Render projects that are not open?

I have 10 short projects in my library. They all need rendering. Is there a way to have FCP render them all (in the background) even though only one project is currently open in the timeline? Or do I manually have to load each one into the timeline and then render?

Select them all together in the Browser, export.

But that's export, not render. Or am I missing something?

When you export, I believe the project(s) render as it exports.

My question is why do you need to render all those projects? And If they are short ~10 minutes or less they should render pretty quick if theres not alot of effects, titles, etc.

Render files also use lots of disk space too. Render as needed.

There isn’t a mechanism to do what you want. You should post feedback for a feature request. If we have batch export it shouldn’t be difficult to implement batch render. Maybe it is. What do I know.

Well, in my experience you usually know an awful lot about FCPX, Tom

Rendering because they are all chroma keys and I want smooth playback.

I see. You have probably done this, but do you have "Better Performance" selected in the Viewer? I just finished a dumb little video that the chroma keyed was used on 4K video and playback is pretty smooth. I have a pretty new system though...for now.

Yes, I have Better Performance selected. In the meantime I rendered everything manually, project by project.
Thanks for your feedback.

A couple of things to consider. Some users have reported that render files aren't always sticking the next time they open projects, so it is possible you may find that to be the case occasionally.
Secondly, if your end goal is to view playback smoothly, then once rendered you should switch back from better performance to higher quality. No need to stay in better performance once the project is rendered, unless you have a really underpowered Mac.
Also, if you are viewing for clients or just for comparison, and these are relatively short projects, you should consider making each project a compound clip. Then you can create a completely new project, copy over all of the compound clips from the individual projects and drop them into the new project. You will be able to select them all and hit Control-R to render all of them at one time. This would be useful if you find upon future openings that some of the render files are no longer there. It's easier than reopening all of the individual projects. When you no longer need to view these for whatever reason, you can simply delete the project. Your individual projects will remain intact.
BUT----without knowing the full purpose of what you are trying to do, this may or may not be a solution for you.

I really just wanted to do it so that I could have all the projects render during lunch so all would play back smoothly afterwards. Obviously, if I was to change anything in the project I understand it would be unrendered again.
Making a compound clip is not really the solution for me, but definitely useful in other situations.

Thanks for your suggestions!

Dgwvideo’s very detailed advice is what I’d do as well. Just call the new project “client screener’ or something like that. Put spacers between each video so it’s east to select video, delete, and then replace with updated version. Render.

I was curious if you could make compound clip of entire original video(s), copy all those to the new project . And then when you make a change to the original video, those changes would be made to the “client screener” version. Still would have to render though. I am not up to speed on compound clips as I should be but I think it has something to do with referencing the “parent clip”??? If this was discussed, please ignor