FCPX and very occasional lag.

[John Davidson]

Here’s how I’d respond to him if it were in my shop. This is the equivalent of complaining that your 64 Oldsmobile doesn’t get the same gas mileage as a brand new Prius.

1. Why the heck are you doing anything on a 5 yr old mac pro? Please use it as a server or sell it before my head explodes.
2. What drives are you using? Certainly not a thunderbolt RAID, and I can only imagine that if you’re working on a 5 yr old mac pro you’re NOT working on a super fast RAID.
3. mLooks? Easy Looks? Have I not told you about using 3rd party plugins on FCPX? Please learn how to color correct in X or with motion, or do it AT THE END OF YOUR PROJECT LIKE THE REST OF EARTH DOES.
4. STOP TURNING OFF BACKGROUND RENDER OR I’M FIRING YOU.
5. Are you working at a native codec? Are you working at Proxy? Prores? Optimized? Is your project or comp the same frame rate as everything else?

We don’t work with third party plugins that aren’t sold off the Mac App store, not even FX Factory ones. You can build so many of your own in motion without all the hassle of maintaining them, checking if they’re updated, reinstalling, etc.

[Gary Huff]

[John Davidson] “We don’t work with third party plugins that aren’t sold off the Mac App store, not even FX Factory ones. You can build so many of your own in motion without all the hassle of maintaining them, checking if they’re updated, reinstalling, etc.”

I’m at a loss for words. Seriously? Come on, now.

[Julian Bowman]

Makes me glad I’m my own boss really. Mind you, that was part of the reasoning behind the plan, avoiding self important ranty men dogmatically telling me I don’t know how to walk properly.

It’s a 2 year old Mac.

I will continue to use plugins as I did with FCP7 (some of the same ones in fact) and I do colour correct then add filters for effect. My clients like my work, they give me money, your shop can work your way, I will work mine.

Adding CC and filters at the end to circumnavigate the flaws of my editing software isn’t an issue with my workflow, but with the software. FFS, I get that FCPX has some things going for it but that degree of apologising for its shortcomings is just stupid. FCPX needs to be coded properly and work properly.

I am aware that my mac may be old, something I have written about up in another thread. I am also aware FCPX is the only NLE that is laggy on my mac and it is seriously so. My guess is partly that is because it needs modern computing power and partly because the code isn’t as good as it should be.

In addition, if I need a new Mac to run FCPX (remember, mine is 2 years old) then FCPX isn’t the cheap bit of software people like to say it is. I am self employed. I make a decent living. I also buy all my own gear, cameras and computers, with my own money, so chucking another £3k + at FCPX is a big deal to me. Perhaps in your world £3k is what you blow on your Christmas do. If so, good for you, but to me £3k still hol value, cheers.

But mostly, on my set up, which isn’t antiquated at all, the lag on actioning things on FCPX is horrendous at the current stage of my project (ie the end when everything is in place and client tweaks are necessary, so no avoiding filters at that point). And even if I was using a thunderbolt raid (which I can’t because apple haven’t built a MacPro with thunderbolt) on this current mac I’m not convinced it would stop the lag because it isn’t only about the drive, it is about the code.

I’m also not convinced the notion of not using 3rd party plugins on FCPX when Apple themselves want 3rd party plugins to compensate for the software’s shortcomings is one to be too proudly extolled. Or are apple just being numpties for telling us it is fine, 3rd party solutions will enable us to fill in the gaps.

[John Davidson]

If you had watched my workflow videos this would not be news to you. The last plugins I bought were the Tiffen filters, which just operated slowly and we have never used them again since purchase. As we add systems life is just dramatically simpler if we don’t have to deal with any third party plugins. I want to be able to open up my project on an air if I want without some ridiculous license. This is how we work and it works well for us.

You’d be surprised at how much you can do in motion if you try. Obviously, if we had to do some elaborate 3D then Dashwood’s plugins would be crucial. We haven’t done any 3D so there’s that.

I have been saying for years I want a plugin store from Adobe and I think the Mac App store should be the place to get them for FCPX. I think Apple should encourage this. Software update should be the source for updates, not constantly checking 30 different websites or FX Factory.

[John Davidson]

Sorry Julian, I thought in an earlier post you said it was a 2.26 quad core mac pro from 2009?

