any experience with feature-length projects?

[Trinity Greer]

I hope this is helpfull, With anything if your drive is at 90% full performace will suffer. Also if you are working from a sequence timeline of 90 minutes kulled from 40 hours worth all still available on the drive spells seektime trouble. I would separate the wheat from the chaff to reduce seeking. Its not and FCP thing as much a OS, IO, filesystem, drive speed issue. If you can, I would buy a new FW drive and tranfer onto it only the stuff you know you want to continue working with, say 20 of best hours of footage 🙂 and leave the remaineder on the original drive for quick access in case inspiration hits and the footage wasn’t transfered over. That way you have reduced load on the system and added a back up of the project footage.

[Mark Raudonis]

If you have “dupe detection” turned on in ANY of your sequences… turn it OFF! This will often cause the kind of slow downs you’re describing. It’s also a good idea to turn off thumbnails and waveforms in the timeline if you can live without those features.

Keep in mind, even if you do not have a sequence open, and it has dupe detection on, you will experience this kind of slow down. Therefore, go through your entire project and check the status of each sequence… no dupe detect should be on anywhere.

Good luck.

Mark

[Kaspar Kallas]

This is dependadnt of the project and how big the database gets,
I have a documantary that has been in the editing for a YEAR! and the project file is about 150Megs and this has the same problems, but I have another project that is much cleaner and there dosen’t seem to be such hic-up’s

-Kaspar

[Bob Roberts]

My project file is 97MB right now.

[Misha Aranyshev]

Use keystrokes instead of the drag&drop. Command-X the clip you want to move and paste it to the new position instead of dragging it there. Use square brackets for trimming instead of Roll/Ripple tool. With drag&drop your CPU cycles are wasted drawing animations and with JPEG footage you need all the cycles you can get. JPEG is more demanding than DV or uncompressed.

[Kaspar Kallas]

This is not the problem of video data but UI and database of fcp – maybe some improvements on FCP5?

-Kaspar

[Aaron Neitz]

This is a known problem at our studio. Anything over 40 minutes and your interactions slow down to a crawl – even on a dual G5 with 4 gigs RAM. It’s not a drive space or speed problem – I’ve had this happen in an online situation (Each clip had it’s own seperate piece of media and all on high performance RAID).

I heard a rumor that FCP4.5 had a 4000 object limit (?) which was to blame. We’re hoping FCP 5 solves this.

[John Burgan]

97Mb project file? There’s your problem. I’ve now edited several feature-length docs on FCP, also using PhotoJPEG in the initial rough cut stages. Basically if a project file gets above 10-12Mb (easily achieved on docs with multiple versions), FCP can get flaky, so you need to slim things down and adopt a different workflow.

Break the original project down into separate projects ie. Media/Edits, then further down as necessary into chapters/acts/interviews, whatever seems most logical. Also weed out redundant edits by archiving them, keeping the project with your main edit up to date and as lean as possible.

There’s no problem for FCP to have multiple projects open simultaneously, you can copy, cut and paste between them.

Also, make sure that you regularly save your projects using the “Save As…” dialogue, forcing the whole file to be re-written from the ground up on a regular basis. Apparently months of saving to the same file is a recipe for corruption, and simply backing up a buggy file is no insurance against losing your work.

[Bob Roberts]

I just dumped all of my outdated sequences and brought a 100MB file down to 11! Still having lagging issues with graphic editing tools. My next step is to break the project up into smaller pieces…interviews, b-roll, tons of still photographs, audio, etc…

Thanks for all the advice.

Slightly off topic…does Avid have similar issues with large amounts of media management? I don’t want this to descend into a FCP vs. Avid shootout…just asking if anyone can speak from experience.

[John Burgan]

Photos/stills are also often a cause of sluggishness in the timeline, particularly when they are way oversized for your project. If you’re not zooming into them or panning there’s no need for them to be larger than the video image. Also – though there is occasionally disagreement on this on the boards – avoid jpegs and go for tiffs/PSD format.