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Has anyone else experienced the painstakingly slow reder times I have with FCPX…among other very irritating things?
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[Jim Giberti] “Edgar Rothermich’s nicely presented visual tutes”
Thanks for reminding me. I had gotten his first FCP X book and forgot to check back on his second one. Which I just purchased.
It’s rare (at least in my opinion and opinions here are okay) when you come across a well written book, such as his. It does a great job explaining how FCP X works. Since FCP X works so differently, it’s really a good reference.
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Whats even more amazing is that iMovie really does work..very well!! In FCPX, things just don;t always work…simple things!
I imagine most of Apple’s efforts will be re-focused to maturing the iPad. Pro Apps may just be a thing of the past! -
For the record, my passion is directed at no one. I am very passionate in make-up, but I find it insulting for anyone to assume that I am need of tutoring with regard to something like a compound clip being moved and the timeline area starts flying all over the place. Seriously, if you try to move a compound clip in a rather involved timeline, elements fly and move wherever they find a “comfortable” spot. This has nothing to do with simply wanting to do something simple like re-position a clip!
Which is why I believe, and want to share the opinion that with out the boundaries of tracks, the control you had in a complicated timeline area by having defined boundaries is gone. And that, most unfortunately is the Achilles heel of FCPX. Why should moving something linearly along its own “line” (I won’t say track, because its not supposed to have any, even though it does have one main track) have such an effect on the entire space?
What I have noticed from several of the posts here is that those who really like FCPX are doing films and Documentaries. Which may be the best application for FCPX as it stands. Complicated projects seem to slow FCPX down to a crawl in my 4 months working with it. -
My main footage does match the timeline. I usually allow FCPX to set it auto based on first clip(video). And then I add photos and other elements based on the project. At the start of any project it renders very fast. As the timeline area gets more and more complicated, simply moving and re-timing a text element can take many minutes to render, which in turn slows down other operations.
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I am editing spots on FCP X. Have been since it came out. It’s different but I prefer it to FCP7. You’re right about the demands of spot production versus long-form but I prefer X for both.
The idustrial plug-ins don’t always work properly. I have seen what you describe.
Sometimes I have to be creative in how I approach something that I would have done differently in FCP7 but that’s one of the things that I was looking for – to find new ways to do things and not rely on doing things the same old way with the same old results.
I am using an early MacPro with 16 GB RAM and a Radeon 5770 under Snow Leopard. I would like to see if Lion makes a difference but I haven’t had time to make the transition. My main complaints are the interface lags sometimes, I still have some issues with text reverting to default parameters (specifically line spacing) even with the 10.0.2 update and rendering can be very slow with a complicated project. I look forward to broadcast monitoring but I have checked my work by playing it back with FCP7 through a Kona card and I’m seeing results consistent with what what I see playing back on the desktop.
I have gone back and forth with having background rendering on or off. I finally decided to keep it on with a delay of about 15 seconds. If something is not fully rendered when it comes time to export I just go ahead and export.
From my observation, this version of FCP is very hardware intensive, specifically video card performance, storage performance and amount of RAM.
You don’t mention what you’re using for storage. If it’s not fast you will have problems. It also sounds like you are leaving the skimmer on based on what you said about transitions attaching themselves to other clips. Turn skimmer off (hit “S”) when you don’t need it. It comes in handy at times, especially when viewing clips in the event library but I rarely use it in the project timeline. One thing I use all the time is re-timing to make things fit. On-camera guy takes 24 seconds to say his piece and I’ve got 22 seconds to fit him into? Retime and I’m done with pitch correction already applied. Do that in FCP7!
In my day-to-day experience I have found a lot more to like about X than you might expect from reading these forums. There are lots of little things that IMHO are just “better”. Some peoples brains just work differently than others. I had no problem adapting to “reversed scrolling” in Lion for example. For other people it’s the end of the world.
NT
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For the record, I think I’m a very funny guy, even though the list of those who would agree might be very short. (only one perhaps?) So, keep that in mind when reading my posts. (or avoiding them altogether as some probably do, no offense taken, no offense intended)
Jim Giberti is right, much of this has been discussed on this forum. Many of the discussions have been rather passionate as well.
I’d summarize all of those discussions as follows …
Some have tried FCP X and are using it.
Some have tried FCP X and found it works much better in certain ways for their workflow where FCP 7 did not.
Some have tried FCP X and found it useful after some new features were added.
Some have tried FCP X and find it completely unusable.
Some have tried FCP X and not only find it so completely unusable that it pains them to even discuss it. (yet, they punish themselves by continuing to discuss it)
Some have tried FCP X and decided to move away from Final Cut and Apple altogether.The rest are watching and waiting.
If you are still reading this post, I was wondering if you could provide some more details on your particular project. You have a fairly fast system for running FCP X. Although I’m not sure about where your media is kept. It would be interesting to know more about what you are doing and why you have performance issues. Some things that can slow FCP X down:
FCP X seems to like more than 7 GB of RAM for itself. Plus, if you are running Lion, there seems to be a memory issue where Inactive Memory can quickly consume your free memory. This will slow down FCP X. There are free utilities to free up your memory. (hey, a pun?) Or run the purge command in Terminal.
Are you using any stills? FCP X seems to have performance issues with stills, depending on their size and number. There was another thread that talked about this. Using PNG instead of JPG, less compression.
As as been suggested, if your system can handle your project without rendering, turn it off. I do. Also, it appears that when you export, FCP X seems to utilize your GPU to render things much more quickly.
If you’re still reading this thread, I’m impressed. Even I’m getting bored and I think I’m pretty interesting.
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OS 10.7.2, GDrives via F800
I read all posts in their entirety…even yours!! (LOL)
Yeah I’ve gotten to the point where I will give it up till they make major changes. Eventhough I’ll delete it, I’ll still have access to it via the App Store. -
[Craig Shamwell] “My main footage does match the timeline. I usually allow FCPX to set it auto based on first clip(video).”
And is your video ProRes or 10bit UC?
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