Re: FCP X hardware performance

I'm dangerously out of my technical chops depth in this, but a few weeks ago, I had a closing sequence in X that started with a white base clip - then had five text elements and three TIFF logos composited into a simple closing slate.

I had applied standard dissolves to the beginning and ends of all the elements wishing to simply dissolve up and down the entire static slate as a single element.

When I set it to render and went to get a drink, I got caught in a conversation and when I got back 30 minutes later, the title stack had progressed a whopping 2 percent!

If I'd been sitting trying to work live - I probably would have thought X had hung up - when in fact it was just taking forever to do it's calculations.

I moved my cursor to the middle of the title, Exported the composite to a flat file, swapped it out in the timeline and got the exact same screen representation rendered out in under 7 seconds!

In trying to understand why, the only thing I can think of is that by stacking all those layers of titles, each needing to calculate a lot of pixel values - I sent the metadata calculation engine in X into a tizzy. I imagined the program calculating the pixel values of the first two layers, then adding another layer, and re-calculating the composite of the original mixed with that - followed by another layer and compositing THAT against the previous result... kinda ad nauseum.

Bottom line is that I'm now trying to keep this kind of "stacked composite" to a minimum when I can.

Again, I could be TOTALLY misunderstanding what's going on under the X hood - but I do think there might be some issues when it comes to expressing everything as discrete metadata states and trying to keep not only the processing, but multiple levels of "undo" in the X metadata system.

Maybe somebody here knows more about how X generates it's composites and why I saw such ridiculously long renders in something that once appeared so simple in Legacy. I know the quality of the resulting graphics appears to me to be much better than I was accustomed to seeing out of Legacy - but this still seems weird to me.

Just thought I'd mention it in case someone else runs into the same kind of massive slowdown.

FWIW.

"Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions."-Justice O'Connor