Overview

It is a unique editor. And there's nothing like it out there.

CHARLES ROBERTS
MEDIA PROFESSOR, AUTHOR, EDITOR

Rendering is the process by which your computer builds each of the individual frames needed to produce an effect. When you play back straight cuts in the Timeline nothing needs to be rendered. The computer simply refers to the hard drive where the original shot has been recorded and uses your edit information to determine which section of the original shot is needed. When an effect is applied to a clip a different process must take place.

People often complain about rendering to wait seconds or minutes for a computer to produce an effect can often drive people mad. I always smile at these situations. My background was in the world of on-line tape editing where the editor would work with several videotape machines, a separate vision mixer, character generator, audio mixer and Digital Video Effects (DVE) generator. To produce effects in this setup would often require an editor to record one or more of the shots to separate tapes. Several tape machines would then be run in sync with the layered effects built through the mix-effects banks of a vision mixer. The output would be in real time, however, real time was only achieved at the expense of the time used in the setup of an effect. These effects would often take a considerable amount of time to set up.

It is not always necessary to render effects in Final Cut...