Re: Apple article on Optimizing Media

[Bret Williams] "So quick I've actually forgotten that's what it's doing! I'm not positive, but I thought that anything that has already been compressed doesn't get recompressed like Premiere. For example, the native h264 project I did had color grading on every shot and so by the time it was completely rendered it was all ProRes somewhere. When I export media, it is pretty much instantaneous. I'm pretty sure it's the equivalent of exporting current settings in FCP in such a case. It definitely did not rerender all the color corrections and also stabilizers. That really would've been a 30min or more render and export. It takes maybe 5-10 seconds with the timeline rendered. No different than FCP 7.
"

It's true, there does seem to be a semblance of some smart rendering in X.

Of you have already rendered your timeline to ProRes and you export a ProRes movie, yes it seems to smart render.

I try not to render in FCPX unless I need to. I work with all kinds of formats, not only ProRes. It's not the exact same
as Premiere, but it does need to compress to your output codec if your timeline is unrendered.

There are no reference files, this is a big difference from fcp7.