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FCP X and Plug-ins
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I usually work with the very basic clip view. I wish the clip size could be altered, but it seems to make things work a bit smoother.
Scott Witthaus
Senior Editor/Post Production Supervisor
1708 Inc./Editorial
Professor, VCU Brandcenter -
[Scott Witthaus] “I usually work with the very basic clip view.”
Waveforms are a common problem that many people have noted all over the web. Unfortunately it’s all or nothing, which means if you need to see the waveforms you have to suffer the downside. In Apple’s defense, waveform redraw is something many NLEs struggle with. Avid finally got it to a workable level in the most recent versions of Media Composer (after 25 years) and Premiere Pro often won’t draw them or only draws interrupted sections of the waveform in a track.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
I remember PPro 5.5 and 6 having a horrible time with playback if the scopes were open or even on a tab in your layout. Sluggish starts and jumpy playback until the tab was closed. It’s fixed now, but I mention since some signs here seem to be pointing to things that need to be redrawn as being the culprit. Personally, I don’t use any plug-ins with FCPX and it gets sluggish all the time.
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One thing I just noticed which may or may not be related. I was having a slow After Effects render, and just quit Firefox which immediately sped up the rendering by probably 5x or more. I’m assuming it is the old Flash memory leak (or whatever causes Flash to hog up resources) that I had forgotten about. Next time FCPX is sluggish I will have to make sure Firefox is not contributing…
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[Bret Williams] “Might be time for a clean reinstall of the OS and X. At least a trashing of your prefs.”
You might be right Bret. I have hesitated to do that until I finish this doc completely. I’m real close.
Let me give you a specific example of what it is doing.
Let’s say I have a photo in the timeline. I decide to resize it. The orange render bar will come up above it. If I wait for about 30 secs X will start to render that photo, even though I have not told it to and I have background rendering turned off. I don’t want it to do that. I don’t want it to render anything until I tell it to.
That’s how it worked before to my knowledge.
I would be interested to know what happens if you try my exact example.
Resize an item and see what it does.
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Maybe we need an FCPX Plug-In Manager so you can pick what third party needs to be loaded when.
Scott Witthaus
Senior Editor/Post Production Supervisor
1708 Inc./Editorial
Professor, VCU Brandcenter -
[Oliver Peters] “Premiere Pro often won’t draw them or only draws interrupted sections of the waveform in a track.”
Very true that all NLE’s can have struggles with this aspect of visual representation.
Whereas Avid of old and FCP7 created uncompressed audio and therefore frame accurate and viewable waveforms as part of their mandatory transcode process, Premiere Pro doesn’t have to do that – we just play the video natively. However, this is not 100% true for audio inside of Premiere Pro. We make the assumption that you want to have viewable waveforms in the timeline and if you put compressed audio in the timeline, we need to either generate a visual representation of this or in some cases conform the audio to uncompressed.
Premiere Pro does offer some choice though between immediate editing and creating those visual waveforms. In Premiere Pro Preferences>Audio there is an option called “Automatic peak file generation”. If you deselect that, some compressed audio files won’t automatically generate the waveforms but will play.
If we are generating peak files or conforming audio, you will see a progress bar in the bottom right hand of the Premiere Pro interface. This is a one time operation. We allow you to edit while this is happening, but it does sometime affect performance during this one time operation. Again, we’re trying to balance the immediate playback experience (edit now!) versus creating a visual representation for the overall edit. Turning off the peak file generation will allow more immediate editing if you don’t care about audio waveforms.
In general, we want to import, visually represent and play immediately all audio types just as we do with video types. We do look to continue to improve the audio aspects of Premiere Pro as we continue to innovate.
I hope this helps,
Dennis – Adobe guy headed to NAB…again. 😉 -
A true plug-in manager would be a very welcomed addition. Especially since the real goal of Motion compatibility is for design templates and not necessarily effects. These are things that are really based on certain productions, so it would be nice to not have them there for every production you work on.
Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] “only draws interrupted sections of the waveform in a track.”
I’ve seen this in FCPX too.
Scott Witthaus
Senior Editor/Post Production Supervisor
1708 Inc./Editorial
Professor, VCU Brandcenter
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