So last night I had to get 5 short projects up on YouTube for a client to review.I thought all 5 videos could be done in a background batch and they would all be uploaded in less than an hour. Not exactly. Here were the results:
1080p, 2 minute 23 second timeline, every frame needing to be rendered
YouTube Share > Background > This Computer - 1:22:43 (1 hour 22 minutes 43 seconds)
1080p, 2 minute 15 second timeline, every frame needing to be rendered
YouTube Share > Background > none - 6:47 (6 minutes 47 seconds)
If I do my math right foreground sharing is more than 10 TIMES FASTER. Wozers.
If you see some benchmarks floating around the web and twitter about FCP X taking hours to render a simple sequence this is probably why. As we have heard before foreground rendering uses the GPU while background is CPU only.
I would be curious how other users systems compare.
* Test Notes: MacPro 2006, 2.66, 4 cores, Radeon 5770, 13GB Ram. No other processes were running, these times were taking from the Share Monitor "i" button. These were one pass, 960x540 setting in Share > YouTube. I am not using Compressor, but since Compressor doesn't use the CPU GPU in my early tests the results would be similar. These projects were pulling footage from the same interview, with a few ken burn's stills in each. Background rendering was off.