How to optimize your FCPX experience

[Eric Santiago]

I’ve had stellar workflow mainly with RED 4K DCI formats.
Mostly shot with my Scarlet and some with EPIC/DRAGON.
2 features a slew of shorts/music videos on a Mac Pro 2012 w/ROCKET card and now a nMP (no ROCKET required).
I am using both 10.4 on the Mac Pro and latest in nMP.
Combinations of SAS cards, Decklinks and GTECH drives helps with my workflow.
I do get the same results with Avid, Pro Tools, Premiere and sometimes Resolve.
In the end I love FCPX and RED files.
Way less tinkering when moving projects around.
I have to deal with numerous Directors that edit their own masterpiece.

[Bill Davis]

Oliver, I think your analysts is spot on. Some editors fly with X, some crawl. Worse yet, the cause of the difference is often far from intuitive. A good example is my exchange this week with Mike Warmels in the “little things” thread. He was doing things in a perfectly reasonable way – on older, but spec capable hardware – and beach-balling his life away. The same thing had happened to me on a critical week long edit months ago, but I’d gotten help to figure out the issue and solve it and it went from horrible problem to “no big deal” overnight. The thing is I’ve been editing for nearly 30 years and I’ve been in that exact same place more than a few times. Something is a huge problem for editors with a particular configuration or workflow – then suddenly someone figures it out – the word gets passed along – and the problem largely goes away. The only difference is that instead of the solutions arriving on phone calls from an editing peer – now they are hashed out in public where everyone watches and the participants with a point of view (looking in the mirror here) use any glitch to buttress their preconceptions about the worth of the whole approach. Basically, I think it’s gonna take a decade or so for the new workflow era to fully sink in. The one where software is ALWAYS in progress. Where we go from HD to 2k to 4k to 5k to 8k in a few years – rather than 1inch to Beta SP in a decade or two. This is also why connection with a community is so critical in this era. I still play here (despite the slings and arrows) but the noise level is still VERY high here. Likely because it’s not a solutions board, it’s a debate board. Still I easily learn 10 times more about how X actually works In other places where people have long since stopped the bickering and just use it. They don’t just bitch about the problems – they solve them. The “techniques” forum here is certainly useful – but the overall Cow brand is still seen out in the wild as Adobe friendly and X hostile. (Maybe it’s all the CC ads?) So many knowledgable X editors have simply moved elsewhere – for better or worse. FWIW.

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

I used to have pretty bad performance with XDCAM also. I must say it seems better now. Maybe because of the underlying technology that they bought with MXF?
Even rewrapped XDCAM MOV seems to work pretty well. That being said, I mostly work with Prores LT in FCPX. Then, performance can be great.
A clip with color correction on it (even 4 layers of it) seems to export in the same speed as one without adjustments. Really impressive.

For the few times I worked with H.264 performance seemed very good too. Even the exporting to Prores went very fast.

Closing the Inspector is sometimes a wise choise.
And when working with a lot of effects, I like to just put on the smallest view in the timeline, without thumbnails. I don’t know if that does a lot, but I would guess so.

Performance and waveforms have been pretty reliable and fast for me since 10.2. Even on shared storage. If you have a decent switch, because we used to have a couple of computers on an old switch, and we got really bad performance if 2 computers got on the same network. That was something that wasn’t FCPX fault though, because it was the same in the Finder, doing copy operations.
To be honest, I can’t remember having beach balls since 10.2, which in complex edits with a lot of graphical effects, I used to have much more.

And I still have the feeling FCPX likes relatively new computers. An SSD on your working system, and fast storage seems to do the most in my opinion.

I’ve had good experience with RED RAW 4K, even on a Macbook air with a small USB3 drive. no complex edit in that case though.
I’ve had good experience working in 4K, even on a 2012 Retina Macbook Pro. Fast storage, though.
No experience in 5K.

