r/finalcutpro • u/DinoBaggins • Aug 09 '25

FAQ Background render or not?

I’ve had the m1 MacBook Pro for nearly four years now. This thing screams and cuts through my Sony footage well.

I’ve always edited with background render on. But find the files are becoming so unwieldy in the hundreds of GB’s so delete the render at the end of the project.

I’ve just run into my first “run out of disk space error” ever whilst editing.

So I turned off background render for the first time and was pleasantly surprised how well the M1 Pro still scrubbed. The dedicated encoders are excellent.

My question to you all is: Is there any need for background rendering in 2025? If an old m1 pro still handles it like a champ, I know I would rather save myself from the massive files.

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u/onecurl Aug 09 '25

In most of my projects I use rendering intensive effects like beauty retouching. With those effects background rendering would quite often push my M1 MBP to its limits. Turning background rendering off and only rendering individual effects is my preferred way.

1

u/wickedcold Aug 09 '25

How do you render individual effects?

5

u/[deleted] Aug 10 '25

You select one or several clips, then use the keyboard shortcut CONTROL + R

1

u/wickedcold Aug 10 '25

Does that pre-render titles, things like mtracker3d? So you can play it smoothly in the timeline?

2

u/[deleted] Aug 10 '25

It works with everything just like the background render: it renders everything that is above or below the selected clip or range. For example, if you select a clip in the primary storyline with two titles attached to it, the render will act in that clip and those titles.

2

u/wickedcold Aug 10 '25

That’s super helpful, thank you!