Final Cut Pro unusable for big projects?

[Kevin Monahan]

The more complex your show is, the more hardcore you have to be about the following:

System Config
Drive Speed
Quality and proper config of RAM
System Maintenance
Project management

I agree with all these guys. Since I opened my shop with FCP 1, I’ve always been a purveyor of OVERKILL. Especially when it comes to drive speed. Even back then, I was able to play out a broadcast quality SD output to Beta SP with the ancient Targa 2K pro while others were doing mere DV. The secret was a high speed SCSI array at RAID 0.

It is a huge mistake not to build a system around a high speed data array if you are doing large or complex projects. This has always been the case. Doing good research indicates this and always has since FCP 1. Rule of thumb? If you are adding a capture card to your system, you must add a high speed data array of some kind.

Walter, Gary, Raf and others. Thank you for what is working out to be a great post and even better advice for Christoph.

Kevin Monahan
http://www.fcpworld.com
Author – Motion Graphics and Effects in Final Cut Pro

[Anders Haavie]

Blablablablafaster drives etc,etc,etc.. ram… versions..etc.

the truth: FCP handles big projects badly. When we edited our feature we came across some of the same problems, however not so severe. When you get a lot of small clips in your project, fcp gets more and more unpredictable. I have written about this a couple of times. It is really annoying that Avid handles this so much better. FCP is fantastic, but big projects are one of it’s biggest weaknesses. When we had screenings, we had to make self-contained movies to be sure nothing screwed up.

Let’s hope the next version of FCP fixes this BIG problem.

Xraid-Xserve-Xsan-Xeverything

[Christoph Strothjohann]

thanx walter, mike, gary and all you others for the active discussion on this post and all your advice.

one thing upfront to walter. by labelling the post “final cut pro unusable for big projects?”
i didn´t want to state but rather ask (hence the “?”) if it the size of our projects is where our problems stem from. but english is not my mothertongue, so I´m sorry, if somebody finds it to provoking and was upset about it.

we talked to the production company and took your advive, walter, to order a raid.
i hope it will arrive on friday and we´ll copy our media to the drive over the weekend.
there was no money for top class fibre channel etc.
so we ordered a sonnet d800 with 8tb storage for ca 4500 dollars without VAT.
as soon as it´s up and running i will give feedback on this post on how it affects our working.

one question about “good” media management with raid: shall we put all media files on there (video, sound, render files) or would it be wiser to keep the sound files on a seperate internal sata drive?

journaling is of course turned off for all our media drives. so that is not where our problems come from.
no updates were made either since the main project was set up.

although the problems we encounter are similar to mike´s, we haven´t run into render issues.
just yesterday i rendered the widescreen effect, video and audio transitions on a 2hour sequence in one go without any problems.

so i will be back in a few days with a description on how our switch to the raid went.