Rendering a particular project no longer allows a fast export

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Level 1

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Rendering a particular project no longer allows a fast export

Hi all 😊

I have a strange problem that's only affecting one project ... it's not long (3 minutes) but it has lots of overlapping plugins which track multiple areas of land (the project contains aerial footage) and also add hovering markers over the footage.

Firstly, it's INCREDIBLY slow to render, probably in the region of 1.5 hours on a top of the range M1 Max MacBook Pro with 64GB of RAM ... normally a file of this length will take a few minutes to render tops!

But then frustratingly, normally once you've rendered a project, the actual export will be much quicker ... but in this project it takes as long to export the rendered project as it does to render it in the first place!

I've tried copying the contents of the project into a new project (which sometimes clears random bugs like this), but it makes no difference ...

Is there anything I can try to fix this issue where exporting the rendered project takes forever?

Oh also, once the project is rendered, if I then quit and re-open FCPX the rendering has gone (the dotted grey bar appears above the footage in the timeline) so I have to render it again! It's as if it's rendering the project but not permanently saving the render files – you can play back the rendered project no problem, so long as you don't quit and re-open the program ...

Many thanks for any suggestions you can offer of how to fix this!

David

PS. I'm running FCPX 10.6.3 on Monterey 12.3.1.

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 10.12

Posted on Jul 19, 2022 3:23 PM

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Answer 1

Hogster86 Author

Level 1

15 points

Jul 20, 2022 8:12 AM in response to Tom Wolsky

Thanks Tom – so it sounds like this might be normal / expected behaviour?

I was under the impression that when exporting a rendered project, FCPX compressed the render files to whatever output format you've selected – is that not the case?

In all my other projects the final output always seemed to export more quickly when doing so once the project was rendered that's all ...

Thanks for the quick feedback though, it's much appreciated 😊

David

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Answer 2

Tom Wolsky

Level 10

152,015 points

Jul 19, 2022 3:28 PM in response to Hogster86

“lots of overlapping plugins”

These can be incredibly slow. Hours for some like Neat.

Do not render before exporting. In most cases it’s not worth the time. Switch off background rendering. Only render what you need to render for playback, or work with proxies.

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Answer 3

Tom Wolsky

Level 10

152,015 points

Jul 20, 2022 8:27 AM in response to Hogster86

The render files seem to help exporting. That’s the evidence users see in many cases. Interestingly Apple engineering has denied this is the case in the past when asked about this by pro support customers. So it looks like it might help, or it might not. Effects like Neat and things like tracking and stabilization are less likely to benefit from rendering, but that’s just observational.

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Answer 4

Hogster86 Author

Level 1

15 points

Jul 20, 2022 8:37 AM in response to Tom Wolsky

Interesting! Thanks for sharing!

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Rendering a particular project no longer allows a fast export

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