Export Reference Movie takes forever!

XDCAM EX project that is only 17 minutes long is taking 3 hrs to export a reference movie. Why? I've rendered everything in the sequence but it still seems like it needs to re-render everything in order to export a simple reference movie and sometimes it crashes during export and I get nothing after waiting for three hrs...

You can't export a "reference" movie in a different codec Eli, that will trigger a full re-render to a self contained movie. As Tom has pointed out the renders in your "rendered" timeline previously only contained that footage which FCP needed to render for full quality playback, but due to the nature of XDCAM HD/EX's MPEG2 codec, even that footage which can be played back without render needs to be rendered for export, even as a reference movie. The only way round this is to set your Sequence menu > Render options to also render "Full". Then, if and when your sequence is fully rendered, the reference movie export will be fast.

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FCP 7 issue with exporting reference movie?

I've used FCP 6 to export reference movies -- no problem. Now, using FCP 7.0.3 , I can't seem to export a reference movie period. On old projects, where I've done reference movies, no luck. On newer ones created in FCP 7, I render everything -- I mean everything, no luck. The 'not self-contained box' is unchecked. I even tried making a brand new project, importing a 10 second clip requiring no rendering. FCP still won't export a reference movie; it keeps making a regular movie clip. I really need this function to make DVDs. Any suggestions as to what I'm doing wrong?

First, let me correct myself regarding the QT reference movie. My movies show a poster frame rather than a preview as I mentioned in my previous post.
It's important that all of the items from the Sequence menu are checked.

Exporting Reference Movies with Lion and QT X

Has anybody else had issues exporting Reference Movies from FCP7 under Lion?
When we open a Reference Movie created with FCP7/Lion in QT X 10.1 (the version that ships with Lion), we're only able to see the first frame of the movie, followed by black/blank video, and audio only.
Curiously, QT7 (on Lion) and QT X 10.0 (on Snow Leopard) are able to play these movies without a problem. However, a number of 3rd-party applications and devices that we use in our facility (most notably an Omneon Spectrum) choke on the reference movies in a similar manner to QT X 10.1.
We've got a support ticket open with Omneon, although they claim to have never heard of the problem, and are currently picking their way through the issue as well. However, there are scattered reports of others who are having similar problems.
For the sake of thoroughness, it's worth mentioning that this is a brand-new Mac Pro with Lion 10.7.2, and FCP 7.0.0; both fresh installs (apparently downgrading to SL is unsupported on this machine). We tried patching FCP to 7.0.3 with Pro Application Update 2010-02, which did not resolve the problem. We've since reverted to 7.0.0, to rule out the patch as the culprit. The reference movies in question do not contain any edits that would require a render, and everything's stored on a NAS that's accessible to the whole office (hence the fact that we're able to view the files on our Snow Leopard machines.
Picking apart the reference movie using Apple's Atom Inspector shows one curious detail in the alias data inside 'dref' atom inside of the reference movie (which is how QT figures out where the original media is). Rather than being a simple file pointer, the alias actually contains a whole bunch of information, including the "relative" path to the video data, relative to the original location of the reference movie, as well as the absolute path of that file, starting from the root of the filesystem. Both of these paths are presented in "Mac" and "Unix" formats, ie:
Mac: volume:folder1:folder2:filename
Unix: /volume/folder1/folder2/filename
Key difference is the use of colons, rather than slashes to separate folders in the path. At least, that was the key difference prior to Lion. We've noticed that, while the SL machines export reference movies with paths that resemble the above, our Lion machine generates:
Mac: volume:folder1: folder2: filename
Unix: /volume/folder1/folder2/filename
(Notice the spaces)
When we attempt to play the movies with our Omneon applications or in QT X 10.1, our NAS throws a whole bunch of 'File not Found' errors. Presumably, those spaces are the culprit. Removing the spaces with a hex editor completely mangles the QT movie, and renders it compltetely unplayable.
Unfortunately, the alias data inside the dref atom doesn't appear to be a standard Mac OS alias, and the only documentation of the alias file format (linked above) is hilariously out of date. Presently, the format is undocumented, and it appears that developers are discouraged from interacting with the files directly. In other words, I have no way of knowing whether or not the spaces are actually significant, or are a completely innocuous and documented part of the file format.
Has anybody encountered anything similar, or found a solution? I'm at a bit of a dead-end here, and would welcome any advice.

