OT: FCP - Render, Render, Render - what a pain

mtnmiller wrote on 1/9/2008, 7:51 AM
I know there's been a lot of discussion in this forum on Vegas vs. FCP and other NLEs, but after being involved in a project in which the editor was using FCP, I simply cannot believe that this is the "go-to" software for so many people, and pretty much the industry standard for editing houses.

I know that FCP has its strong suits, but in an industry where time is money, its amazing the popularity of this program. Props must be given to the marketing deparment for the snow job they've pulled on so many people.

Beyond Vegas' superiority in color correction and audio, often what would be the most simplest of tasks in Vegas involves a multi-step process in FCP. And more than anything, the amount of rendering is insane, and completely interrupts the workflow.

Want to change the volume of a track by a decible? You must render to preview. If you have layered tracks and want to extend a clip by a frame? You must render. Want to change a transition? You must Render.

We're paying this editor good money, and half his time is spend rendering. And as an editor myself, all this time wasted would drive me mad.

Of course, I've learned my lesson to bring up the benefits of Vegas to FCP fanboys. There's just no winning.

Thanks for letting me vent.

Comments

Laurence wrote on 1/9/2008, 8:03 AM
I started out with FCP and switched to Vegas after much frustration.
MarkFoley wrote on 1/9/2008, 8:59 AM
Really Laurence? acording to the FCP fan boys...nobody ever switches back to a PC after using a mac :-)
Coursedesign wrote on 1/9/2008, 11:36 AM
Sounds like you need to get the editor one of the new Mac Pro's released yesterday.

Twice the performance, comes standard with 8 Penryn cores, with 32GB RAM and 15,000 rpm SAS drives optional....

The strength of FCP is not its editing speed, but that it supports just about anything you can throw at it, including anything in Hollywood.

Vegas is far faster to work with, except you can't even get the footage on the time line half the time, because Vegas doesn't support so many of the formats used in Hollywood.

And it doesn't play nice with Pro Tools, which is what the post companies use in most cases, whether you like it or not.

Of course you could try telling them that "Vegas is much better than FCP and Pro Tools!!!" Just be sure to put some padding inside the backside of your pants to soften your landing on the sidewalk.

So what do I think?

1. Vegas is way faster to edit with, compared to FCP. I think the Vegas editing paradigm is the future of video editing.

Unfortunately I expect to see FCP pick this up in a future version (maybe even this year), and present it as First-in-the-World!

Apple could easily get away with this, because Sony is not even mentioning the great Vegas paradigm in the fine print in their ads.

They're just saying Vegas is "like.no.other," which of course is like saying "I'm the politician for change."

2. FCP isn't even sold alone anymore. Today it's all Final Cut Studio, which includes also Motion for 3D compositing and motion graphics (a really great program that takes the same plug-ins as FCP, but with better functionality thanks to a more advanced API), Live Type (a phenomenal and very powerful text animation program), Color (a truly professional level color grading application), DVDSP which is DVDA's older brother after finishing grad school and getting his PhD (it's used for most Hollywood DVDs in stores today), Compressor (large encoder collection), Soundtrack Pro, a fairly ho-hum but still capable sound editor/mixer for basic needs, Cinema Tools (for working with film and reverse telecine), Qmaster (for distributed rendering), and good old QuickTime Pro which is a lot more than just a player, it can handle many conversions and extract weird audio track formats.
rmack350 wrote on 1/9/2008, 12:04 PM
Another 2 cents worth.

Render, render, render should get you guaranteed full framerate playback. That's the tradeoff. You'd think it could be handled in a smarter way so that you wouldn't be interrupted by it, but at some level of complexity it's required.

Vegas could do this nicely, I think, but it doesn't. Consider that it currently renders frames on the fly and caches them in RAM if it needs to. It could cache them to disk, I suppose, but your disk requirements would be greater. It might be worthwhile as an option in a Pro-Pro version of Vegas.

Rob Mack
Steven Myers wrote on 1/9/2008, 12:34 PM
FWIW, I use both FCP and Vegas daily, and this is how the world works: The rendering delay is going to disrupt your life.

With FCP, it's going to happen while you're editing (I'm assuming, here, that you want to see the immediate result of any little cut you make).
With Vegas it's going to happen when you're finished editing and want to make your work useable in some format or other.

