How is browser performance in FCP X on your machine?

[Oliver Peters]

This looks pretty normal to me. I don’t work in that view either. For me it’s almost always list+top filmstrip unless it’s an event with only still photos.

– Oliver

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

[Mark Dobson]

I work in filmstrip and list view depending on what task I’m doing.

My mind responds to visual information better than long lists and with skimming on its possible to find things very quickly.

I’ve got a 2008 2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon with 22 GBs of RAM and a ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024 MB Graphics card . I find scrolling in filmstrip view jerky bit not unusable. (1080p native Canon C300 files)

I’ve devoted a 27″ monitor to the Event viewer and keep the view at minimum with no waveforms.

Tomorrow I’m starting to migrate to a new 27″ iMac and I’m looking forward to finding out what improvements in performance / stability I’m going to get for my investment or whether I’d of been just as well to stick with what I’ve got and gone on a holiday.

[Jeremy Garchow]

If you can, open Activity Monitor and click the “Disk Usage” tab and check out both the data and also iops.

Your cache is being built as you scroll through there, how new is this Event?

Is the performance different on your OWC drive?

It looks like you have three hard drives that have pertinent fcpx databases on them. What happens if you go down to just the chicken of LaCie?

[T. Payton]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Your cache is being built as you scroll through there, how new is this Event?
“Is the performance different on your OWC drive?”
“It looks like you have three hard drives that have pertinent fcpx databases on them. What happens if you go down to just the chicken of LaCie?”

Actually I just grabbed that event because I knew it was large, about 2100 clips, and it would illustative the problem well for this thread. My drive “Chicken of the LaCie” is running off esata so it is just fine with speed, about 120MB/sec. I’ve done many tests with different configurations—many events or few— all with similar results. I’ve cut dozens of projects and have always experienced this slow scrolling behavior. ProRes gives the best performance, but nothing I would call smooth.

I have quite an old Mac Pro 2006, so I was just wondering if this was typical. It sounds as if alot of folks are not using filmstrips to view clips. I for one use it to get a quick overview of my footage. It is a great timesaver, I just wish it was more responsive.

——
T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque

[Jeremy Garchow]

There’s no question a newer computer will perform noticably better.

You could take Chicken of LaCie to an apple store, plug it in to a quad core i7 imac and see the difference as long as you have the proper adapters.

We are facing the same fate of plunking down for new hardware, but I am trying to wait it out just a bit longer.

FCPX can do some amazing things, but it does use considerable resources. It would benefit from a modern Xeon.

[Oliver Peters]

” 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.”

That hasn’t been my experience with Media Composer, but admittedly I run those bins in the list mode. There is no equivalent to skimming, but you can play thumbnails in the frame or script view from within a bin. I will admit, though, that if you open a large MC bin in the frame view, it will take a while to populate as well. If you scroll up revealing off-screen frames, you’ll get similar display latency as to what T is showing.

Oliver

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