urgent: getting 720 x 486 uncompressed frame captures

[heartofglass]

Okay, before I go into specifics and scare anyone away, I'm mostly asking for a way to render specific portions of a 1 hour, 38 min video, instead of rendering the entire file all at once.

My situation: I have an external 500GB drive with a 1 hour, 38 minute quicktime file on it, including 4 audio tracks. It is uncompressed 10-bit video (720 x 486), digitized professionally from a digibeta master. I imported it into FCP in a timeline and for some reason it needed to be rendered. So it has been rendering for over 11 hours now, and is only at 5% (it does seem to be making some progress, at least, because last night it was at 2%). I'm using Firewire 800.

Does anyone know of a way to get the uncompressed frame captures I need (for a DVD cover) without rendering the entire 1 hour, 38 minute film?? I've been given the approximate timecodes I need for each frame capture.

I'm asking because this is an extremely time-sensitive project, and it looks like it would take several days of uninterrupted rendering the way I'm doing it now.

Thanks for any help!

 

[BenB]

I really, really need to know this in order to figure out specifics:
What Mac/CPU speed are you using, how much RAM, what version of the OS and FCP?

Now for a generalized answer based on some rules of thumb:

1st up, FW800 is not fast enough for any uncompressed format to work with properly. You need SATAe, preferably in a RAID, for any uncompressed format.

The problem is the slow bandwidth of the FW drive, and the huge amount of uncompressed video data per frame of video.

You don't have to render before going out to DVD authoring, mostly. If you want a QuickTime file, you have to render, period. If you want to go to DVD Studio Pro, you can go directly from the Timeline window, File > Send To... > Compressor. Compressor, when launched as a Sent To from FCP, ignores all render files, and creates new ones from scratch, when making the MPEG-2 and AC3 files needed for DVD authoring in DVDSP. Is it faster than rendering? No. But it doesn't require that you spend two days rendering out uncompressed video on a FW drive. Yeah, FW, even 800, is not really ideal for "uncompressed" video formats. The files are huge, it's a format that requires very high bandwidth.

Go to Compressor straight from the Timeline window, you may even want to go the the Render Manager and delete all your render files to free up disc space, since you won't be needing them at this point.

In fact, I have a new DVD tutorial going on sale in a few days about this very process, "DVD Stduio Pro, from final edit to final product".

 

[heartofglass]

Thank you for your reply. I didn't actually need to render at all, I figured out (I thought that the last person who had the file had done something to it that required rendering, but it was actually just me absent-mindedly forgetting to change my sequence presets from my previous project - how embarassing!). So all of that overnight rendering was totally unnecessary. I just set FCP to prompt me on new sequences - too many projects going on at once.

Yeah, it seems like FW800 does not like rendering the uncompressed video, so thank you SOOOOOO much for your tips! I'll need them in the future. On my system I'm just trying to get the highest quality frame grabs I can possibly get.


And my set-up is:

MacBookPro3,1
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.2 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache (per processor): 4 MB
Memory: 2 GB
Bus Speed: 800 MHz
Boot ROM Version: MBP31.0070.B00
SMC Version: 1.16f8
Chipset Model: GeForce 8600M GT
Bus: PCIe
VRAM (Total): 128 MB
Vendor: NVIDIA (0x10de)

 

[heartofglass]

Oh, and I almost forgot:

FCP 5.1.2
Mac OSX 10.4.9

 

[BenB]

Upgrade your FCP to 5.2.4, worth it.
Upgrade your MBP to 4GB RAM, very worth it.
And upgrade to FCS 2, very, very worth it, and will auto conform sequences.

FW800 is fine for compressed versions of video, even DVCHPRO-HD and HDV. But, not for any uncompressed, not even uncompressed DV. Especially on a laptop that has much slower data buses than a tower.