How much memory does rendering and filters use up?

[Ralph nixon]

I'm relatively new to electronic editing so please excuse my novice question but I was wondering several things:

1) How much memory does rendering take up on the harddrive? Does adding filters also take up memory?

2) Is an external hard-drive like the hard-drive on your computer where you have to make sure that you keep ten to twenty percent free so everything operates okay. Or with an external hard-drive can you use it doen to almost it's last gig.
Case in point I'm working on a 44 minute piece that i carved out of seventeen hours of raw material. I started with a 250gig g-drive that now only has 63 gigs left on it. Is that a safe amount to work with or am I going to find myself in trouble when I add more filters and do some colour correcting etc.?

3) Also I'm thinking of adding a whole layer of superimposed images under the entire piece. Will I have enough memory and render space to do this? If not what would be the solution?

Thanks.

 

[tigeba]

1) It takes at least as much space as the footage you are altering. Take a look at the files in your FCP scratch dir and I think you will get a good idea of what is going on in there.

2) Not a problem in my opinion.

3) No way to know, you will just have to try it out.

For maximum clarity when asking questions, it is a good idea to refer to "memory" only when referencing RAM. While I think you can argue that drives also "remember" information, their capacity is normally termed "space".

 

[Ralph nixon]

1) It takes at least as much space as the footage you are altering. Take a look at the files in your FCP scratch dir and I think you will get a good idea of what is going on in there.

2) Not a problem in my opinion.

3) No way to know, you will just have to try it out.

For maximum clarity when asking questions, it is a good idea to refer to "memory" only when referencing RAM. While I think you can argue that drives also "remember" information, their capacity is normally termed "space".

Thanks for the above answers I have just have a few more: A) If I run out of space on my harddrive to render all that I want to will FCP warn me first or will I crash the system. B) Is superimposing considered a render? C) Say I have an hour of footage to superimpose under an hour of other footage. Does that work out to 13gigs approximately for the additonal footage and then another 13gigs to render it as a superimposition?

 

[bbalser]

ALL hard drives on ALL operating systems need 10-15% free space to operate properly.
Larger the drive the faster it's through-put is.
FCP will use the same amount of RAM and HDD to render anything. You want 2GB of RAM for sure, min.
Superimposing is compositing, and may need to be rendered.
FCP will warn you before it launches and while it runs if there are any problems with your drive space.
Footage space is determined by the capture files, not by what you do in the Timeline. The Timeline only refers to the original files, so you can composite all day and not take up any more drive space than normal.

Ralph, as an experienced producer and trainer, I STRONGLY recommend that you get these two books for sure:
Apple Pro Training Series: Final Cut Pro 5
Apple Pro Training Series: Optimizing Your Final Cut Pro 5 System
With these two books, you'll have about all the information you need to get the most out of your FCP system. You'll learn a TON out of doing the first one cover to cover (it goes faster than it looks). The second will answer 99% of all your hardware and configuration question. The other 1% will be answered here.