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FCP X media management solutions?
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Thank you for all of these tips, Jeremy! This is exactly the sort of reprogramming that my brain needs to sort out whether or not I want to be using FCP X. I want it to succeed and I want to want to use it, but whenever I use it I still feel like I’m in iMovie.
Event Manger X looks like an awesome little app! The other apps by Intelligent Assistance (Project Xto7 and Sync-N-Link X) also look very useful and I’m grateful that you pointed me in that direction.
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Yeah, I love how the early FCP X demo was based around this gorgeous, well-lit, properly color balanced, graded footage. “See? Everything looks good in FCP X.”
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “No mate;) Audi – not audio.
“I was tracking, I just jumped from crag to crag.
I knew you were talking about the FCPX Audi demo.
My thoughts are that @radicalmedia is the real greenhouse for FCPX.
50 seat collaboration.
Jeremy
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Absolutely. It’s great that that’s happening. Although I bet even the radical media guy gets a shiver off the roller coaster story if he reads it. That’s Blair witch for editors.. 😉
Seriously you’re right though- it’s great X is getting a shot in a facility.
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics -
Re: Disk Images. I loved the concept. But I was having terrible performance issues with a XDCAM 100bmps multi cam project and the first thing Apple told me to do was copy the event out of the disk image. Their official policy seems to be “don’t use disk images.” Why? They couldn’t say, just that it was part of the trouble shooting protocol. So, now I am not using sparse disk images which is a shame.
Any one with some real computer chops care to comment?
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[Michael Hadley] “Any one with some real computer chops care to comment?”
I am not going to pretend I have real computer chops. I don’t.
I do have user chops.
As a user, this seems really wrong to me. I know it’s posted on reputable websites. I know it’s been discussed, and i know that some people have had success with it. Frankly, when people said to use it, I would immediately write a knee jerk response saying saying something to the effect of “don’t do it”. I stopped as I don’t know the technical reason not to, so then I started to think that perhaps it was a valid, working model.
The biggest reason I can give, is that it’s not in the manual. Not like that fcpx manual is a wealth of information, and when it comes to production and post, rules are meant to be broken, but the manual does have media management suggestions and sparse disk images are not in there. My user-based guess is that they are some sort of weird disk wrapper type of thing, and with the constant touching of the database that fcpx does, perhaps it’s a bad idea. Perhaps it’s a layer of abstraction that doesnt follow proper hfs+ protocols, or maybe it’s simpler than that. Perhaps due they way they work in the OS, they simply aren’t fast enough to use due to limited overhead. I don’t know. I do know that for some reason, it doesn’t make sense. Maybe that will change one day, but I doubt it.
Admittedly, it’s a very clever work around, but in reality, the FCP Event is already in a tidy little folder that is named exactly what your Event is named in the Browser. Projects work the same way.
For 5 bucks, get Event Manager X that manages these folders for you, very easily, very quickly, and “properly”.
If you need to move a Projects and Events to another drive, you simply find the Final Cut Events, and Final Cut Projects folders, look inside for the corresponding folders that match your Events and Projects browser, and drag them to the new drive, with fcpx quit of course.
I highly recommend reading the manual for fcpx media management. It’s a quick and concise read, has decently powerful options, and officially supported. You are not able to “trim media” on Projects/Events at this time. It’s not perfect.
Sorry to not have the technical answer, but Michael, I appreciate you sharing your experience.
Jeremy
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Don’t forget that u can make folders at the event manager level…and subfolders. Only difference is these contain keyword collections, not clips.
U literally could make a keyword the same name as a folder in a project organized in finder and rebuild the same structure if u wanted to. Its not completely necessary…play with it, it’s a COMPLETELY different way to organize and find stuff…nowhere near the very linear build that I love, but very clever and if u can figure out how to use it, WAY more powerful than folders inside folders inside folders….
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No problem, Gary 😉
Jason Jenkins
Flowmotion Media
Video production… with style!Check out my Mormon.org profile.
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[Michael Hadley] “Re: Disk Images. I loved the concept. But I was having terrible performance issues with a XDCAM 100bmps multi cam project and the first thing Apple told me to do was copy the event out of the disk image. Their official policy seems to be “don’t use disk images.” Why? They couldn’t say, just that it was part of the trouble shooting protocol. So, now I am not using sparse disk images which is a shame.
Any one with some real computer chops care to comment?”
Well, that’s the downside. It does slow down your disk performance. I noticed this before but I just ran a test on my Pegasus R6 with Blackmagic Disk Speed Test. Pegasus root or folder: 510MBPS Write; 475MBPS Read. 100 GB Disk Image on Pegasus: 300MBPS Write; 250MBPS Read. It works fine for me because I’m running AVCHD, with one or two layers for most of my work. With multicam you obviously need to stream multiple layers simultaneously. While your speed may be fine directly from the RAID, you’re throttling down the performance to an unacceptable level with the disk image.
Jason Jenkins
Flowmotion Media
Video production… with style!Check out my Mormon.org profile.
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I’m very new to FCPX (bought it on Friday).
If I’m reading this right you can only have 9 keywords, so only 9 ‘bins’.
You could use a combination of keywords to make 9×9, but what if you get part way through making your keywords and assigning them and then need a tenth which doesn’t fit the setup you have in place…I think smart collections based on named favourites look a better bet, but it’s a shame that the names of a favourite clip section don’t make it to the timeline. It does mean naming a favourite and then creating a smart collection to house, but that’s almost the same as creating a bin and dragging clips to it I suppose…
I don’t see Events as anything to be happy about, it’s just part of the workflow.
With FCP6 I’m really happy with my archiving strategy for media and projects. I keep a weekly incrementing zipped copy every FCP project, livetype and motion project I’ve ever made, and sync it all to Dropbox and a second Mac. Media lives on matching pairs of USB2 drives, I use an eSata as a scratch disk.With FCPX I can’t put a project on my system drive anymore and synchronise it to Dropbox because the project contains massive ProRes render files.
Overall I like FCPX, it’s a refreshing change from the usual NLEs and seems quite stable on my 2008 MBP. The Event window is always too small even when you drag it around, and I wish the viewer on second monitor would show 100% of the image without the menus around the outside on my second 1920×1080 screen.
EX1
MBP
FCPX
Short fingernails
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