Tip: using roles can make you save... render time ?

Hi there

Many of you will know that, but I'm sure that like me, some of you might not know.

Lately I started to use roles a lot, and I've been absolutely amazed to observe the following:

* Enabling and disabling them does not require a new-render of the timeline. It's a huge time-saver if like me you used to enable and disable clips a lot (to see the difference, to disable a CPU consuming clip, to edit without seeing the subtitles I've added...)

* Even better: let's imagine you have your clips on the Primary storyline and they have a CPU heavy plugin on it - such as a denoiser - , and subtitles (or anything else) on top. If you don't use roles, everytime you change your subtitle, it will need to re-render everything under it, and it takes ages. But if you use roles, it still does... but faster. It seems to "keep" separate layers of rendered media by roles, and then takes less time to re-combine them.

PS: I might be wrong about this! It's based on observations on my system. I have a mac mini so when renders are long... they are very long! Therefore I notice the changes quite a lot.

Would be nice if somebody could confirm or not what I'm saying.

Cheers

Just tested, not seeing that. Roles metadata is not written into render files, there's no need for it there. Render files are simply a flattened single file for the computer to read from, as opposed to multiples files in multiple locations, having to composing in real time on the fly. I highly doubt there's anything about Roles to effect render time. I'm not seeing it.

Regardless, I might have a look at this myself some time this week.

I would love this to be true, since I like to do a little bit of nesting, any performance boost would be totally awesome.

I'm already on to roles for audio, but haven't yet found the best approach to using roles in video, apart from the obvious.

Just to clarify things, I've made two statements:

* The first one is true - and it's not obvious for everybody -, when you disable/enable roles it's not asking to re-render.

* The second is more debatable since I have no more proof than my subjective own experience. BenB I don't know if you remember, I've told you once that for me a Master export that is pre-rendered is much, much faster that when it's not. (Of course it takes more time to pre-render). Maybe you and I have completely different results because again I'm on a Mac mini, so basically I don't have any GPU. Maybe in your case it's so "fast" that you can't see any difference ?

I don't want to claim something that ain't true, really. That's why I'm asking your opinions.

I've made further testing. I remove my 2nd statement because it's not that obvious at all.

So please forgive me for making you waste time and only remember that:

* Enabling and disabling them does not require a new-render of the timeline. It's a huge time-saver if like me you used to enable and disable clips a lot (to see the difference, to disable a CPU consuming clip, to edit without seeing the subtitles I've added...)

[(Time To Render) + (Time To Export)] > (Time To Export)

I base the statements you attribute to me not to my own personal experience, but on an article I assisted with. You can read it here.

Part 1
www.macprovideo.com/hub/final-cut/final-...o-x-performance-test

Part 2
www.macprovideo.com/hub/final-cut/final-...est-2-realtime-speed

Take from those articles what you will. The variety of hardware configurations is unwieldily, thus universally consistent results are impossible. But the generalization I took away from my experience helping out with those tests, is that: 1- it depends on the codecs involved. 2- Rendering a timeline, plus the time to export, are always greater than the time to simply export without rendering. I've never said anything other than that.

Oh maybe there's a misunderstanding. I never claimed that Rendering first + exporting was faster than exporting at once. Not at all.

I just added that in real life, when watching the export for review, it happens often that I notice a little something that I want to change. Then I need to re-export, and that's when having pre-rendered timeline saves me time.

Nice article!