Advanced Rendering Techniques

[ LiB ]

Advanced Rendering Techniques

When working with complex effects, you'll need to render the effects to see whether the results are satisfactory. Bottom linerendering takes time. There are, however, some shortcuts that can make rendering less time consuming and certainly save you some drive space.

First and foremost, only render what needs to be rendered. If you build a series of PIP effects and they are all the same length, all you need to render is the top PIP. By rendering this effect, you'll essentially have created a composite and all the tracks underneath the top track will play as a rendered effect (see Figure 9.54).

Figure 9.54. In this example, only the top PIP needs to be rendered. Do not render the tracks underneath. If you make any changes to the tracks underneath, you'll need to re-render the top effect.

Expert Render

Another way to render is to let Avid Xpress Pro determine which effects need to be rendered and which ones do not (called the Expert Render technique). To perform an Expert Render, follow these steps:

1. Mark an IN at the beginning of your sequence and an OUT at the end of your sequence.

2. Turn on all the tracks by clicking on the track selectors or pressing Command+A (Macintosh) or Control+A (Windows) when the Timeline is highlighted, to select all the tracks.

3. Choose Expert Render from the Clip menu.

4. This window will inform you about how many effects there are and how many will be rendered.

5. Select a drive and click OK. (Then take a break, depending on how many effects need to be rendered.)

Rendering Ranges

One of the options from the Timeline's Fast Menu is called Render Ranges. Render Ranges displays un-rendered effects that are in the Timeline, which acts as quick visual aid when you're trying to determine what needs to be rendered and what does not. The options are None, Partial, and All.

The None option turns off the render ranges; nothing is highlighted in the Timeline. The All option displays a red line over all the effects that are either partially rendered or completely un-rendered. The best option is Partial, because it displays a red line over just the portion of the effect that is not rendered or has been "knocked" out of a rendered state. For example, let's say you built a five-layer PIP effect and then rendered the top layer. You then change a keyframe in layer 4 at the end of the sequence. With the Partial Render Ranges on, you'll only see a red line at the end of the top PIP informing you how much of the effect needs to be re-rendered.

NOTE

TIP

When you're rendering effects, press the T key or the P key as Avid Xpress renders . The T key will display the estimated time it will take to render the effect and the P key will display the percentage of rendering that is complete.

[ LiB ]