How is browser performance in FCP X on your machine?

[Oliver Peters]

It’s not your perception. If you are a fast editor – as in how quickly you interact with the NLE – then actions in the Event Browser are significantly slower than in FCP 7, Premiere Pro or Media Composer.

I just loaded a new project today. 10 1/2 hours, 822GB, 828 clips of PRHQ 1080p/23.98 media. One Event, numerous Collections. Moving from one clip to the next is relatively slow because of the redraw time of a filmstrip with waveform. Sometimes you can close and reopen FCP X and the performance improves, because the RAM has been flushed. But operation on this kind of project is painful. Skimming helps to offset the experience, but I’m seriously considering moving the project to a different app in the morning.

I’m letting the machine cook overnight and generate proxies, just to see if the performance is better in the morning.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Bret Williams]

Last time I checked, there was nothing even approximating filmstrip view in legacy. There was in the sequence, and it was a dog at redrawing. As was waveforms. Two things I never even considered using 90 percent of the time. I did however use thumbnails in list view, because you could skim them, albeit in their tiny little thumbnail. But even so, I would grit my teeth all the time waiting for the thumbnail redraws when I opened or scrolled large bins.

So I think filmstrip view is kind of a luxury. I’m surprised it works as well as it does. I generally use thumbnail mode with waveforms off. I skim the thumbs and use jkl to be precise for mark in/out.

My big wish for the event is multiple event windows so that one event window can be in thumbs and the other in list. Even of the same data, or different keyword collections. And add thumbnails to the list view.

And can we please match back to the shot in the keyword collection it was edited from? I dread hitting shift+f and having X redraw all the strips or thumbs in the entire event. and then I still cant find the clip among the zillion frames displayed. Oh, and skim and mark ranges in the viewer and event viewer. And a million other things. I’d love to see apples priority list.

[Nicholas Kleczewski]

It seems clear that FCPX is doing some kind of dump into RAM each time a clip is accessed for the first time in an open project. Whether thats the thumbnails, waveforms, metadata or what even the guys at FCPX Feedback aren’t sure. But the good thing is, once its loaded once, you can go back to that clip and performance is lightening fast.

I’m working on a feature doc with over 10,000 clips of video, 5TB of footage just in proxy resolution. I find it best to leave FCPX open at all times as much as I can. Once things are cooked into Ram and FCPX is hitting around 10GB used, the project moves decently enough. The do-over from restart each time is a real pain and I avoid it all costs.

I notice this kind of thing actually performing much worse on a MacPro than any of the updated macs. I traced this back somewhere to some guys hypothesizing this had to do with something called AVX or something like that Intel put in post MacPro processors that goes directly to these types of quick access issues.

Another huge thing I found before 10.0.6 was using dual monitors drastically decreased general responsiveness. It seemed to get better after 10.0.6 to where I’m not sure it even happens any more. But I haven’t worked on anything small and zippy lately to really test that.

Director, Editor, Colorist
http://www.trsociety.com

[Oliver Peters]

[Oliver Peters] “I’m letting the machine cook overnight and generate proxies, just to see if the performance is better in the morning.”

I let the project cook overnight to create proxies in FCP X. Performance isn’t any better with the proxies, so I’ll probably just stick with original media. However, letting it sit overnight has definitely improved responsiveness. I think that when you do a lot of keywording the app does some under-the-hood database management. This doesn’t show up as a background process, yet it definitely affects UI interaction. When it’s done, the app speeds up. It’s hard to put your finger on, but that seems to be why sometimes you close the app, or come back to it a day later, and it feels like you are running completely different software or are operating a much faster machine.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[T. Payton]

Oliver –
What are the specs on your machine. Are you on Mac Pro too?

——
T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque

[Oliver Peters]

There’s definitely some under-the-hood management going on that still needs to be optimized. It would be great if there were an option to have a list-only view or completely turn off waveforms in the event filmstrip until needed.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Jeremy Garchow]

In times like these, if you have the screen real estate, you should keep a Finder window open and single click the Event file to highlight it.

You can see how often the file gets hit and that, at least for me, causes a few pauses here and there.

A cache and manual save option would help here, but I’m sure that will never happen.

You go from knowing when the pauses happen in Legend by virtue of user control (save all, renders, “preparing to display…”) to letting the software manage the pauses. Although, since v10.0.0, I find they happen less often.

I find it helps to see the software doing something by watching the Finder. 🙂

[Oliver Peters]

12-core Mac Pro, 32GB RAM, ATI 5870, fast storage (internal RAID-0 plus fibre channel SAN), Decklink Extreme card.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[T. Payton]

The thing that is killing me is when I am in the initial organizing stage of my project and I trying to scroll through a bunch of footage in filmstrip. Especially with my magic mouse trying to “flick’ up and down. It is painfully slow, jumpy and jerky. So much so that it isn’t useful for reviewing, keywording or organizing footage. I fell like I am working against FCP X.

Is this what it feels like to you on more recent Macs? (for me anything more recent than a 2006 MacPro)

——
T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque

[Nicholas Kleczewski]

Hey
Ive experienced the same thing. If you notice from when you started and picked it up the next day in Activity Monitor FCPX probably went from using some average amount a RAM to using much more. When everything is “loaded” and idle in my big project FCPX is hovering around 10-12GB of RAM used.

Theres still lots of smaller beach ball moments while its “thinking” its way through things. but much more manageable.

I think in a sense the FCPX engineers devised so many performance/convenience items, from waveforms, to thumbnails, to saving every move made, to massive amounts do metadata, etc, and in order for it to do that at the blistering speeds it does, it needs everything held as close as possible. Where as Avid, or to some extent FCP legacy, addressed things more linear as needed so size didn’t matter for the most part, (Avid compartmentalizes way more than Legacy did) I have no doubt that if I had every Bin open and everything going at once in Media Composer as FCPX is trying to do, it would be even worse.

I kinda wish there’d be some kinda implementation of a “performance/convenience slider” or a “longform/shortform” toggle switch, and FCPX could make intelligent decisions on processes for forgo, or not forgo in order to keep things running as equal as possible regardless of project size.

Director, Editor, Colorist
http://www.trsociety.com