Rendering behaving strangely

I have a Prores-422 project in FCP 7.0.1 on an Intel Mac using Snow Cat or whatever cat the OS is named after (because it makes the OS seem "cute"). Anyway, this project has a lot of areas which require rendering due to applied effects or whatnot. Many times when I add a clip somewhere in my project and do something to it that requires rendering, nearly every other clip in the timeline will lose its render and require re-rendering despite the fact that I did not touch those clips or lay anything else on top of them at any point. My rendering settings haven't changed.

I am going to try to trash the prefs, but one would think that Apple would have fixed that issue since that was something that plagued FCP 3 or 4 maybe, it should no longer plague part 7.0.1.

Nope, trashing prefs didn't help one bit. This usually seems to happen if I apply Smooth Cam to a clip and then render said clip. After the rendering is done BAM a whole bunch of other random clips need to be re-rendered. I will just assume it is a bug in Final Cut Pro because I can't see any other way where this would happen. I think when it renders in certain situations, it is somehow writing over other render files it should not.

Hi Joe,

Are you editing from long master clips ? (i.e. entire tapes) ?

When you apply any effect that requires analyzing the master clip (such as Smoothcam) this can affect other clips in your sequence that belong to the same master clip and that have been rendered. It shouldn't, but it does. The workaround is not to apply effects such as Smoothcam directly to the clip in your timeline (which will cause FCP to analyze the entire master clip), but to first export the clip as a QT Movie and apply the Smoothcam filter to that movie, then replace the original clip with the smoothed movie.

Or you can use an external plugin to stabilize your footage, such as iStabilize or Lock&Load. These plugins only analyze the clip to which they are applied, not the entire master clip. That's their main advantage, they do not offer any better quality for satbilizing your footage than Smoothcam does.

Best wishes,

Ronny

Ronny,

No these are all separate clips of a relatively short nature. No clip is more than, say 20 seconds long unedited. The clips came from a Canon EOS 7D DSLR camera and were transcoded into ProRes 422 and that is what the sequence settings are at as well. Even when I bring in a new clip shot on a different day and apply Smooth Cam, the clips from previous days will require re-rendering. Quite odd and I have only seen it on this particular project.

Hi Joe,

I did a quick Google and it seems that this has been happening to other people as well, though not very frequent. And there appears to be no explanation yet. Definitely a bug.

Best wishes,

Ronny

Good to know that I'm not doing something crazy-wrong. Apple will likely (hopefully) fix in their next update... hopefully pre-FCP 8.0.