[Aindreas Gallagher]

john man – you kind of coined GFX word tag smart collections, and work flow compound clips functioning as sequences in the browser –

I tread lightly –

“Certainly not a thunderbolt RAID, “
that’s not going to matter realistically. We’ve all been happy as clams to this point.

“Have I not told you about using 3rd party plugins on FCPX? Please learn how to color correct in X or with motion,”

So I’m going to take fairly deadly issue with this.

Either FCPX has a reliable extensible plugin architecture or it doesn’t. As of two days ago Magic Bullet, from Stu Maschwitz, apparently functions again.
After a three month silent interregnum.

Basically: who is not pretty happily accustomed to invoking third party pug-ins?
plus what’s worse, the dude here says its not even external plug-ins killing him.

still – I do basically take the point – throwing any old plug-in to the mix is liable to mess things up.

BUT – the system should be in a position to reliably accept plug-ins.
Up until three days ago that was not true of a serious amount of third party plugin software.

That aside – he said pouring tea and offering biscuits –
do you get system slow down or interface breaks? Do Apple have anything to address here?

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

[Charlie Austin]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “do you get system slow down or interface breaks? Do Apple have anything to address here?”

Well… Other than the first press of the spacebar or L key after opening the app, I don’t get any appreciable slowdown in X at all. And I often use all sorts of crazy 3’rd party and native plugins. To be fair, I don’t do a lot of CC. On a 2009 Mac Pro originally, and for the last couple weeks on a new 27″ iMac. There are some complicated piles of FX and/or compositing which either require setting the playback quality to better performance, or rendering the problematic section. This is stuff which would never play at all without rendering in 7, and just plays choppily -sometimes- in X. My experience is that X, at it’s slowest, performs at least as well as 7, and usually performs much better. Source is generally HD of some flavor served over Gb ethernet from a NAS RAID. The only interface slowdown I notice is the first load of the project library if there are more than 10 or 15 sequences in it. After the first load it’s generally snappy, more so on the new iMac.

————————————————————-

~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[John Davidson]

Thanks dude! I will absolutely take credit for the gfx smart collection trick. Compound Clips was suggested to me by one of the network post production heads we work with. One day I’ll be able to credit him publicly when they officially switch, but until then I’ll take that, too!

My problems with 3rd party plugins aren’t completely based on sluggishness. A lot of it is with 1 or 2 seat licensing issues that are doing all kinds of network snooping on my systems that could be doing who-knows-what by accident. We avoid the matter entirely by not using them at all. I can say that anything that’s doing a massive amount of color correct, vignetting, clamping, etc, is going to need a render to play back properly. I think everybody knows that on pretty much any system. Julian said he was working with MLooks and Easy looks later after the post you linked to, so that’s why I pointed them out.

There was one particular project a few weeks back that was doing all kinds of crazy stuff. I could literally watch the RAM usage creep up until it maxed it out. This occurred on pretty much every system we opened it up on. It wasn’t a ‘work’ project, but a personal one with all kinds of crazy stuff going on. We experiment with personal stuff to beta test possible workflow updates. We were using internal media vs referenced, had all kinds of plugins applied (3rd party ones too I think) and while I can’t remember what it was, I think we ended up making a new event and copying what we needed from the bad Event. In terms of sluggishness, Mac Pros don’t work as well as iMacs. We have the 2010 Mac Pro with 64 gigs of RAM in one room and while it should be the best, it’s absolutely not. It’s bluetooth signal is terrible despite numerous backplate replacements, it’s had networking dropoffs that other systems don’t have, and it just doesn’t feel as robust as the imac. My overlying plan is to swap out every system with iMacs eventually and put the towers in the server room.

(cue the coldplay background music)
I love the simplicity that this software on an iMac suite has. It’s just the imac, mic, speakers, and a monitor. We keep our workflow light and robust to try to match. Some people think our sparse disk image is a hack, but when you think about it, sparse disk images will instantly show you on the finder sidebar exactly which project you’re working on is going to be in X before you open it. That’s a finder level project viewing solution built into the operating system. That’s pretty awesome.

Sorry, I don’t know where all that came from!

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Charlie it sounds like your setup is pretty similar to ours. Are you doing sparse disks? I’m sure you probably told me all about it the other week and I completely forgot. Last few months have been a blur!

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[Bret Williams]

Still, the MacPro he bought was at least a year old when he bought it since it hasn’t been updated in 3 years.