FCP X – 15 films/5 days/clunkety clunk!

[Oliver Peters]

Boris – you are brave. I’ve been beating on FCP X for a few weeks on and off at this point. I would tend to agree that the added eye candy and animations have chewed up a lot of the power of its 64-bit horsepower and OpenCL capabilities.

For instance, if you try to type anything into a field (like Notes) there is a noticeable lag (maybe 1/2 sec) before you can type, because clicking on a clip requires FCP X to load the image into the viewer. I’ve noticed a lot of flakiness once you really start to push it with large projects or faster paced editing. Last night in tinkering, it quit allowing undos. I relaunched and I realized it had not saved the last few edits I had done.

Presumably these are 1.0 issues, but nevertheless annoying. Right now my biggest frustration is the actual way you edit in the timeline. I’m cutting a film in FCP 7 this month, so I’m particularly curious how it handles split edits as a point of comparison. So far, it is more cumbersome. Not unworkable, but extra steps. In general I feel that working in the timeline is considerably less precise than in FCP 7, PPro, Avid MC, etc.

That being said, I’ve tested H264 files from a Canon 5D project and it does indeed work well with these. It’s still not as fluid as if I had transcoded the files first, but it’s not bad. A work in progress, shall we say 😉

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Craig Seeman]

[Boris Jansch] “- The 5D footage was 25fps but I had to insert some 24fps promo footage, which FCP conformed to 25FPS but without retiming the footage so the footage played faster. I didn’t find a solution within FCPX and had to sort it with compressor.”

From the almost Help guide

Choose a method of conforming frame rate

When a clip’s frame rate differs from the project’s frame rate, Final Cut Pro employs a frame-sampling method to change the clip’s frame rate to match that of the project. You can choose which frame-sampling method Final Cut Pro uses to modify the clip’s frame rate. The method you choose depends on how important it is to you to eliminate visual stuttering and visual artifacts.

Add a clip to the Timeline with a frame rate that doesn’t match the current project’s frame rate settings.

Select the clip in the Timeline.

To open the Video inspector, click the Inspector button in the toolbar (shown below), and click the Video button at the top of the pane that appears.

Choose a method of conforming frame rate from the Frame Sampling pop-up menu in the Rate Conform section of the Video inspector.

Floor: The default setting. Final Cut Pro truncates down to the nearest integer during its calculation to match the clip’s frame rate to the project’s frame rate.

Nearest Neighbor: Final Cut Pro rounds to the nearest integer during its calculation to match the clip’s frame rate to the project’s frame rate. The Nearest Neighbor option reduces artifacts at the expense of visual stuttering. Rendering is required.

Frame Blending: Creates in-between frames by blending individual pixels of neighboring frames. Slow-motion clips created with Frame Blending appear to play back more smoothly than those created with the Floor or Nearest Neighbor setting. This setting provides better reduction of visual stuttering, but you may see some visual artifacts. Rendering is required.

Optical Flow: A type of frame blending that uses an optical flow algorithm to create new in-between frames. Final Cut Pro analyzes the clip to determine the directional movement of pixels, and then draws portions of the new frames based on the optical flow analysis. Choosing the Optical Flow option results in better reduction of visual stuttering, and Final Cut Pro spends a significant amount of time to fix visual artifacts.

[Boris Jansch] “- Adding transitions is easy once you get your head around the storyline concept but why in God’s name does it add a second transition at the other end of the clip?? Idiotic!”

Select the edit point, not the clip.

[Boris Jansch] “- The editable audio function has seemingly disappeared from the timeline in its most condensed mode, which is how I like to edit. I don’t need to see the waveform nor thumbnails but I do need to adjust audio so why has this been taken away?”

View/Expand Audio Video Clips/For All

In this mode you will video and audio tracks for each clip. My own peeve is that Dual Mono is still portrayed as a single audio clip unless one detaches audio.

[Craig Seeman]

DUPLICATE POST

[Boris Jansch]

Hello mate,
I use both but as I get used to it I’m using the select tool more and more and it puts a smile on my face.

It was a bit of a one sided rant but I really do like a lot about the new FCP it’s just ever so buggy and I needed it to be better for this edit.

Many thanks,

Boris J.

[Dennis Radeke]

[Steve Connor] “I’ll keep pushing the PPro thing a little further If I may, my facility was fully invested in Matrox Digisuite and Premiere 6.5 as were lots of people. PPro came out and was not usable with the hardware that some of us were actually making broadcast shows with.

In fact probably the ONLY people making Broadcast shows with Premiere used Matrox Digisuites, Adobe chose to dump them in the pursuit of their new code base.”

The problem there was Matrox, not Adobe. They chose not to support Premiere Pro – probably all the more since they were hard at work on newer hardware designs. Adobe is committed to its customers and have never intentionally abandoned any customer in the video space. I’m sure the same is to be said for Matrox, Apple, Avid, etc.

Change is a part of life, on that everyone can agree. I think what Herb and others are trying to say is that while FCP X may be a 1.0 product it shouldn’t be counted as an excuse for making a step backward for their daily work and missing features.

As Herb pointed out, when Adobe went to Premiere Pro, it didn’t lose features. When Adobe did a complete re-write just a few years later to make it 64-bit, they didn’t lose any features. At the Avid Media Composer 6.0 preview event, Avid went out of it’s way to say the same thing.

I think that Apple is to be applauded for it’s ambitious undertaking of tackling all three major focal points of a professional application in one shot: User Interface, 64-bit, Workflow. For some people, the net result isn’t satisfactory.

And in the effort of full disclosure….

Dennis – Adobe guy

[Boris Jansch]

Thanks Craig, as you correctly said, enlightenment was available after a little searching – not to be confused for the search for spiritual enlightenment, which is an impossible dream.

I still don’t get the adjustable audio levels line in the most condensed mode of the timeline.

Many thanks,

Boris J.

[Ts O’grady]

[Craig Seeman] “Select the edit point, not the clip.”

That’s true when using the keyboard shortcut but not when right clicking. Right clicking on the edit point to access the cross dissolve via the shortcut menu selects the entire clip.
Thanks for the conform rundown.

[Craig Seeman]

[TS O'Grady] ” Right clicking on the edit point to access the cross dissolve via the shortcut menu selects the entire clip. “

Select edit point. Use Command T instead of right click.

[Ts O’grady]

[Craig Seeman] “Select edit point. Use Command T instead of right click.”

Yes, I’m well aware of that. My point is that right clicking on an edit point should reveal options appropriate for the edit point, not the entire clip. Clicking on the clip itself results in the same options. There’s no longer a shortcut menu for the edit point.

[Craig Seeman]

[TS O'Grady] “My point is that right clicking on an edit point should reveal options appropriate for the edit point, not the entire clip.”

If you look at the list when you right click, everything in the menu affects the entire clip so the behavior is consistent. This gives the user the choice to right click to impact the clip or use the keyboard command to just impact the edit point.