question for you Mac users out there... « Videomaker Community Forums

M-323
Member

Hi

I recently enrolled in a class for film making. The college uses Macs with Final Cut Pro.

I have always had PCs and currently using mostly Adobe products.

the question is, 90% of everything we do in class requires rendering. Even dropping a transition in requires rendering.

Is this something you Mac guys are used to or is it just a factor of the colleges systems?

I took note of their systems - they are 1ghz Mac Power PC G4, 1MB L3 cache, 1.75GB DDR SD Ram, OS V10.4.7

Awfully slow. Even on my old PC (which I dont even use for editing anymore - it was a P4 1.6ghz with 1G ram) I was used to real time effects, transitions etc. Only rendered before burning but everything was viewable as soon as the effect was applied.

is this normal? do you guys (and girls) experiance rendering everytime you change something?

In the class, you couldent even see the video that you dropped into the timeline if there was something that needed rendering.

And, last class I put togehter a short, maybe 5 min peice (more less to get used to Final Cut Pro) it took about 45 min to render and then it still had to be "made into a movie"

Maybe some of you are using newer systems like G5 etc? Id like to know this isent true of the newer systems??

oh yes, and the version of FCP they use is 5.1.1 - is this anywhere near current?

discuss..

Posted 5 years ago #
emarch
Member

Yes in Final cut pro/express a transition requires a render at some point, you can view it with Control-M (Print) and it will
render and view without a ALT-R to render.

Id bet windows is the same, jst something is happening automatically. Think about it you have a serices of frames in one segment of vide F1 and another series of frames in another segment F2 and the transition is now T1 merging a few frames from the end of
F1 and th ebeginning of F2 - how do we get these frames? The cpu has to generate them somehow, since they are calculations
of T1 = Function( F1 & F2 )

Ed March
http://www.MarchDVD.com

Posted 5 years ago #
M-323
Member

Ed

is there anyway to set that to auto on a Mac? cause thats a definate deterrant for a non mac user to switch over. Im use to seeing what you get or visa versa.

is it the same in a faster Mac? like G5 x3gzh, quad processors, 4.5gb ram etc? or is it just a function of the software?

that seems to be the down side however Im hoping that the upside is that it works, cause I get lots of error messages and its very difficult for me to burn a dvd.

I have made one but there were errors in it.

and out of 50 attempts, 99% end up in some type of error that stops me from burning.

Posted 5 years ago #
videolab
Member

I use a intel mac mini (which is not near as fast as the latest mac pro's) and my system almost always is fully real time. (except for export of course) I would assume that the systems you are using (which are about 5-6 years old keep that in mind) are simply too slow to playback in real time with transitions and effects. This is not the case with todays systems. As it is not the same with current pc based systems. While it has no setting called automatic the settings which would equal auto is UnlimitedRT and Dynamic Playback quality. (these can be found the RT button at the top left of the Time line) I switched because in my last semester in college I realized that FCP and Avid (also Autodesk but thats more on the compositing side of things) are the only games in town when it comes to real professional studios and television stations. Avid is also loosing a great deal of share to Apple recently. Avid's stock dropped 25% the other day because they admitted in a conference call that they had lost a great deal of market share to FCP. So Final Cut is growing into the top dog of the Professional video space. If you don't want to work in a professional studio or a television station then stick with premiere but if you want to work in this industry go with FCP or Avid. Premiere is great I like it more than FCP or especially better than Avid but I would rather be most familiar with the program that my employer wants me to know. I am much more employable that way.

Posted 5 years ago #