That’s pretty much

[Mark Suszko]

I seem to have a devil of a time with shares and renders in FCPX. I have 120-minute long pro res files I import from a KiPro, and all I need to do is burn them to Blu Ray and Standard Def DVD, but the share/exports to Blue Ray take for EVER, if they complete at all – they often hang at around 68 percent complete. Then I gotta clear out a bunch of files, empty trash and make more room,to try again, and knowing if it will complete takes a half day to find out. I must be missing a trick somewhere, but I’m falling way behind, by days, on processing these simple dubs, and will accept any help.

[Bret Williams]

I think one trend I see is that an i7 is better than a nMP in terms of playback performance if you’re using h264 based material. On a late 2012 i7 iMac I find no benefit in transcoding to ProRes. Except a lot of time and drive space wasted. Exports to h264 are ridiculously fast as well. But that’s all from the h264 acceleration that the i7 (i5 too?). MacPros, new or old, seem to really want the media to be ProRes. Oranges to oranges, I’d assume a nMP would play back way more layers of ProRes at once than an i7 iMac.

I still get laggy experience no matter what codecs I’m using, optimized or not. But it seems to be more a function of how many motion templates or layers of title fx or generators I’m using. Sometimes just having a very complex motion template in the sequence, even if it’s rendered, seems to bog things down, as if X has to treat it as unrendered even though it’s rendered. It has to check and make sure all the resources are there just in case it comes unrendered or something. Have a couple copies of something like that in your sequence, or a few complicated compounds and the beach ball comes out or every function starts to take 5 seconds instead of being instantaneous.

[Andrew Kimery]

[Bill Davis] ” but the overall Cow brand is still seen out in the wild as Adobe friendly and X hostile.”

I guess they all left before the CC or Not forum was created? 😉

[Bill Davis]

I check that too. First, the branding there has never been Adobe Premiere Pro or Not, the Debate. So it’s not the same discussion at all. Second, we were arguing here for a long time before that came along. As a forum, it’s always been a very much less active – tho I think it’s fair to say the the passions against Creative Cloud in that forum are at least as strong as any here against X. I don’t subscribe to or use Premiere – so I don’t participate in that discussion.

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.

[Andrew Kimery]

[Bill Davis] “First, the branding there has never been Adobe Premiere Pro or Not, the Debate. So it’s not the same discussion at all.”

One would think that but a lot of the hatred bleeds over into anything Adobe (the software is shoddy, the subscribers are idiots, etc.,). Occasionally there is the obligatory “the product teams do great work, I’m just mad at senior management” comment yet the apps (especially AE for some reason) get raked over the coals on a regular basis. Not to mention the multiple discussions about software alternatives so you don’t have to give evil Adobe your money. It’s nearly like no good word will be uttered until the return of the perpetual license.

IMO, the X or Not forum has mellowed with age (as the program and user base have grown) where as the the CC or Not forum has the same level of vitriol today as it did 2yrs ago because the situation is exactly the same.

Anyway… long story short I’m surprised anyone would rank the COW (the entirety of the COW) as pro this brand or anti that brand when there are forums for pretty much every brand. Maybe those X guys you mention should take another look at the COW instead of basing their opinions on a years old, outdated version of the COW. 😉

[Oliver Peters]

[Bill Davis] “Oliver, I think your analysts is spot on. Some editors fly with X, some crawl. Worse yet, the cause of the difference is often far from intuitive. A good example is my exchange this week with Mike Warmels in the “little things” thread. He was doing things in a perfectly reasonable way – on older, but spec capable hardware – and beach-balling his life away.”

Yes, I saw that one. Definitely a weird one.

[Bill Davis] ” I still play here (despite the slings and arrows) but the noise level is still VERY high here. Likely because it’s not a solutions board, it’s a debate board.”

Correct. It’s a debate forum that’s pretty freewheeling.

– Oliver

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

[Oliver Peters]

[Mathieu Ghekiere] “I’ve had good experience working in 4K, even on a 2012 Retina Macbook Pro. Fast storage, though.
No experience in 5K. “

What I’m seeing right now, when comparing FCP X and PProCC2015, is that the 4K REDCODE media performs about the same, while 5K EPIC is better on PProCC.

– Oliver

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