background render blues

Nearing the end of editing an 80 minute documentary. My event is 9tb and my project is huge. Every time I open it now, I have to wait nearly 35 minutes for it to complete a back ground render. I'm using a late 2012 i mac with 32gb ram, Lacie 20tb raid 5 array. I'm using some heavy plugins like neat video on a lot of clips and they're almost all color corrected using Color Finale. What is going on here! Seems like it really only started since I put color into the project.

In general you don't need to use background render so can turn it off. It is perfectly OK for the render bar to be orange. The footage may not render and playback with complete fidelity and smoothness but it is usually adequate for editing.

Neat Video is a good product but it is incredibly CPU intensive and very slow to render. It has a configuration option within the interface to use GPU rendering on some platforms. It will tell you if that is available on your platform. However in many cases GPU rendering isn't much faster, at least on the systems I have tested.

In general you want to defer applying compute-intensive plugins like Stabilization, Neat Video and Digital Anarchy's Flicker Free until very late in the edit process. Otherwise there is a tendency for FCPX to recompute those (even with background rendering off), which slows down subsequent editing.

Another step which can greatly improve performance is transcoding to proxy. You can easily do this for only the clips you have used, not all the clips in your library. Just filter for used clips (CMD+F), then press + to add "used media", select those in the event browser and transcode to proxy, then set the viewer to proxy. Remember to set the viewer back to optimized/original before you export.

I have a 2012 iMac 27 plus a top-spec 2013 and 2015. The 2012 is pretty good and 32GB helps but 9TB is a big event.

My advice is turn off background rendering, and disable Neat Video in the clips, then finish your editing. You should not have to wait 35 min to open the project. Normally Color Finale isn't that bad from a performance standpoint. When finished turn Neat Video back on. If that isn't sufficient, then transcode your used clips to proxy. To do a final check you can then render everything or simply export it to H264 using single-pass, which is very fast. If using proxy remember to set the viewer back to optimized/original before exporting.

Thanks a lot for the reply. I was able to slug through and export a 1st cut in the nick of time for a screening for funders. I exported as 422 and then used compressor to create an HD .mov. Following some advice on another thread, I deleted all my generated library files. But performance is still slow. Maybe I do need to make proxy of everything. Unfortunately, was I deleted render files and tried to export, fcp would crash. When i tried to render all, it also crashed. I'm having a bit better luck rendering chunks at a time and hope that once its all rendered I'll be able to export with success. I'm sure Neat Video and c2 Lock and Load stabilizer are the culprits. It's tough to disable them though since they are applied on tens and tens of clips throughout. WOuld I be a candidate for deleting fcp preferences at this point?

dissonante wrote: ...I deleted render files and tried to export, fcp would crash. When i tried to render all, it also crashed. I'm having a bit better luck rendering chunks at a time and hope that once its all rendered I'll be able to export with success. I'm sure Neat Video and c2 Lock and Load stabilizer are the culprits. It's tough to disable them though since they are applied on tens and tens of clips throughout. WOuld I be a candidate for deleting fcp preferences at this point?

Your situation illustrates why we ask for a "remove/disable all attributes" feature. You have apparently isolated it to the render phase (vs export/encode phase) somewhere in the timeline. It may be possible to narrow down the problematic clip by rendering portions of the timeline. If isolated to one or two clips, then examine those further.

Yes transcoding to proxy will make the editing phase faster but when you finally get to the export phase, that will take just as much time. It sounds like you are mostly done with editing, so creating a bunch of proxy files will not really help exporting.

Verify you have the latest versions of NeatVideo and Lock&Load. Unfortunately there is no standardized method of checking version of plugins.

You can trash preferences by doing OPT+CMD while launching FCPX. If you wanted to back up preferences, the free 3rd party tool Preference Manager is good for that: www.digitalrebellion.com/prefman/

BTW I have had the same problem happen on Premiere Pro several times; this is not unique to FCPX.

Thanks again for the reply. So far re-rendering the timeline piece by piece has yielded another succesful export. Curiously, after I exported and before quitting the program, the orange render bar was back in seemingly random places. Also, as soon as I make the smallest of edits like a trim, the render bar will pepper the timeline randomly as well. Very frustrating. I'm going to do the credits sequence in another project to avoid the sluggishness and volatility. This is making the fine tuning of the project way more tedious than it needs to be. When I trash my preferences, do I risk damaging my project?

dissonante wrote: ... When I trash my preferences, do I risk damaging my project?

Most FCPX users have done this many times and it is generally safe, but as always your risk may vary. I have never had a problem doing this.

Trashing preferences resets the app to the initial default state as if it were first installed. No libraries will be listed except for the default Untitled library. Within FCPX you will have to manually open your library file for your project, then all your content and edits should be present. You can also double-click on the library file in Finder, and it will load that library into FCPX. Also you'll have to set any FCPX-specific preferences like background render, default import options, etc.

It is common in FCPX for the render bar to turn orange in segments upon slight edits. I don't know why but it is not abnormal.