I totally understand where you're coming from; Apple's support of some of QuickTime's more advanced features has unfortunately been waning for some time now.
Avoiding the buggy parts of the program is always a good strategy, although the ability to quickly export reference movies is something that is absolutely vital to our workflow. Simply put, losing these files is an absolute dealbreaker.
Two things seem to be going on... FCP on Lion appears to be generating slightly malformed reference movies, and QT X 10.2 seems to be freaking out when it tries to play back those movies (while prior versions are seemingly able to work around the problem). I suppose this could have something to do with the introduction/evolution of QTKit and AV Foundation on Lion, although I'm surprised that this would be affecting FCP7, which was built around older APIs.

Exporting reference movie

I am exporting a movie with make self contained unchecked to export a refernce movie (1.5 hours) before it only took a few minutes to export the reference movie, now its telling me 9 hours. help!
A

a reference qt points to the original media ONLY if there are no effects applied. If there are effects applied AND they are rendered, it points to the renders. if there are effects applied but NOT rendered, it needs to render the effects and includes them in the "reference" quicktime which will take much longer to output and will be a much larger file.
Telling whether your effects are rendered in fcp is not always easy. Make sure all options in the sequence menu: render all are checked and then render your sequence.

Export to Quicktime takes forever

I have a fairly simple slideshow - no video, some basic transitions and builds. There are nine slides, each one minute long (nine minutes total). It takes probably 30 minutes or so to export to Quicktime in full quality. Is this normal, or do I have settings incorrect?

Thinking out loud sort of:
Maybe the problem is that you're using GOP structured media, and because of this, the GOP has to be remade because you've edited in not iframes... I can recall just how long it took to create DVD's from HDV on G5 machines... YIKES it was slow. Might be a related problem. Dual only intel machines are a bit faster, but not by much... if your on a Powerbook or iMac.. you're on a dual intel most likely?
Seems to me that if the media was captured to an i frame format (ProRes) you'd not have this long export time for a reference movie.
I just edited a 3 camera shoot recorded with 3 HDV cameras last night as it turns out... but I captured it as ProRes using a Macbook Pro. The cameras never stopped so syncing them was pretty easy.
Larger files, but the switched 45 minute sequence exported as a reference movie in about 2 minutes.
HDV isn't my favorite codec to edit with, so I never work in it natively... It's just a totally inefficient codec and was never really intended to be a professional format I'm afraid (see Sony's original press release when they introduced it to the world, they point blank stated it was for consumers and home movies...) your problem is likely that it's HDV material. Sooooo don't work in HDV in post.
Jerry

Movies take forever to load

I just bought an apple tv two days ago and a new router today as mine was about 6 years old. My apple tv has no problem picking up the songs in my itunes, but takes forever to load movies from itunes. all the movies are digital copies as well. any reason this happens? is it common and how is it fixed?

Likely to be slow LAN connection - if possible try a direct ethernet connection to router to see if it makes a difference.
Have you tried with the old router?
As digital copies will usually be less than 5Mbps and standard def you don't need blistering LAN rates, but if slower than this they will need to prebuffer.
If not a connectivity issue (describe how all equipment is connected in the LAN and wi-fi type if any), then consider itunes library corruption (create a new library with a few things in to test) and also security software that may see repeated access from AppleTV as a threat and be slowing/blocking it (eg NetBarrier).
AC

Why does exporting to m4v take forever?

I've done a lot of QuickTime exporting and converting in my time and I just got a video iPod and would like to put a few videos on it but I can't for the life of me figure out why exporting to m4v takes so darned long. Anyone know? Exporting to huge file formats like .dv and such only take a minute or two, but my 20 meg .mov file takes almost an hour to convert to .m4v
Any insight would be appreciated.
Thanks.

Check out this article.
http://www.drunkenblog.com/drunkenblog-archives/000312.html
It explains a lot about how compression to H.264 works.
Also, look at it like this. If I asked you to pack an average sized dorm room into a dump truck, no sweat, just toss everything over the side and you're done. However, if you had to do the same thing with a Toyota Celica, it'd take you longer because you've got to make the best use of all the space, including under the seat and around the tire well.
QuickTime is also doing 2-passes over your media. After reading the above article, you'll see why this is a good thing. Since QuickTime doesn't allow you to choose a bitrate, I also figure that it's fitting your media as close to 768 kbps as possible and this would take some finagling too.
There ARE tools that are faster than QuickTime, but it seems that as speed increases, so does file size and file size directly affects battery life.

Export Reference mov

***?
I just attempted to export a reference .mov from my FCP HD 5.0.4 Timeline and the file was 29G+.
I was under the impression that a ref movie would be 50, maybe 60k.
The "Make movie self contained" check box was NOT checked.
What am I doing wrong?

