Cupertino, we’ve got a problem!

[Joe Marler]

[Oliver Peters] “Premiere Pro performance in my experience is actual quite good on Macs, as long as you are dealing with media that is optimized for macOS, such as ProRes. FCPX and even Resolve are a bit better in overall media handling, but again, nothing that seems to have changes because of Catalina.”

Likewise I haven’t seen any major perf. problems on Catalina. For certain tasks there was a significant performance improvement with FCPX 10.4.7 (the Metal-optimized version) on both Mojave and Catalina.

In my experience on an iMac Pro, Premiere performance is highly uneven. It’s OK on optimized media but playback can be incredibly laggy and slow on most 4k H264 codecs and some 4k All-Intra codecs. I tested the viewer (aka program monitor) update rate of FCPX 10.4.7, Resolve Studio 16.1.0.055 and Premiere Pro 13.1.5 on a 10-core Vega 64 iMac Pro running macOS Mojave 10.14.6. Premiere was set to 1/4 resolution. Codec was Panasonic GH5 4k H.264 All-Intra 23.98 fps, 10- bit 4:2:2, 400 mbps:

Resolve: 28 frames/sec
FCPX 10.4.7: 20 frames/sec
Premiere: 2 frames/sec

That said, both FCPX and Resolve are extremely slow at 10-bit HEVC output. Premiere is much faster for that one task.

[Oliver Peters] “It would be great if within the OS – without any special app – I could directly operate a remote Mac as if I would running a machine right next to me. And with little or no latency.”

All Macs have built-in remote control and screen sharing using Messages. It works well and I’ve done limited remote editing, but it’s laggy. You wouldn’t want to do lots of work that way: https://support.apple.com/guide/messages/screen-sharing-icht11883/mac

I’m not sure how you could run lag-free remote work on a 4k or 5k screen. Using an iPad to control a remote Mac desktop is another issue. Besides the inherent performance problems it also involves remapping mouse/keyboard events to touch events. I’ve used Parallels Desktop for this and it’s OK in a pinch but I wouldn’t want to edit with it.

Yet a separate issue is remote collaboration which FCPX is just not currently optimized for. This is especially difficult since in the FCPX model much of the work takes place in the Event Browser, not the timeline. The natural workflow is the Assistant Editor preps and organizes the material in the browser, and the lead editor works on the timeline.

Since each event is a separate database, you can have separate assistants working independently on each event but there is no built-in support for this, not even rudimentary event locking. If something like an advanced version of MergeX was built in, that could be one developmental direction: https://www.merge.software

Much of the discussion on collaboration centers on the timeline, or on co-located LAN-type collaboration. With FCPX a solution is needed for (1) The Event Browser, and (2) Distributed non-connected collaboration.

There are check-in/check-out approaches to lock an entire library but ideally some kind of finer-grained concurrency is needed, combined with sync and conflict resolution. Those are not easy, even for companies oriented to group workflow vs single-user workflow.

[Dom Silverio]

I feel you, Mark.

A lot of our Mac clients have resorted to LogMeIn, Splashtop, etc. type solutions.
HP RGS is really a godsend especially.

You can try OSX remote screen sharing but will need to coordinate with your IT in setting up external access (VPN might be the easiest).

[Jeremy Garchow] “Doesn’t that mean this works with macOS even if the central server is HP?”

The receiver portion (external computer) works with Windows, OSX, and Linux. The sender portion (the local computer you want to access remotely) only supports Windows and Linux. And it is free if the local computer is an HP Z workstation.

[Rich Rubasch]

I’m not sure. Once you have the footage, isn’t the editing process mostly an individual at a workstation? Maybe not for long form, but once the edit is done the project can be sent to a colorist, or the OMF audio to an audio post house etc.

Unless you’re talking quick turn like news and you still want to edit from home. My daughter is one of the only ones going into the station to cut all day. Sales is at home.

So footage is 300 miles away, or 1000 miles away. Send it to me and I’ll get cutting. Especially when we are talking 6k Red footage! How in the world are we going to cut 6k Red footage over a 500mbps internet connection?

As has always been the case, the minute we get Thunderbolt 3 or M Drives we gobble up all that bandwidth with 4 layers of 6K Raw footage. It’s never enough. So once we all have 2k mbps internet it still won’t be enough.

It seems that the best way to edit/color/audio is still a dedicated workstation with the assets on local drives. I think we’d all agree we have the review process pretty solid with several methods and tools. But if we really need a guy to be looking over our shoulder while we edit (again, aren’t most of us editing alone with a review process later….even Schoonmaker?) why not send the output of the record monitor as a stream thru an encoder and OBS?

What we really need is a better way to send footage on a drive via FedEx….a pipe that allows just bulk file transfers in some magical, super/hyper packet technology that’s even faster than Signiant’s products. Shoot, package, send to editor within 4 hours. That work?

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media Inc.
Video Production, Post, Studio Sound Stage
Founder/President/Editor/Designer/Animator
https://www.tiltmedia.com