With FCP, you will be annoyed while you're editing. With Vegas, you will be annoyed when you're trying to turn out the DVD.
Pick one.

Personally, I prefer the Vegas pain. I can delegate the rendering to a computer dedicated to rendering and walk away. Sometimes for a really long time.

rmack350 wrote on 1/9/2008, 1:21 PM
The topic makes my imagination run a bit. The value of rendering things to disk is that, if it's well managed, you get realtime playback and fast final renders. The disadvantage is that rendering requires that you choose a render format for the project (maybe uncompressed if you want to preserve alpha), that you may have to wait for renders as you work, and that rendering requires more disk space (and probably a very beefy RAID array if you are rendering uncompressed HD)

So the goal would be to make the process invisible to the user.

As I noted in my prior post, Vegas caches frames to RAM as you play out the timeline. What if it could dump them to a render file later on. This requires a render file format that supports empty frames, and allows you to dump frames into the middle of the file wherever needed. It'd be RLE compressed so frames with nothing in them would have almost no size in KB.

It would need to be an optional feature, and they'd need to make it impossible to turn on if your system can't support it.

Basically, you'd be leveraging some existing Vegas behaviors to get better previews and faster final renders.

They'd need to account for No Recompress rendering. They'd also have to make prerenders much more robust, which might require more timeline validation. If that sort of validation creates too much processor overhead then this is a non-starter.

Rob Mack
Laurence wrote on 1/9/2008, 1:47 PM
"With FCP, you will be annoyed while you're editing. With Vegas, you will be annoyed when you're trying to turn out the DVD."

Actually Vegas can do it either way. Just use the "selectively prerender video" function.
I must say that I do prefer the "render while you sleep or eat lunch" approach though.
Steven Myers wrote on 1/9/2008, 2:16 PM
Actually Vegas can do it either way. Just use the "selectively prerender video" function.

Yes. Having the choice is a real good thing. You can work uninterrupted. Then, when you go to lunch, set the computer a-rendering.
rmack350 wrote on 1/9/2008, 2:17 PM
Selectively Prerender is the worst of both worlds because the prerender disappears so easily. If it were a little smarter it'd help, but as it is it just allows you to be annoyed while you edit in addition to the final render.

Rob
farss wrote on 1/9/2008, 2:36 PM
The optimal solution is provided by the wavelet codecs such as Cineform. You can extract a half res output with much less CPU overhead. Adaptive preview res like PPro uses would be nice to have in Vegas.

Bob.
Patryk Rebisz wrote on 1/9/2008, 9:20 PM
Both packages have strenghts and weaknesses and now when FCS2 came out with Color i think FCP has more strenghts than weaknesses and definatly outdoes Vegas. I think Vegas has it's place in history (being one fo the first ones to support 24p editing for instance) but since Sony bought the software it's not much but a marketting tool for its cameras. I still use Vegas but i never made even one cent editing (i made quite some oney using its color correction tools though). I edit for my personal uses. When i saw a profficient editor with FCP (and another time with Avid)... wow! Trust me those are pro tools with incredible capabilities. And now with FCP's Color... My mouth waters. And as to rendering in FCP -- it's dependent on the machine and the settings.
Spot|DSE wrote on 1/9/2008, 9:53 PM
but since Sony bought the software it's not much but a marketting tool for its cameras.

That would be a surprise to *everyone* at both Park Ridge and Madison. Broadcast Division of Sony barely acknowledges Vegas, and Consumer Electronics division won't put Vegas with cameras, laptops, or any other product.
Some distributors bundled Vegas with the XDCAM tools. One camera out of a few dozen makes it a "marketing tool?" Whatever. The publications I've been hired to write for various Sony divisions all come with orders to equally cover every NLE in the major league. AVID, FCP, and Vegas are always covered identically.

It all comes down to what circles you run in. We make $$ every day of the week with Vegas, and we do OK with FCP. Given a choice, I'll use Vegas. Faster, more intuitive, certainly less cluttered. then again, Motion is the best tool on my laptop, IMO, and the most used tool on my desktop Mac. We also use Avid on a limited basis, depending on what the client wants or who we're working with.
Color is a great tool, BTW, but it's easily accessed with projects done in Vegas, too.