10.08 released

[Julian Bowman]

I am running two films and splitting each into 5 parts which run from 2 minutes to 10 on average with one at about 18 mins.

As for cuts, a fair amount, but what I consider normal from 10 years of doing this. I use CC and looks filters. I have transitions and some PinP. I hav some text overlaid here and there too.

Background rendering is off and waveforms are on as I use them as a guide quite a lot in terms of trimming dialogue clips etc.

Playback is ok, when it gets going, but it is the general lagfest that is driving me to despair. I literally click something and have to wait a second or two (sometimes a little more) to get a visual representation of what I have done. In the filters I can click the transitions tab, click the all option, type my text into the search box then about 4 or 5 seconds later the text will appear in the search box and same amount of time again for the filters to appear.

I’m figuring i need a new machine though I am loathed to spend £3k if FCPX is just laggy, but I just don’t understand how other people are not whining about this all the time, so either they are a) very accepting of lag (unlikely) b) running newer machines or c) my Mac Pro happens to just be unfortunately really shite.

I can’t bare to continue like this though, which makes me feel really fond of Apple’s insane silence about anything they are going to release as I am stuck between an iMac now just to be able to work properly or waiting an indeterminate period of time suffering with this lag in the hope the ‘awesome’ mac pro is just that, rather than a fart in a tea cup.

Ah, I do love how Apple stand behind my business like a foundation stone made by the gods.

[Steve Connor]

Do you mean Magic Bullet Looks filters?

Steve Connor

There’s nothing we can’t argue about on the FCPX COW Forum

[Julian Bowman]

No, just other filters. Think I was using an Easy Looks one and a mLooks one. Magic Bullet don’t work (though they may have just started working from an ad I saw recently).

I truly believe it is just my Mac being crap, despite it not really being crap, but FCPX the software being the £200 part of a £3000 bit of software (when hardware is taking into account). At least I hope it is because I may go postal if I buy a new mac and FCPX still runs with so much lag. And believe me, though it is still very buggy and has some utterly naive/idiotic/flawed design decisions, on the whole it is a pretty decent way to edit now at 10.0.7 with some great features, and for a one man show such as myself is a good contained editing eco-system with plugins, Motion etc., it is just totally mickey mouse on my MacPro for working on proper video projects, whereas FCP7 and CS6 both worked without any lag whatsoever… and this is truly a tad frustrating.

[Erik Lindahl]

I do find all the news coming to FCPX nice touches. However the app still has MASSIVE underlaying issues that Apple has to address.

1. Slow / lagging / sluggish playback on even the lastest systems.
2. Odd workflow workarounds for how to overcome the above or how the app handles media and files.
3. General buggy ness.

Fixing audio or collaborative solutions would be nice. In my book getting the app fast and responsive would be 10-times more worth.

I’d like to see 10.1 be fast, fluid and bug-free. Then they can add extras. I guess I was hoping for to much but even on a decked out iMac 27″ the app is still laggy. That’s NOT acceptable IMO. And it’s far from acceptable that an editor should require this kind of machine and still be relatively unresponsive. Yes, again, there are certain workaround. Dissabling a/v output for starters removes a huge amount. Still I find it shocking that they didn’t have this in mind when designing the app or patching it up the past 2 years.

[Fabrizio D’agnano]

I run FCPX on a 2008 MP, not even fully loaded with RAM. I work on 26′ video documentaries, sometimes starting with tons of clips that live in the documentary event. Waveforms on, background rendering on. I feel sometimes FCPX gets sluggish after long hours, but not all of the times, and not during normal work. When it happens, I quit FCPX and restart the OS. But it never gets unresponsive up to the point it really is a problem, just a bit slow.

Fabrizio D’Agnano
Rome, Italy

[Brent Cook]

Looks like I’m still disappointed. 🙁 What would be the reason for not including this option among the zillions of other key commandable features?

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

Does anyone know what the Pro Apps Quicktime Codecs update does? Does it add something, does it make certain export-processes faster? Or is that also a kind of maintenance update?

[Craig Seeman]

XAVC is an important codec for Sony F5 and F55 users.

[Steve Connor]

[Craig Seeman] “XAVC is an important codec for Sony F5 and F55 user”

It certainly is, spent the day shooting with the F55 and the codec works very well in FCPX, only about 12fps in High Quality mode with CC applied, but at “better performance” it’s pretty much full frame rate, even on my old 2008 MacPro. Codec seems very resilient to grading.

Steve Connor

There’s nothing we can’t argue about on the FCPX COW Forum

[Chris Harlan]

[Steve Connor] “[Walter Soyka] “Even if major updates require full re-purchases, $299 every couple years is a major bargain. Barring Lightworks (which I haven’t spent any time with to know if it’s a serious competitor), no one else has maintenance priced this low.”

This is very true, there’s a lot of discussion about what might happen but if this was the worst case scenario then it’s not a problem for me at all.
“

Yes, its a great deal. 300 bucks every few years is about the price of the traditional upgrade, anyway. Its a lot of software for the price. They could upgrade and do supportive maintenance in the same way they do OS X, just not as often.