Thanks for that "Give-This-A-Try".
Here's the thing:
It was a 3 camera Canon HDV shoot and I'm editing it using Multi-clip Sequences.
I have it split up into 4 different sections so I have 4 different MC sequences. Each sequence is about an hour and a half to 2 hours long. (It's a seminar on lighting that was given by the ASC and the Digital Cinema Society (.org)).
I'm using a Lacie 500G FW800 drive for capture and render files.
There was issues to begin with because one of the X1L-H1's lost gen lock with the other cams (time of day) so I had to create a time line for that camera and output as a .mov and import that as one of the clips. It works but it was a pain.
Is it possible that the output is being affected by the fact that this is a Multiclip Sequence to begin with?
BTW: I'm not having any issues with cutting in real-time. All is good and I LOVE cutting it this way. It's just that when the time comes, I'm out of disk space for the final output.

IMovie export to iDVD takes FOREVER

Hey kids - need your help.
I've been digitizing home movies from a Sony Camcorder using the XtraView USB for Mac hardware. This produces a (massive) .mov file. I imported this file into iMovie 09 as an event, edited it, put in transitions, etc. I selected Share>iDVD and it exported to iDVD in a reasonable amount of time. In iDVD I tweaked Chapter menus, etc., and burned to disk. No problem.
Now here comes the issue...
Playing the disk back, I realize that I have a really bad interlacing issue. The XtraView HW/SW didn't give me an option to deinterlace, so I'm not terribly surprised, but it's bad enough to not be acceptable. Again, no worries, I used Handbrake to convert the movie to MP4 and deinterlace it along the way. The result was a much smaller, very nice, smooth-playing .mp4 (m4v) file.
When I import this file into iMovie, I can work with it, but the performance is terribly degraded. Not unusable, but noticeably slower. Now, when I've added my chapter markers, transitions, etc. and export to iDVD, it takes 19 HOURS to "Prepare content" and create movie.
I can only assume that this is an issue with the now H.264 file I used.
So my questions are:
- is there a better way to deinterlace the video?
- is there a different format I should be using for the movie file (e.g., FFMPEG?)
Thanks in advance for any help - this previously fun project has gotten incredibly frustrating.
- Roger

OK, I have a bit more data, and some success!
Using Handbrake I converted the original mov files to mpeg-4 files using the ffmpeg codec rather than the H.264, then imported them as events in iMovie. This time they imported quickly, were responsive when edited, and shared to iDVD quickly, completing in under an hour.
So it would seem that it is the H.264 format that does not play well with iMovie. Still curious if anyone has any suggestions/explanations as to why that may be, but at least for now the problem is resolved.

Exporting File now takes forever

Is it since the upgrade to FC X 10.0.7 that the exports take ages to do? I have a 2.8 Gb movie using 466 compression and it takes an hour to transpher to desktop.
Also, on topic:
What is the best format or way to export to a jump drive, to send someone a movie so that they can use whatever compression they want and I don't have to wait ages to export?
Thanks, Gary

I do not see below Uncompressed 10-bit 4:2:2.
Also, when playing to an audience with laptop to projector I hear that a DVD is not the best quality but that Apple devices 720p is the way to go. True?
1: Select File->Share->Apple Devices 720p
2: Click Tab "Settings"
3: Switch "Video codec" pull down to "H.264 Better Quality"

My home movies take forever to load when using apple tv..help

Ive got a new iMac, apple tv and airport extreme. Regular movies stream just fine. I moved a home movie into the movies folder of itunes and when I try to play it on apple tv it takes extremely long to even load. I just switched the network the 5ghz but that doesn't help. Can anyone help?

Likely to be slow LAN connection - if possible try a direct ethernet connection to router to see if it makes a difference.
Have you tried with the old router?
As digital copies will usually be less than 5Mbps and standard def you don't need blistering LAN rates, but if slower than this they will need to prebuffer.
If not a connectivity issue (describe how all equipment is connected in the LAN and wi-fi type if any), then consider itunes library corruption (create a new library with a few things in to test) and also security software that may see repeated access from AppleTV as a threat and be slowing/blocking it (eg NetBarrier).
AC

Home movies take forever to upload to ATV

I have an ATV third edition, with the latest 6.1 software.
My iTunes is the latest version 11. something or other
Here is my problem.
I recently got a gopro and have taken some great footage and have uploaded this footage into my home movies secion of iTunes. On my PC it plays great, instant access no problem.
IF I try to play this footage on my apple TV it plays eventually, but as an example an 8 min video takes more than an hour to queue up. This makes the task completely useless so does anyone have any ideas where I am going wrong?
I am clicking on the "computer" icon on the apple tv and searching for the video's there. The video pops up to play almost instantly with a clear picture of the start of the video, but will not play until the progress bar is full and its just very very slow
I also have piles of music which plays almost instantly stored on my PC and played through iTunes.
I also have some movies stored in the same way which I got from "free digital copies" from various blu-ray and DVD purchaces over the years which I added into my itunes. These movies (some over 2 hours long) start to play in no more than 2 mins and play completely fine with no stuttering or lag.
PS. the video format is H.264 is less than 1080p and is 30 fps so the apple tv should play it ok.

