Chapter 18. Real Time and Rendering

Final Cut Express offers many, many ways to manipulate your raw media—a wild world of complex effects. Someday soon (we all hope), computer processing will speed up enough to dispense with the need to render in Final Cut Express. We enjoy more real time and less rendering in each successive version of Final Cut Express, but the program is not completely renderless yet. Until it is, you’ll need to render some clips with effects before you can play back your final result.

This chapter outlines the workings of RT Extreme, FCE’s software-only effects previewing feature. Real-time systems use the power of your Mac’s CPU to process added effects on the fly, allowing you to play them back without rendering them first. ...

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