FCP X media management solutions?

[Steve Connor]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “in a finitely complex situation. A few events – exposing one keyword at a time. A couple of shots of the Audi, in a promo spot, as it were.

I find it hard to shake the notion that there is a real limitation of use case scenario baked right into FCPX. But I could be very wrong.”

The feature film I am currently finishing has 2543 clips in an event with 8 projects in as well as dozens of keyword collections and it works fine. Only limitation is project length, but even that seems to be much improved in 10.04.

I make copies of all my project and event files before the end of every edit session, it’s a bit tedious but I’m hoping it will be worth it in the event of any disaster scenarios. We do need Apple to let us save backups on different drives though as in FCP Legacy, this would get round any project corruption due to drive issues.

Steve Connor
“FCPX Professional”
Adrenalin Television

[Jason Porthouse]

Duncan,

You can have far more than 9 keywords – I don’t think there is a limit. The misconception of 9 comes from the fact you can have those assigned to shortcuts, but they’re changeable and not fixed.

I’ve just finished a fairly major project on X – 20 odd short films for a tourist authority. Shot by 2 crews on a mixture of XDCam EX, 5D and GoPro. About a terabyte of media in all, with maybe 50 -70 keyword collections (bins) and a fairly typical smattering of graphics, narration, music and ambient SOT. Typically I was able to cut these about 30% quicker with X than 7 I reckon, and I really liked some of it’s features. Some drove me up the wall.

Media management wise, I would copy the project folders at finder level each night (only changed ones) and then discard the render files from the backup projects. A little time consuming but not too bad. I’d also backup the event file (not the entire event) in it’s own folder, dated and timed, to ensure that backup was there.

This saved our bacon once, when my client, trying to copy a project over from her macbook pro as I’d been doing (AirDrop the project folder, place in correct drive location with FCP off, fire it up and away – worked a charm) BUT she copied the wrong thing and tried to import the project within X rather than at finder level with X not running. Result – all keywords collections (essentially all the logging) and most projects gone. We replaced the current event with the backup from the Friday before and replaced project files from the backup , restarted X and fortunately all was well. As someone who’s well used to mucking around at finder level and quite disciplined I was confident we’d get the project back, and I think that the underpinnings of the database in X are quite strong, but there does seem to be a few too easy ways of it screwing up if you’re not careful. Couple that with seemingly random corruptions and crashes that people like the OP have had and it makes me nervous – not to the extent that I won’t use it, but enough to make my backup regime thorough.

In the 1 or 2 cases where the project (read sequence) became corrupt, or at least wouldn’t open (we used Neat Video on a lot of clips and it was a little unstable on occasions, especially with Skimming on) then removing CurrentVersion and replacing it with a renamed backup (copied from the Backups folder and renamed CurrentVersion) it never failed to get us back on track, and in about the same time as Restore would on 7.

I’m back cutting on 7 now, and already I miss some of X’s features – skimming (after hating it initially), the fluidity of the timeline (although I still think tracks are necessary) and the overall speed of the app. I’m rooting for X as I think it has the potential to be great and it will definitely be in my editing toolbox (along with 7 and Avid) for a lot of projects.

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[Duncan Craig]

Jason, thanks. That’s huge.

You’re right about misconceptions, usual story I suppose. Having the Keyword Shortcuts pop up each time, drove me to thinking I had to use a shortcut, but duh, I see you just type anything into the top window. That’s it…! What got me is that if you type in nine keywords on one clip, it fills in the nine presets for you, the top entry box disappears and when you go to a new clip the same 9 show up again.

From the FCPX manual:

‘Assign keywords using keyboard shortcuts
To add keyword phrases to your clips using keyboard shortcuts, you must first assign keywords and keyword phrases to the keyboard shortcuts’.

I read too fast and it went into my brain as: ‘To add keyword phrases to your clips you must first assign keywords and keyword phrases to the keyboard shortcuts’.

Also good to know that keeping manual finder-based backups of CurrentVersion.fcpevent and CurrentVersion.fcpproject will probably get you out of any trouble. Great info. Again thanks!.

Duncan.

EX1
MBP
FCPX
Short fingernails

[Jason Porthouse]

No problem Duncan, just be very methodical with how you store the backups as all projects are called the same when you get below the project folder. I also make sure, if replacing a file (either project or event) that I move the existing problem file to the desktop, replace with backup, make sure the new file is working within X and then trash the original moved file.

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[Aindreas Gallagher]

well, that blows my guff out of the water, although I meant it – I do feel cramped up there in the event, pecking away at keywords and looking at the lozenges, but its obvious that that really is just me. I likes a big second monitor of bins with the bin contents spatially arranged to my taste. I think I’m an editing slob.

what’s the movie?

https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics

[Tony West]

So far I have used a method that I saw way back, just making a projects not in use folder and same with events.

I just move the files back and forth when I want to work on them. I know about the app for this but I have not really bothered to use it.

I was dong it this way from the start and just stuck with it.

I don’t want to bog down the program with a lot of stuff that I’m not working on anyway.

What I have been doing with a doc I’m working on (tons of clips) is I make each person or subject (b-roll) their own Event. Rather than ONE doc event.

I saw where Steve C had over 2 thousand clips in one event and I’m glad that’s working for him, but with the stories I have read about corrupt events I’m a little gun shy. (he also has his stuff backed up)

I figure it like this, if an event gets corrupt I’m thinking it won’t take my whole project down.
Just the section with that one person or just the event with my music. Faster to fix than the whole thing.

apple might say “hey, you are defeating the purpose of the virtual (tag) events”
I’m still using the tagging for when I want to find something quick.

I guess you could say I’m using the events like old school bins and the search for clips the new X way.

I might change this once everything settles down, but for now I don’t want too many eggs (clips) in one basket.

[Andrew Richards]

[Michael Hadley] “Any one with some real computer chops care to comment?”

There is some system overhead involved with interacting with a mounted disk image. Disk images are treated by the OS as any other mount, but they are still subject to the physical I/O limitations of the storage they are sitting on, which might also have other I/O going on.

In your case, you were multiplying that effect by calling multiple streams of media from a virtual disk and probably also trying to write back to the same physical disk (I’m assuming your Project storage is either on the same disk image or the same physical HDD). If you have a fast RAID or SSD, that might be able to overcome the bottleneck by brute force, but if you were doing that from a single HDD, the bottleneck could be pretty acute.

Best,
Andy

[Michael Hadley]

Thanks. FWIW, I found I got a big performance boost once I exited the sparse disk concept AND separated my project and event folder, with the former being on internal system disk.

[Chris Kenny]

It’s a shame licensing issues prevented (first-party) ZFS support from ever materializing on OS X. ZFS makes creating file systems as easy as creating folders — it would perfectly support a “one file system per project” approach with none of the overhead of disk images. Useful for Media Composer as well (which like FCP X also wants its media files to live in a special location relative to the root of the file system — and doesn’t even organize them as well as FCP X does.)

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.

[Andrew Richards]

Not to mention modern filesystem technologies like concurrency, metadata written in the correct byte order, sub-second date precision, support for massive volume sizes, and sparse file support.

HFS+ might be the single biggest wart on OS X today. It really is a shame ZFS didn’t happen. The only filesystems I know of besides HFS+ that support hosting FCPX Events and Projects storage are Xsan and ExFAT.

Best,
Andy