18. Real Time and Rendering

Final Cut Pro offers many, many ways to manipulate your raw media—a wild world of complex effects. We enjoy more real time and less rendering in each successive version of Final Cut Pro, but even FCP’s impressive real time performance improvements can barely keep pace with increased performance demands as industry and consumer video standards move to higher-resolution HD formats.

Apple engineers persevere, however, and their efforts have brought us the Open Format Timeline feature, new in FCP 6. Now you can combine media with different formats, frame rates, and scanning methods in a single sequence and edit without rendering. In this mega-multi-format world, Open Format is a lifesaver.

This chapter outlines the workings ...

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