Suppose you added an effect to the timeline and as a result it shows a red “Unrendered” (or “Needs Rendering”) line above it. You press Command-R (say) and rendering happens and now you can play it in real-time. But what exactly is this rendering? What format is it in and where does it go, i.e. what file(s) in what folder(s) ?
- The rendered file appears in a project-specific subfolder of the Rendering folder of FCP’s Scratch area. In my case I defined the latter to be on the RAID.
- Location was: [RAID_ProAVIO/App-Specific/Final_Cut/ FCP_Scratch/Render Files/Voda 2009 Estab 001/]
- Example file name is: “Sequence 1-WP1-00000001“
- The coding format is ProRes 422 – Standard, not High Quality (which would be overkill). This is good news!
- VideoSpec displays its FourCC code to be “apcn”
- The four-character codes “apch” and “apcn” denote ProRes 422 HQ and ProRes 422, respectively [http://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/2009/03/prores_422_colors_in_after_eff.html].
- The rendered file’s bitrate, according to VideoSpec, is an average of 123Mbps, around four times that of the HDCAM EX high-quality mode (35Mbps). Nevertheless a great reduction on the uncompressed bitrate (around 1.5 Gbps) and broadly comparable to Convergent Design’s 100Mbps, judged by some to be virtually indistinguishable from uncompressed quality. So it bodes well.