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FCPX and Stabalisation
Hi everyone
I am currently editing a live event about 7hrs and want to take some of the edge off of some of the zooms which went a little dodgy throughout the day. I’m editing on a 2013 Macbook Pro retina, via usb 3, with 2gb graphics card, quad core processors but according to activity monitor around 12mb of data a second is being accessed from the hdd and around 85% of my cpu is idle… basically i’m trying to figure out what is the bottleneck in this system as surely it should be churning through this process a lot faster than it is.
The footage itself is XDCAM straight from the cards, non trans coded, library and media is all on one hdd but still it should be faster than this right? Any suggestions or pointers would be appreciated.
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4 Replies
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Lots of variables here. First, while X can parse MXF files without transcoding, they are not optimized like ProRes. For kicks, try transcoding a short source clip to Optimized inside X,then zoom to see if the quality is acceptable ( i bet its great) and see if the processing goes a lot faster. If so you may be saving time up front only to lose twice as much later. Also do you have background rendering enabled? I ask because “intent renders” from the Modify menu focus more resources on rendering than standard “timeout” progress renders (unless they’ve changed things in later revs)
Lastly, I’ve observed that sometimes things are slow to render in X because the core processes in how X handles stuff like scaling and compositing are a lot more precise than they were in the old QuickTime days. So renders can be slowed by large raster content simply cuz X won’t “dumb down” it’s calculations. Instead, it brings the same precision to 1920×1080 work that the engine would apply to compositing Alexa or Red footage.The 12% processor utilization seems odd tho. Have you checked Activity Monitor to see what else is polling the processor?
Just some things to think about.
Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.
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[Bill Davis] “For kicks, try transcoding a short source clip to Optimized inside X”
FCP X does not optimize XDCam.
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Ok. Been many many months since anyone brought me an XDCAM project. To test the theory, OP would have to export a clip as ProRes and reimport it. Stripping the MXF wrapper and recoding as clean ProRes might not accomplish anything. But I’d still want to know that. Perhaps he already does. I don’t. My last quick turn foray into XDCAM editing seemed like my system was chugging more, but that might have been merely perception.
Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.
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Can compressor do the trick?
Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV40, Sony Z7U/VX2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; FCP X write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.
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