FCP X and long form

[Mark Dobson]

[Nicholas Kleczewski] “Check out my rather long and boring post about that matter here”

I have to agree with you and unfortunately it doesn’t answer my question.

But thanks anyway

[Oliver Peters]

All good feedback. Generally all NLEs have a finite number of “programming objects” they can effectively address. That manifests itself in various ways – total media files in an MXF folder (Avid), total project file size (FCP legacy), etc. Seems like that may be the root cause of some of the issues being described. I wonder how tied to the amount of RAM that is for FCP X?

– Oliver

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

[Nicholas Kleczewski]

I figured the same thing. I’ve done some testing to that affect, and although I couldn’t quite figure out any magical number, I could deduce that once an event got over about 270 MB in size things when extra haywire.

I did notice though that the slow down seems pretty linear as it grew. Not so much that there was a single cliff. It starts to present itself on any sizable project, gets a little worse, around that 270MB mark theres a bit of a cliff, and then continues from there.

This will never happen of course, but it’d be good if you could put the program in some sort of “Long form Mode” and axe a few of the conveniences of “all loaded, all the time” in order to get more reliability on huge projects. On normal projects, the way FCPX holds everything at the ready is great, but it just falls apart at a certain point.

Interestingly, once i finally get every clip “loaded” as was noted before, FCPX is still only hitting at about 7GB of RAM. It’d also be cool if there was a “Pay Me Now, or Pay Me Later” choice with just having a long startup while all that data was dumped into Ram at the top rather than needing to click through each section, and then id just be diligent about leaving FCPX open at all times. But again, i realize this is such niche stuff, no one is ever going to bother with it.

Director, Editor, Colorist
http://www.trsociety.com

[Tony West]

[Mark Dobson] “I too have found the new behaviour really frustrating. I would really like there to be an on-off switch for the new persistent ranges feature. Whilst I’m happy for the developers to improve the functionality of the software it really annoys me that one has to unlearn previous workflows that one has developed to work within the previous confines.”

[Mark Dobson] “am still struggling to get back up to speed.”

I could have wrote this myself Mark.

I get why folks wanted it this way, but I had it down and could fly once I adapted to it.
I’m not alone : )

[Neil Sadwelkar]

Some of the experiences here are from editors working on older Quad core systems with older graphics cards.
Due respect, of course, but do things improve with a newer iMac i5 or i7, or the newest iMacs or MBPs with nVidia GPUs?

Because, for instance, in DaVinci Resolve, running on a new i7 MBP with the nVidia GTX 650, renders are happening as fast as in the ‘latest’ 8-core MacPro with 32GB RAM and a nVidia Quadro 4000 card installed. Maybe such a new system – iMac or MBP – with a SSD or Fusion drive may be the answer for performance with long projects.

I have also found that just replacing my boot drive from HDD to SSD has made a big difference to the opening speeds of a large (150 MB+) sized projects. SSDs also speed up rendering in some cases where disk speed not CPU speed is the bottle-neck. Like rendering to/from ProRes4444 or higher.

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Nicholas Kleczewski]

I have tested all those theories before, unfortunately its not the case. The rMBP running everything off a Pegasus has the same issues as a MacPro with a Geforce 120. I’ve taken a look further and found during these types of beach ball or slowdown situations, disks and GPU aren’t even being pinged at all. FCPX is simply thinking.

One unfortunate thing is that any time FCPX is thinking, it only uses 100 percent of a single core, so computer speed matters a tiny bit but its not taking advantage of any real potential. While apple could open this processing thread up to multiprocessing, its probably more of an issue of addressable object limitations.

They’d have to come up with a system that doesn’t plop everything into the Original Media folder as an alias making every file “considerable” to every action.

This is one of the places where Avid is still a powerhouse, although I wouldn’t want to trade the performance advantage of FCPX for Avids.

Director, Editor, Colorist
http://www.trsociety.com