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First serious edit on FCPX
Just started using FCPX and have a hit a hurdle immediately.
Media files all on external drive and mainly ProRes422 (12 hours worth). These import immediately and are a dream to edit with but I have a few (c120, 30 second clips) shot hand help on a little panasonic. These are *.mts files and although FCP will handle them they are disproportionately slow. For example clicking on one of them in the import dialogue causes beachball for minutes while FCP builds the skimmable preview (is there a way of defeating this in the import dialogue by the way?) When I multiple select all the clips – beachball again for minutes, then hitting the import button causes a ‘validating media files for import’ which is still progressing (15 mins so far) while I type this.
I’m not transcoding these to prores just trying to import the raw files and fulling understand that converting will produce more edit friendly files – but hey this is just a first trial.
Should I expect this or is there something I should be doing to speed up this process? It’s a brand new 15″MBP with current version of FCP and the files are on USB3 external disk. These files import immediately in Edius on the PC.
Please tell me I’m doing something wrong.
Ta Alan
XdcamEx & HD, C300, DSLRs, all sorts of production & post gear and a very untidy desk. On the East Coast of the UK
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10 Replies
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Not to worry, just discovered FCP doesn’t like these files at all so re-wrapped to mp4 via Handbrake and all is well.
All I have to do now is work out how to handle hundreds of stills, of varying resolutions while maintaining a par=1 as FCP seems to want to fit these all to the ‘canvas’
Alan
XdcamEx & HD, C300, DSLRs, all sorts of production & post gear and a very untidy desk. On the East Coast of the UK
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When you add the stills to your timeline, you can select them (individually or en masse), and go to Inspector>Video tab>Spatial Conform and choose Type: None. It would be great if you could make this the default behavior, but I think it has to be done after the stills are cut into the timeline.
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I’d recommend going to ProRes unless you’ve got a 12-core new Mac Pro with D700s and a lot of ram. Performance is just a lot better…
Noah
FCPWORKS – FCPX Workflow
Call Box Training -
Thanks guys for useful info. Peter that’s such gratifying info, is there a way of setting this subsequently after import as well as a batch.
Cheers Noah, yes I agree and would do this but as I said on a previous posting that you responded to, these files are on a single ‘shared’ disk (Nearly full 1 TB) that flips between Mac and PC laptops and I just didn’t have the space to do that.
Alan
XdcamEx & HD, C300, DSLRs, all sorts of production & post gear and a very untidy desk. On the East Coast of the UK
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2TB Lacie Rugged drives are less than $200- might be a good investment.
Noah
FCPWORKS – FCPX Workflow
Call Box Training -
[Noah Kadner] “unless you’ve got a 12-core new Mac Pro with D700s and a lot of ram. Performance is just a lot better…”
Except the H.264 decoding performance on the Mac Pro is actually pretty pathetic. Honestly, if I were buying a new computer I’d probably choose the iMac 5K over the Mac Pro. Based on my experience with a new MacBook Pro the more modern processors make editing snappier. Undoubtedly rendering is better on the Mac Pro, but I’ll take real time performance over rendering speed any day.
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And 2TB USB 3 toshiba’s are $100. And slightly faster. Unless you’re talking TBolt Rugged.
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The iMacs have a built-in H.264 hardware encoder that the Mac Pro lacks. However it is only single pass lower quality encoding. So while it can be faster on the draw it’s not what you want for final outputs.
Noah
FCPWORKS – FCPX Workflow
Call Box Training -
Hi Noah,
I buy these drives to mount a) in Atomos devices for recording then b) transfer to external caddys that have eSata for PC laptop and usb3 for the mbp. Generally 1TB is generally enough per project and I have an identical one as a mirrored pair for backup. One of the beauties of Edius is that the project will open directly off either the main drive or the backup, so even if I have a drive failure I can editing immediately. I archive these pairs, not reusing, and buy new for each project so I guess I’ll be looking at bigger drives in future depending on the prices.
I don’t like Lacie drives, I’ve have many disasters with then.
XdcamEx & HD, C300, DSLRs, all sorts of production & post gear and a very untidy desk. On the East Coast of the UK
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I’m talking decoding. My MacBook Pro refreshes when skimming H.264 media 3X faster than my Mac Pro. That’s just the facts. And generally feels slightly snappier when editing.
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