FCPX and very occasional lag.

[Gary Huff]

[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.”

That’s fine, but I find great benefit from the plugins I use and find the idea to not use 3rd party plugins to be patently ridiculous.

If that was the case with any other NLE, there would be howls of derision.

[Charlie Austin]

[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!”

Nope, Events and Projects are local, but all media is central and referenced, not copied to local event folders. We haven’t totally switched to X, so Sparse Discs might be an option, but now that X .08 can duplicate projects and events using the symlinks, ie. without trying to copy all the actual source clips into the duplicate -which broke the links to the central media-, we can probably just use our old fashioned sneakernet method. To share a sequence, just duplicate project +used clips without renders, give new project and new “clips for project” event to other editor, etc. etc. Almost exactly like handing off a sequence in 7.

————————————————————-

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

[Charlie Austin]

[Gary Huff] “That’s fine, but I find great benefit from the plugins I use and find the idea to not use 3rd party plugins to be patently ridiculous.
“

It is ridiculous, and I use them all the time with no issues.I don’t think we’re talking about a problem with X, but a problem with some peoples installations. Not to diminish the importance of Julians, and probably others, issues, but I haven’t experienced these problems. There are plenty of other people who’s installations run just fine as well. But I guess that’s off topic, as this is yet another thread about how FCP X is horribly, catastrophically flawed. Carry on…

————————————————————-

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

[Rafael Amador]

Is this the NLE that would free the editor from technicalities and let him concentrate in creativity?
Too many elements to consider and too many decisions to take before starting to drop things on the time-line.

[Charlie Austin] ” as this is yet another thread about how FCP X is horribly, catastrophically flawed. Carry on…”
You are right.
People like Julian should shut up and keep their complains for them self.
Only praises should be posted.
rafael

[Charlie Austin]

[Rafael Amador] “[Charlie Austin] ” as this is yet another thread about how FCP X is horribly, catastrophically flawed. Carry on…”
You are right.
People like Julian should shut up and keep their complains for them self.
Only praises should be posted.
rafael”

Uh… I never said that. In fact I believe I said the opposite. Let’s see …” Not to diminish the importance of Julians, and probably others, issues, “ Yep. Anyway, Julian did not start this thread, Aindreas did, with a specific, though IMO loaded question about FCP X responsiveness. Which, after a couple actual responses, seemed to be turning into another X bashing fest, to which I reacted. Sorry if it bothered you somehow. I’ve never believed that only praises should be posted, hearing of problems folks are having is helpful, not only for the poster in hopefully finding solutions, but also for others to hear of potential pitfalls. Hearing random uninformed biased opinions about how awful FCP X is are not. At least to me. I’m really not sure what purpose they serve. Now, if you’ll pardon me, I’m of to the MC forum to post about how awful it is… :-/

————————————————————-

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

[Carsten Orlt]

Aindreas,

Not sure what you are actually trying to achieve with these posts? I read the original post and it lacks very little detail about the specify hardware used or which codecs are in play? To take this as a negative example to point out how this might be a fundamentally serious problem is far fetched to say the least.

If your interest would actually be to understand more about the software and possible best setups because you don’t have the means or time to test it yourself than I would understand your many post of same nature lately. But your language reveals quite openly that you are basically using a lot of words to say: see I told you it is crap.. Very thin ground if you are using others to prove your point without actually testing it yourself.

I for instance get really nice performance out of my early 2008 with 16 GB RAM and I only updated my GPU to a ATI 5770. I have Raid 0 Esata drives connected to a Sonnet EP4 card. I use either Sony XDcam or Canon XF codec and edit in 1080p25 all the time. I actually have background render on because the render is now so fast after FCPx started to use all cores that making myself a cupa is time enough to get my fx rendered since the last time I made a cup (nothing I ever tried using FCP7). Yes newer machines might be faster and sure a Pegasus thunderbolt would be nice, but to edit you don’t need either!

And if it might lack slightly in speed I think this is really a very minor point because if we are honest speed these days is way beyond what we actually need unless you are more a FX artist than an editor. For me the argument that you might be editing quicker with FCPx is completely irrelevant because I don’t edit to win a race. I want to be sure that I get the best possible edit from my material. The real advantage that FCPx gives me is that I actually have to think less about the mechanics than about the content I’m creating. This is the real revolution. Yes it takes a moment to get past the mechanics when you come from FCP7, Premiere or Avid, but the goal justifies the effort. Just yesterday I helped a friend with some ‘mechanics’ in FCP7 and I can’t tell you how much I’m happy that I do not have to deal with tracks anymore. The freedom from dealing with the mechanics when working with tracks compared to the pain of developing a new way of solving editing questions is totally neglect-able.

And on the same machine I had way less realtime performance with FCP 7 than I have now with x. The only thing that takes longer is working with thumbnails. But I didn’t actually work with them in FCP7 because they were useless than. Now they are super helpful and I learn everyday strategies how to best use the software to not get bogged down by FCPx having to load thousands of thumbnails. I don’t think neither Premiere nor Avid actually make the same extensive use of them and therefor maybe don’t have the problem of needing time to pre-load them. But boy do I love looking at my footage visually rather than by description, because that was the only way we had before.

