[l008com]

I whipped up a quick project in FCE. I have 43 minutes of aiff audio, and about 90 minutes or so of 1080p video (1080x1440, it's not widescreen). So I dragged them both into FCE but apparently I need to render the video before I can watch any of it, to actually see where to line up the audio.

I'm on a (4) x 2.66Ghz Mac Pro, with 6 GB of RAM and a whole lot of fast hard drive space.

How long should this render take? I know its a pain in the ass question, no one's probably going to know exactly how long it's going to take. But rough estimates?

Also bonus points if you can figure out *exactly* what I'm doing

[Big Mac]

What version of FCE? I know well the problem you're describing because I've had to deal with it many times. You shouldn't have to render raw footage just to view it, and if you do it most likely means that you're running FCE 3.5 or below and you've selected the wrong resolution settings for your project that is mismatched with the type of source video you have. (Version 4 supposedly does away with having to be concerned about this issue since one of its features called the open format timeline supposedly will automatically sense what kind of video you're working with and adjust settings accordingly.) So if you're not using version 4 I can almost guarantee that's the problem and that you have to play with your project video options, but if you are using 4 then I don't have much to suggest.

[l008com]

4.0.1

[Big Mac]

Darn, there goes that theory. I don't have experience with 4 yet, but you definitely shouldn't need to render anything just to get to see your video.

[Phileas]

Something is wrong with your video footage. You should not need to render before viewing.

[andi*pandi]

you could try running your video through mpeg streamclip to change the format to match your fce settings.

[imitchellg5]

My guess is that you've got the wrong settings when you started the project for the video and audio that you're working with...

[l008com]

My video is a quicktime movie with H264 video and no audio. My audio is a .aiff file. And never saw any settings for new projects. I opened it, dropped the clip into the time line and that was that. It's true, I don't know final cut very well at all. But what I'm doing is so simply, I was hoping it would work.

[Big Mac]

Originally Posted by imitchellg5 

My guess is that you've got the wrong settings when you started the project for the video and audio that you're working with...

That's what I thought too, but I think that only applies to versions before 4, and he's running 4.

[imitchellg5]

Oh. I haven't used FCE since 3.5.

[Big Mac]

Yeah, with version 4 one of the touted features is the Open Format Timeline that supposedly does away with having to manually set video options like in the previous versions. In 3.5 and below the definite cause of the problem l008com describes was the initial video settings, but that should not apply to 4.

[l008com]

So no one has taken a stab at the real question, how long should rendering an HD file like this take? Any thoughts?

[Big Mac]

I'd think not long at all, but the point is you shouldn't have to do it. The fact that you're having this problems means there's something amiss somewhere because FCE 4 did away the problem that caused that phenomenon in previous versions.

[andi*pandi]

Could it also be a memory/processor issue? I was running FCP on a non-intel mac and had to render things in my projects that when I was using an intel machine they were ok.

[l008com]

But I'm on a Mac Pro? And render time for this video is about 7 days. I'm also importing the movie into iMovie, and that import's ETA is about 5 or 6 days. And don't worry about doing both at the same time, both apps are only using one processor, and less than 5MB/sec of disk throughput. So the only bottleneck is the CPU. The question is, why is it using so much CPU to import this h264, and why do these apps only use one processor.

[imitchellg5]

7 days?? It takes my MBP about 40 minutes to render an hour and a half of 720p video...

[Big Mac]

Originally Posted by l008com 

But I'm on a Mac Pro? And render time for this video is about 7 days. I'm also importing the movie into iMovie, and that import's ETA is about 5 or 6 days. And don't worry about doing both at the same time, both apps are only using one processor, and less than 5MB/sec of disk throughput. So the only bottleneck is the CPU. The question is, why is it using so much CPU to import this h264, and why do these apps only use one processor.

You're seriously wasting your time then, l008. Houston, you have a Final Cut problem. Nothing you ever do in FCE should take multiple days, especially on high end hardware. A few hours for a final render of something complex, I can possibly understand. But not 7 days.

For reference, when I've selected the wrong timeline type and have had to render to see video, the render takes 30 seconds or so on my G5 (depending on clip length).

[l008com]

Both iMovie and FCE are chugging along at this slow speed. At this point, I want to let if finish because I'm curious what the results are going to be. It is a 4-core Pro so the machine is still perfectly usable while this is going on.

[Big Mac]

Does any video act normally, or does it all require rendering?

[l008com]

I'll tell you once these are done rendering in a few more days.

[l008com]

Well after a few days, iMovie finish it's encode and is working great. I actually don't think I even need FCE at this point, but I'm going to let it finish just to see what's up. I suspect once it finally does finish, everything will be fine. Not sure why this video had to transcode for a week but *shrug*

[Big Mac]

Strange. If I ever see any computer operation take more than a day at max, I cancel it and figure out why it's so slow and find some alternative.

[l008com]

So I got a new source for my video. I converted it to a 100% quality .mp4 in Handbrake, thinking that a quicktime playable file would be the easiest way to move the file around. This file is 117 GB (huge I know but once it's in FCE and edited, I'll compress it way down again). The file plays fine in QT, but I get this error when I try to open it in FCE!

iMovie HD opens it. Well, it's still importing but iMovie always imports because it converts everything into raw DV. But why the hell won't FCE open this super easy video file? It doesn't even think about it really either, it just instantly spits out this error.

[Phileas]

.mp4 is a not a production format, it's a playback format.

iMovie doesn't mind because iMovie is designed to sacrifice quality for ease of use.

[l008com]

Well what format should I convert this video to so I can actually use it in final cut?

[Laminar]

.wmv

[Laminar]

.3gp

[l008com]

Might as well make it a flash movie then. Or hell hows about a keynote slideshow with each slide = 1 video frame?