Rendering High-Precision Requires A Graphics Card with More Capabilities

Have you ever seen that?

Without getting into great detail, with that Final Cut is telling you that it can't render what visual effect you want (have applied to a clip or nest) in high-precision because of one of two things (or both).

1. Your graphics card simply can't handle it. You'll need to upgrade.

2. If you're lucky you can adjust a setting and render in slightly less than "high-precision" with some caveats.

A: Highlight the sequence that has the troublesome clip & effect in it in the Browser and hit Command + 0 for Sequence Settings. Fortunately, in here, changes you make DO apply to the current sequence.

B: Click on the Video Processing tab and you'll see something like this:

See the four radio buttons on the left? Try setting your sequence settings to something other than it currently is. RGB is usually good for this problem.

But read the two paragraphs of text to the right there. Rendering with different Video Processing settings can cause colors to go all wonky.

C: Hit OK and test, test and test some more.

Renders need Re-rendering

Do your renders in FCP's Timeline suddenly seem to un-render themselves? A friend called me a few moments ago in a panic saying that FCP was freaking out and un-rendering, seeming at random.

To make a long story short: he didn't realize that a previous project's test Render Files folder was still being used by FCP...while it was in the Trash.

Solution: Drag it out of the Trash or tell FCP to use another folder (stay organized, though).

Ripping DVDs to ProRes

ProRes is really great but it has some limitations you should know that can trip you up later.

A friend called me tonight saying they were getting an error in Final Cut they'd never seen before which was this:

"Codec not found. You may be using a compression type without the corresponding hardware card."

I knew this wasn't true after talking to them a bit so I asked from step one what they did and discovered a big gotcha when ripping DVD content to ProRes for use in Final Cut Pro.

They'd used MPEG Streamclip to rip video from a client's DVD of old footage. Since my friend wanted to use the footage in Final Cut they set MPEG Streamclip to export (transcode) the .VOB file to ProRes.

(No, I'm not sure why MPEG Streamclip lists ProRes twice in it's export options. They're likely HQ and non-HQ but I'm certain.)

When it was done the file was great, imported into Final Cut and they happily edited away. Until they needed to render something and saw the above error. Any kind of rendering produced that error which we knew wasn't true because they had used ProRes many, many times before. Something else was different.

Dissecting the project I started to jot down all the settings and media types in the project and ran across something not readily apparent unless you know to check.

The resultant ProRes file from MPEG Streamclip wasn't a compliant size for ProRes. It wasn't either:

1920x1080

or

1280x720

If it's neither one of those sizes Final Cut pro runs and cries in a corner. My friend had left MPEG Streamclip to create a file that was 854x480 because next to it, in MPEG Streamclip's options, it reads "(16:9)" which this footage was and their thinking was that since it's a DVD they didn't need to rip it as an HD file.

I suggested they re-rip the bit of video they needed with MPEG Streamclip set to "1280x720 (HDTV 720p)". They did and after substituting the file for the renderless one Final Cut behaved as expected and rendered away.

So if you rip something to ProRes make sure it's a size that ProRes and Final Cut are expecting.

For more info check out this page in the FCP 7 manual.

Rendering a keyframed cropping results in missing image

This bit me tonight and I have no idea what caused it.

I have four elements, Text, Text, Image, Image all on separate layers. The two text elements are keyframed to move a bit and the first image is keyframed to move in sync with the text. The other image is keyframed independently. It's all very basic.

The mini-sequence has a green Preview render bar over it and plays as expected but when it's fully rendered the first image, the one keyframed to the text's movement VANISHES. And I'm not alone; I found a post about it here from Feb. 6th 2009:

Help!!! Let's see if I can explain this....I have taken a clip and placed it on the timeline. I applied some croping elements to it and motion...it starts our as a very thin line and then moves up and down to create a rectangle. I can view it on the timeline but the minute I render it with "full" and then view it, it no longer exists....When I export it to make a Quicktime it is gone....

What's interesting is his keyframing seems very similar to what I was doing with this image. At first I thought I goofed and had the "reveal" keyframes going in the wrong -opposite direction- but they weren't.

What didn't work was re-launching FCP, deleting render files, toggling track visibility or rebooting the Mac. What DID work was right-clicking on the image file in the timeline, selecting Remove Attributes...and ticking Crop and then hitting Okay to remove all cropping of the image.

I then re-did the keyframe cropping, rendered and it was fine.

Be Careful When Reconnecting/Renaming Multiclips

When you have a multiclip already in a sequence, be aware that if one of the clips (or more) was renamed since it was edited into the Timeline, FCP can get confused and attribute TWO file names to one clip.

This will result in all manners of strangeness. For one, even though all the footage in your bin will be properly connected, a multiclip in the sequence in your timeline may still report a red bar over it, and if you hover your mouse over the red bar you'll see FCP complaining that one of the clips is offline...but it's not...it likely it just has two file names attributed to it. One of them being the old file name that's no longer available to FCP.

The solution is to 2nd click on the clip in the timeline, select Reconnect Media and then after connecting the properly named files, ignore the improperly named one(s). You should see the red render bar turn green nearly instantly.

This can happen if the files were initially named incorrectly and an editor renames them from within FCP or in the Finder late into a project's life.

Render Only What You Want To See

Tap G three times, that'll be the Range Selection Tool. Now, hold down the mouse button and drag over the part of your timeline that you want to render. What's great is that this tool will highlight exactly what you drag over and it's not limited to highlighting entire clips, it can highlight portions of clips.

Hit render and you're good to go.

Motion .motn render Bug in Final Cut

It seems there's a bug or some sort of issue with .motn files being loaded into FCP's timeline and rendered. When un-rendered and you Option + P play them, or scrub through them they look fine. They even play in the viewer normally albeit a bit choppy.

But when you render them in FCP they appear as completely black.

There are a few threads about this at Apple here and here and here.

The solutions offered there didn't work for me so I'm thinking it may be a video card/driver issue, some obscure setting or incompatibility between settings or just a bug.

The workaround is to export a rendered clip from Motion then import that into FCP for me at least with FCP 6.0.1 and Motion 3.0.1.

One interesting thing is that this works as expected when using one of the new glass screen iMacs and FC Studio 2 so maybe it's a video card incompatibility or a limitation of some video cards.