But of course if nobody pays you for using it you don’t need to learn it. And of course you can try to keep finding flaws by reading third persons accounts. But I like to test myself before I would go on the Premiere bashing agenda and say how awfully bad this software is written by just looking at the post about project management. Because it might just be that somebody has a special config that causes trouble and a lot of people don’t have the same problem.

Happy editing

[Charlie Austin]

[Carsten Orlt] “The real advantage that FCPx gives me is that I actually have to think less about the mechanics than about the content I’m creating. This is the real revolution. “

That’s it in a nutshell for me as well. There certainly are things that I think can be improved or added. But really, if there is something lacking in X that is specific to your workflow, or you just plain don’t like it or don’t think it’s worth the effort to learn it, use something else. It’s not like you don’t have a choice.

I get that a lot of people are mad at Apple for EOL’ing their favorite NLE. I know the feeling. When I was mixing I used, and loved, Avid AudioVision. It was amazing, specifically for editing and mixing for Film and TV. Then, they bought Digidesign’s ProTools (or SlowTools as we all derisively called it), and killed AV. PT wasn’t at all the same, like, not even close, but the world kept turning, and everyone moved on. I can only imagine the vitriolic, inane internet ranting that would have occurred had forums like this existed back then.

————————————————————-

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

[Charlie Austin]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “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.”

You say that like it *never* reliably accepted plugins which, as you know, is patently false. Something broke 3 months ago. It seems pretty obvious that the X folks had to wait for an OS update to fix it. OS X 10.8.3 was released on 3/14. 2 weeks later, FCP X 10.0.8 was released, fixing the issue. Seems pretty responsive to me. Now maybe you’ll argue that Apple should tell everyone the technical details and give progress reports for every bug that comes up, but I’m not sure there’s a commercial SW vendor on earth that gives out that info unless you’re a developer.

————————————————————-

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

[Julian Bowman]

Fair enough. Does that mean you’d shout at me less if I was in your shop ?

[Julian Bowman]

And what frustrates me the most is responses suggesting people with similar machines are not getting the ridiculous lag I am getting. And when I say lag I don’t mean choppy real time playback, on the whole that is good, I mean I click something it takes 2 seconds to action it.

Aindreas took a quote from another thread I posted in but there is a thread with my macs specs, and my workflow, which is basically pro res converts on an external 2tb hard drive.

I can’t help that my mac is ‘outdated’ as Apple haven’t updated their MacPro (properly) in years. I also cannot run OSX or FCPX on a PC without using a hackintosh which I am uninterested in, thus I am stuck dancing to their corporate drum or spending £3k + on a macine which will be outdated a t ‘some awesome point’ in 2013.

As I have said in other threads, there is a lot to like about FCPX, as well as some niavity/stupidity/error in design decisions they have made. The magnetic timeline is just a different way of doing things that is neither earth shatteringly revolutionary or dead on arrival, but Apple have coded it with serious flaws that mean its performance on my mac is horrendous at the current stage of a large project, and no other editing software I have tried or have used extensively has offered up this lagging. This is a flaw, and in an environment where people give me money to make the films, FCPX doing this on my current set up, makes it far less viable a NLE than it could be. And this is a flaw.

I believe there would be a lot more civility between the two extremes of opinion on this forum if those who ‘love’ FCPx weren’t so doggedly blinded by their love that any comment, question or complaint about FCPX that wasn’t gushing praise didn’t act as a catalyst for battening down the hatches and, more recently, a plethora of smug sarcasm and irony about ‘how FCPX isn’t good enough for Pro use’.

Honestly, I am using it, it does a job, bits of it it does really well, bits of it are terrible, and I don’t care what anyone thinks of what software I use because in my world it is irrelevant. But I have to say there are a fair amount of pro FCPX commentators on this forum who make me generally shut up about using FCPX because I don’t want to be associated with them, rather than not wanting to be associated with the software. Andreas may be an agitator, a devil’s advocate, but he doesn’t argue against FCPX in absolute terms of derision, he states he sees value in it and bits are great, but what about this……… as well he should. FCPX 10.0.0 was horrible on the whole, 10.0.7 is far far better and it is now out of the realms of being horrible. It is still incredibly flawed though. Ad it is still littered with poor design decisions. Start acknowledging that whilst stating you also love it’s good points, start debating its pros and cons (which does occasionally happen in a manner that is a joy to areas until one of the jack boot brigade decide to waft in with their size 12s on) and this forum will be more useful than annoying, and people will be less antagonised by your dogmatic fundamentalism, which is always a flawed position to take anyway.

Now, if someone can tell me who to google (technician wise) to get them to look at my mac and figure out why mine is so shite compared to others that would be totally appreciated. I live in Hertfordshire these day, just outside of London.