Exporting feature with filters: how long should it take?

R

RCummings4885

Member
Greetings all! I am working on FCP 6.0.6 on a 2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo Mac Book Pro with MacOSX 10.6.7.

I have a 90 minute feature film with 5-6 dual mono AIFF tracks of audio and my video clips for the most part all have at least one ColorCorrecting filter, if not 2 and also we have been employing Neat Video Pro Noise Reduction Plug-In on the majority of clips as well. We shot in 1080 with the HVX200.

My question is, I went to export it as a quicktime file (I was thinking it'd be around 70 or 80 gigs) and the meter estimate kept rising well up beyond 30 hours. Does this sound right? Our intention is to bring the .mov to a facilitly my friend works at where they encode media and he's gonna make a Blu-Ray for us for exhibition purposes. Is this the best way to go about this? Will using compressor speed this up or what? Compressor seems to be screwy sometimes with this project file sometimes and I've had errors and corrupted files when using it. Also my version of compressor doesn't have any Blu-Ray settings so using it would compress it way more than we'd need to to fit it on a BD50. Thoughts?

Basically I'm running out of time as we have a screening on Wed. that I need to get a .mov to this guy by Monday morning to give him time to do his job but can't export till tomorrow evening after I get final music from our composer. Will I have enough time or do these things just take that long? I'm used to it taking 5-8 hours for this big of a project but does adding that Noise Reduction filter really up the processing time by 4-6 fold?

Please could someone help and dole some advice my way as I am really in a pinch.

Thanks in advance as I know the people on this board are usually pretty forthright and helpful.

Sincerely,
Ryan Charles
www.NittyGrittyStudios.com
 
The noise reduction filter is what's increasing your render time by so much. It's normal when using a noise reducing filter of any sort.
 
Sounds about right- that noise reduction filter will kill your render times. I'd guess even longer than 30 hours, especially on that hardware. I'd suggest a render without it if you want to get it out the door in time.

Noah
 
Split the movie up. You can make chapters in DVD studio pro and link them all together again, or link then with various software after you export. This will insure that, a: you can get a better estimate on exporting times, b: fix problems that may occur without having to export the entire thing again, and c: 90 mins is huge!... You should "pre-render everything" in FCP which will speed up the exporting to some degree as well.
Export to the a very large format...i.e. ProResHD, then use a compressor after the export to encode into a formate you will be using.
Compressor can be amazing and problematic at times, but splitting the movie into segments can really help solve a load of problems.
 
1- Rendering will not speed anything up, as Compressor does not use render files at all, and they render on export anyway.

2- Send To Compressor for best image quality, apply the DVD Best Quality 90 minutes folder, you'll be fine. I've put more than that onto a single layer DVD with great success, many times.

3- Exporting to a higher spec codec does nothing but take more time and adds nothing to your image quality.

4- Splitting a video into segments uses up more disc (and DVD) space, does nothing to help out. Each file adds more metadata, headers, half full sectors, etc. One large file takes up less space than several smaller files, and takes less time to encode.

5- Make "chapter markers" in FCP, they'll be most accurate that way, and carry over into DVDSP.

6- Compressor isn't problematic if you know what you're doing. Every FCS user should spend $30 and get the book "Apple Pro Training Series: Compressor 3.5".
 
To clarify, Im not suggesting you split the movie up in tiny segments (Chapters). Merely split the movie into 2-4 segments, then you can rejoin them after the export in a program like DVD Studio Pro.. and you can do that by linking the segments "like" chapters.
This allows you to address any problems with the exporting without having the entire project to export all over again.
Export natively, dont export into a compressed form. I'm guessing your editing in ProResHD (You mentioned you wanted to burn to Blueray), and so export that (the Apple+E command).
I wasn't suggesting you export to another format.

"You should "pre-render everything" in FCP which will speed up the exporting to some degree as well." Means, if your exporting... and there is problem with the filter/plugin you will have to go back and fix the problem and start exporting all over again... Thus pre-rendering can help speed up the process sometimes.
I've had Indian and Arab weddings, where they wanted up to 4 Hours. Many times we had long export times and problems with individual clips (we had several different cameras), and I would need to find the problem and re-export everything all over!
Splitting the large export into smaller segments can really solve a load of problems. And Pre-Rendering can (Sometimes) help find those problems before export.

The BD50 will hold all your 90mins... however there are different encoding bitrates you tweak if you have having issues.
http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/resources/white_papers/HD_Broadcast_Formats.pdf
Look under Chapter 2

Dai-Lon
http://www.dailonweiss.com/reels-recent/
http://www.kristinaweiss.com/Magyar/
 
Rendering in FCP and rendering in Compressor are two different operations - I've noticed certain plugins will do okay in FCP and will crash Compressor, and other ones vice versa.
 
One last thing to remember. Set In/Out points in your Sequence in FCP, so that you're only sending about 3 minutes of video to Compressor to do a test. If you're importing a full length QT movie into Compressor, then set In/Out points in Compressor's Preview window, so you're only exporting about 3 minutes of video. That way you can experiment with various codecs and settings very quickly.
 
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