2 is much faster,utilizes the graphics card and is optimized for the G5. You can upgrade for $99.

http://www.redgiantsoftware.com/mbforeditors.html

I was refering to exporting as a quicktime and unchecking "self-contained." This creates a very small file quickly that "points" to the original quicktime files and renders already on the harddrives.

Yeah, you've got about a zillion different things going on in that render, including the slowest rendering filter of all, Magic Bullet. You've truly described a worst case scenario for transcoding, adding effects, and resizing.

It's gonna take awhile!

I think you should make some decisions about what's important and what's not in this output. You could probably just cut it down 75% by rendering to 1080i60 HDV codec.

[edit: you know, you should also render out maybe a 15 second test also. Have you? 1080i HDV with 60 fields/sec would only go into 720p60. And I wouldn't even trust FCP to get that right, first try. Test test test!]

If at all possible upgrade to V2 of MB. I did some comparisons and, depending on the type of processing you have requested, it can cut the rendering time about by 25% or more. BTW, the speed of the disk and the interaction with FW are non issues, your bottleneck is MB, moving the footage to another disk will not speed up the process.

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Paolo

Thanks for the advice fellas, I'm at 8 percent currently though so I think I'll just let it go this time, but I think I've learned my lesson. Now at least I'll get some writing done, maybe roll to the beach...

Bruce,

I’m in 100% agreement with Tim on this, upgrade the MB to version 2. The speed difference was MUCH faster for us, and I mean way. I was almost disgusted at how my typical 45 minute render was taking 8 minutes or less after upgrading. I was excited and nearly sick at the same time.

Another trick you might try... we use MB2 a fair amount to get the look we want quickly, but then if time is critical (isn’t it the case all the time?) we will go back to conventional color correction methods and match the look of our MB preset, by adding some less render intensive filters. It may take a little more time on the front end but it will save you GOBS of render time later, as you very well may be learning the hard way. It’s not so hard to match the look once you break it down.