Another Q from FCPX newbie: third party plug ins

[Jeff Kirkland]

Hi Sascha,

No offense intended, and I’m all for jumping in off the deep end, but it strikes me that most of these questions are really foundation ‘how do I actually use this app’ questions – and makes me think you would do well to invest in some training before you get to much further down the major project path. Ripple Training, Lynda.com and others have great courses and it will be time well spent.

While all the good folks here can offer lots of useful advice on workflows, plugins, and FCPX basics, we can only really tell you what works for our own projects and needs – it’s could easily be a short road to disaster if you start any large project without understanding enough about how the application works to be able to pick and choose the right bits of workflow for your specific needs.

Happy to keep on helping and answering questions but maybe just some food for thought… I’d much rather see you have a great FCPX experience than get half way through a project and hit a brick wall because you missed some important foundation step at the start.

Cheers
Jeff K

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Sascha Engel]

Thanx guys for your concern. I actually did some training on it, and I’m “editing” on virtual projects, giving myself tasks, trying to understand other those how to translate certain workflows and actions I’m used to from 7 into X. Also the magnetic TL which was a riddle for m e in the beginning, I grasp very well now. The media management is the only thing, that stroke me very inflexible and unforgiving so it’s important to me, that I launch the project the absolute right way first, not – like you said in your posy – to hit a brick wall in the project , by facing that I ingested the mea wrong.
I know it’s risky, but I’m an auto didactic self teacher, who got into producing his first film and editing it by jumping into he cold water in the first place. It’s war where you learn how to battle, all before is just warming up.
That said, I will keep consuming tutorials and tips from wherever I can get them, till I get the project on the table.
If I manage to safely set up the project – with the help of you super COWS- I think, I will manage to edit he film on it.

All the best,

Sascha Engel
TIME BANDITZ Productions
http://www.youtube.com/taikang

[Jeff Kirkland]

[Sascha Engel] ” The media management is the only thing, that stroke me very inflexible and unforgiving so it’s important to me, that I launch the project the absolute right way first”

Pleased to hear you’re not just rushing in 🙂 I’m a trained educator so I always get concerned if it seems people may have jumped in without paying attention to the basics first.

Regarding media management… if we’re talking about dealing with files and folders on the hard drive then yes, FCPX is quite inflexible. If we are talking organising the media inside FCPX before you start to edit, then it’s one of the best.

Everybody has their own methods. I personally just get FCPX to copy media into the event folder and let it handle everything. I have far less issues that way. Some prefer to do all their organising as folders at the Finder level and just link to them in FCPX.

Either way is fine but it’s important to remember that FCPX isn’t good a re-linking and is very unforgiving of anything that changes a file – so no matter what you do, once imported you should try to never mess with those files outside of FCPX again.

Organising media and metadata may not be especially exciting but it’s generally the key to FCPX success. However you choose to organise your imported files, once they’re in forget about the files on the hard drive, everything revolves around ranges, favourites, keywords and tags inside the event library.

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Sascha Engel]

No worries there, I am a pedantic German – if I get into a software, I REALLY wanna get into it. 🙂
So, would it be an option to to it as following: Create a sparse disk image on my internal RAID (not sure yet, how much space I should give it though), Put all my source material (the folders from the Canon C300 CF Cards) into that sparsed partition. Then create the Event and Project Folder into this Partition as well. Now, in FCPX import all the media (but leave it in the original place, since it’s anyway already on the right “disk”). Later, I can copy that Partition on the clients disk, so he has the full project.

Would that be a safe way?

In the way I described, I understand, that FCPX is actually working with the original C300 material, so – coming from the transcoding world of FCP7 – it strikes me a much more stable and safe workflow (specially considering a round trip to Resolve) to let FCPX optimise the media into ProRes and copy it into the event Folder. Cause if not, when I export the XML at the end, does that link in Resolve to the original files of the C300 Card? I guess, these files DaVinci would not like very much, right?

Greetings,

Sascha Engel
TIME BANDITZ Productions
http://www.youtube.com/taikang

[Jeff Kirkland]

You can make the sparse image as large as you like, it will only take the space actually used. I tend to make them a terabyte or more just to be safe.