well - I have used the "convert movies to apple TV format but that doesnt seem to have helped - maybe reduced the queue time by a few minutes, but when its taking many 10s of minutes to queue up a 15-20 min clip its not much use.
What do you mean with regards to fast start and streaming? - is there a setting hidden away in the ATV or iTunes? Bare in mind purchased movies playing from iTunes play completley fine, its only video that I have made myself that is causing problems
I guess its something I am doing wrong as the user group isnt cimpletely stacked with people saying this feature doesnt work, but its beyond me at this time.

Apple TV rented movie takes forever to authorize

Since purchasing our family's new Apple TV and connecting it to the home network (Mac based, wired broadband, 6mb down), we have rented two movies. The first movie rented fine, authorized fine, downloaded as we watched, and eventually completed... but we had to stop watching for about 30 minutes to allow the ending to eventually download. Not a great first impression, but acceptable.
Today's rental on the other hand has had some hiccups. I gathered up the family and upon trying to start the movie, we instantly noticed that the ATV couldn't authorize the movie (the step after clicking 'play'). There were no errors, just a never ending "Authorizing" on the screen. I tried everything I could think of to get it to Authorize and after 20 minutes my wife finally recommended unplugging the unit and replugging. I tried that and played the movie again. This time the movie authorized instantly and after getting the family all together again (like herding cats), we watched.
Is there a better solution to the lack of authorization... better than unplugging the unit? It was almost like it needed that kick to the shins to get started, but it seemed extreme to me.

Thank you for the response. As for the other things I tried, my knowledge of the unit being limited to my few days of ownership, were to try downloading other items such as previews or trailers. I also tried starting and restarting our iTunes. I also put the unit to standby. All in all, very basic troubleshooting to make sure I had a live connection and not a dud at that moment in time.
I just didn't know if there was something different or more "tried and true" for something such as this.

Problem exporting as reference movie

I have a 90 min timeline that I am trying to export as a reference movie. I have done this before with no problem. everything is rendered in the timeline. I am working in SD DV NTSC.
The reference movie takes over an hour to export and the file size is about 14gig... so it seesm to be exporting as a self contained movie. Self-ciontained is UN-checked. I'm using current settings, audio & Video, chapter markers.
The video and render files are on a WD 500gig external drive.
I've tried exporting to the external drive and to the computer desktop. Same issue.
I've trashed FCP prefs with no luck.
I got a new laptop this week... I migrated the files from my G5 to the lap top. Same issue on both machines.
G5 dual 1.8 Mac OS X (10.3.9) 3 gig RAM

yes.... the timeline is completely rendered... and the files are located on my WD 500gig external Harddrive.
It appears to be a reference movie. The 14 gig file I have created and saved on the desktop will not play when the external drive is ejected from the computer.
I had a major FCP crash last week working on a project with the desk top G5. I was not able to get the program to reopen. I read here on the boards to trash the prefs. and that worked to get FCP to reopen.
This week I got a new macbook pro. I migrated from the g5 and it seesm waht ever problem I encountered on the G5 has migrated to the macbook. I am re-installing FCP fresh today to see if that solves the problem on the macbook.
This also seesm to have messed with the compresor program. I have several (10-13gig) one hour SD video files captured (raw) that I sent to compressor last week to export as QT7 download 300Kbps. Those files took a reasonable amount of time. NOw this week I try again and the same files are taking over 6 hours to compress.
I wonder if I have a larger overall computer issue here.
Thank for the help so far!
G5 dual 1.8 Mac OS X (10.3.9) 3 gig RAM

Compressor takes forever to load movies and settings

When I drag a movie into Compressor, or drag a setting onto a movie already in Compressor, it now takes a very very long time for Compressor to ingest it. This is happening both on my Quad tower and on my MacBook Pro. I totally wiped the MacBook Pro and reinstalled both the OS (10.5.6) and FCP Studio 2, then updated everything with software update. Problem is still there. Perhaps it is the way I exported the movies from Final Cut? I usually export reference movies to send to Compressor, this time, I did standalones because I want to save the HDV standalone movies for later use in BluRay projects (when Apple finally...). Any ideas? Your help is appreciated.

Wow! You are my hero of the week! Thanks so much, closing the Preview window before importing solved the problem completely. Now movies and settings import and set instantly.

Export Reference Movie takes forever!

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