What is Rendering in Final Cut Pro 5?

Video Transcript

"Hi! This is C.J. South representing expertvillage.com. In this clip I am going to discuss rendering with you. So now let's talk about rendering. Let me explain that to you. When you put an affect or some type of transition or change any of the values onto a clip, you then have to render those changes. Now what is rendering and why you have to do it. Well essentially think of it like this. When your clips are being captured into Final Cut Pro, they are being optimized to run a 100 percent in Final Cut Pro. Now if you add an effect to it you are essentially dumping more information on to that file that Final Cut Pro is optimized to handle. When you put too much on there, Final Cut Pro can't even play it at full speed. Your computer doesn't have enough ram or high performance to play it out at full speed. If you look here on the time line, you will see these bars up top here. These different colored bars. I've got orange, my computer is doing something. It has to move to render that effect. Now you have orange, green and gray. They both represent different render levels. The gray which you see over here. This is the video that I haven't affected at all so there is no rendering required for that gray area. The green which you see here is I've applied a low rendering effect where it doesn't take a lot of processor speed to play this in real time so you can play it in real time. See the fade. That was practically in real time. Now when you get to orange and red is when it gets tough to play. Orange means you can still view it but it is going to be choppy. Watch this while I play it. Once it gets to the orange, it now becomes very choppy so I can barely see what is going on. "