I think your approach to bringing in the media is pretty much the same one I used until recently. I stopped using sparse images though because I have some issues with backing them up. (essentially, copying a sparse image while it’s open and in use can lead to corrupt copies… and a corrupt copy isn’t a backup.)

I think it’s fair to say that while FCPX can work with a lot of media ‘natively’, letting it optimise the media to ProRes makes everything work much more smoothly.

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Sascha Engel]

Thank you so much, you have been a great help!

Greetings,

Sascha Engel
TIME BANDITZ Productions
http://www.youtube.com/taikang

[Craig Alan]

Hi Jeff,

I am in the same bag as Sascha.

Trying to come up with a FCP X management system for the long haul.

I too started with sparse images.

Since X only uses one Projects/Events folder per drive on the root level, sparse images worked wonderfully.

However, there are some complaints from end users about speed issues with sparse images and a strong recommendation from Apple Care support (pro app department) not to use sparse images. I did a speed test using apps from both AJA and Black Magic. I did not find any speed problems with the small projects I had set up in sparse images. However, maybe as the drive gets full or the projects get larger that changes?

I understand you can’t back up your images while open. Still, they provide a very neat container to transfer, back-up, move to a different Mac, etc. So why exactly did you decide to switch to a different means of organizing multiple projects? Did you need to back up while they are open while shooting? More importantly what is your alternative? I need a way that not all projects are loaded. Not only does this slow things down but I will be setting up a lab in which users cannot have access to each other’s media and projects. Sparse images seemed to be the perfect solution but now I’m second guessing…

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Camcorders: Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV30/40, Sony Z7U, VX2000, PD170; FCP 6 certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Dave Gage]

[Craig Alan] ” However, maybe as the drive gets full or the projects get larger that changes?”

Craig,

When I was deciding how to go forward with an editing drive and backing up, I did numerous speed tests and found that regardless of whether the drive was internal or connected by FW800 or eSATA, a 3/4 filled drive benchmarked slower than a near empty one. (I used QuickBench 4.0, Large file test (2-10 MB), 5 cycle run, with the “Allow Cache Effects” box checked and 5ms set for the Read and Write Delays).
—

Here’s some of my scores from a prior post:

Here’s some new benchmarks that don’t have anything to do with the Hybrid drive, but were brought up earlier in this thread.

1TB 2-Drive RAID 1 becomes a 2TB 2-Drive RAID 0:

eSATA OWC Elite-AL Pro 2-Drive RAID 1 3/4 full (Quick Bench “Large file Test” from SpeedTools Utilities 12-24-12)
[With the “Allow Cache Effects” checked (5ms)- eSATA: Write- 97 MB/s, Read- 99 MB/s.].

eSATA OWC Elite-AL Pro 2-Drive RAID 1 EMPTY (Quick Bench “Large file Test” from SpeedTools Utilities 12-27-12):
[With the “Allow Cache Effects” checked (5ms)- eSATA: Write- 96 MB/s, Read- 155 MB/s.]
—

eSATA OWC Elite-AL Pro 2-Drive RAID 0 EMPTY (Quick Bench “Large file Test” from SpeedTools Utilities 12-27-12):
[With the “Allow Cache Effects” checked (5ms)- eSATA: Write- 96 MB/s, Read- 155 MB/s.]

eSATA OWC Elite-AL Pro 2-Drive RAID 0 1/4 FULL (Quick Bench “Large file Test” from SpeedTools Utilities 12-27-12):
[With the “Allow Cache Effects” checked (5ms)- eSATA: Write- 97 MB/s, Read- 156 MB/s]
—

Not sure if I learned anything here except that “maybe” full drives don’t Read as fast as empty ones, RAID 1 and RAID 0 do benchmark about the same (of course one has redundancy and the other gives you twice the space), and/or the Speed Utilities QuickBench 4.0 comes up with different numbers on different days.

Dave

[Craig Alan]

Thanks. Drives slow down when getting full. But what about sparse images?

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Camcorders: Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV30/40, Sony Z7U, VX2000, PD170; FCP 6 certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.