Advice for FCPX Novice

[Matthew Celia]

How much RAM does your system have? The one thing I find about FCPX is that it loves to eat up memory. Luckily, if you need more, memory for the iMac is insanely cheap. I think I paid $150 for 16GB of RAM and my machine is quite fast.

An external hard drive (FW800) is a really good idea, but I doubt that not having one is the cause of your problem. My advice would be to get a cheap Western Digital USB drive to use as a backup drive (because the speed isn’t as important) and then get a nice G-RAID to use for editing projects. I would advise against putting your backups and your edits on the same drive.

Please let us know more details about your set up and we can help you out.

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FCP Guru
http://www.fcpguru.com

[Bill Davis]

Another area to watch out for when working with still photos is the size of the photos you’re importing.

It’s incredibly common in these days of high-rez cheap cameras to simply “drag and drop” what are actually extremely large photos onto a video timeline.

The thinking is that since it’s a photo rather than a video – it must be comparatively small – but the exact opposite is often true.

Even high def video is vastly less “information dense” a raster than a high-rez still photo.

So if you’re working with large stills, pre-processing them into a smaller raster can have amazing effects on how fast they work for video editing.

The basic rule of thumb is to start by looking at your timeline settings. If you’re set for “high-def”, the raster will be something like 1920×1080. You can reduce a huge camera master image down to say 3840×2160 pixels (twice the timeline rez) – and that will let you “zoom into” it at twice its native size and still hold full detail. Compared to a camera master “8 megapixel” still, that’s a MUCH smaller file for the computer to have to process for each frame.

Also if you want REALLY fast performance, a TV screen can only reproduce a pixel density of about 72 dpi natively. So resizing photos to something basic like 640×480 pixels often yields perfectly usable video images that look great but that are so small a data profile that you benefit from virtually instantaneous performance when you’re moving or combining them on video.

Hope that helps.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Matt Sayles]

Thanks for the advice chaps. Stupidly, hadn’t really thought about buying more ram, but it’s so cheap it’s a bit of a no brainer. Good advice on the two external hard drives. G-RAIDs look pretty pricy, but I guess I can get a smaller one and presumably you can fairly easily transfer your projects off that onto another drve once you’ve finished them thus freeing up space for editing new projects?

Yes I was assuming using stills would be less demanding so this is very useful info, thanks. My camera produces about 10 megapixels so can’t be helping matters.

Thanks again for the advice. Hopefully Santa will bring me a FCPX book for Christmas so I can read up on the basics!

[Stephan Walfridsson]

[Bill Davis] “image down to say 3840×2160 pixels… …Compared to a camera master “8 megapixel” still, that’s a MUCH smaller file”

No Bill, 3840×2160 is 8.3 megapixels, so it’s actually a LARGER file.

Stephan

[Bill Davis]

[Stephan Walfridsson] “No Bill, 3840×2160 is 8.3 megapixels, so it’s actually a LARGER file.”

Yeah, you’re right. I still have trouble thinking in terms of 1920×1080 native rasters since for most of my career, all I had to deal with was a 640×480 (or 720×480 non square) pixel rasters.

When you have to think of everything in terms of filling a full “high def” TV raster the files get pretty big pretty fast.

The truth is that a huge chunk of the work I’m doing these days is destined for the web – and a “target raster” is more likely 800×600 progressive – which lets you work with smaller source files even if you want some “zoom room.”

Faced with 1920×1080, I’d probably avoid going 2x unless there was a compelling need – or better yet do the really smart thing and do a “pre-analysis” of the individual photos and decide which of them would actually benefit from being “zoomed into” and by how much – thus keeping the largest number of imported photos as small as I could.

But thanks, Stephan, for keeping the record straight. A lot of folks come here to learn and correcting mushy math like mine in this case is a useful and appreciated.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor