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Magic mouse scrolling to skim footage?
I’ve just started using FCP X after many years of FCP Studio (and Avid, D-Vision, Media100, etc. for 20+ years before that). Still wrapping my head around it; hard/different but change is good for you, right? It will make sense eventually.
The main annoyance I’ve found so far that I can’t figure out is skimming through clips with the magic mouse:
1 – Can’t you swipe L/R on a magic mouse to skim a clip or timeline? This post https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/344/18434 suggests you can. But it doesn’t work for me (using FCP X 10.3.3) The only way I can skim in browser is to physically slide the mouse over the clip. I’ve un-paired and re-paired mouse, checked and changed mouse settings in mouse preferences, but no joy. The mouse itself works fine; it scrolls horizontally and vertically in other apps with finger swipes. (FWIW: using Magic Mouse 1, running El Capitan 10.11.6. Two identical Mac Pros; same problem on each one.) Two finger swiping works in timeline, but not in browser. And in the timeline, it just jumps between clips, even if snapping is off — it’s not true skimming.
2 – In filmstrip view in the browser, long clips in the browser wrap around to the next line. When my mouse hits the end of line 1, I have to move it down to the beginning of line to continue skimming the clip. Crazy annoying. (I prefer list mode, but our workflow requires us to see all the clips.)
3 – Is it possible to skim within the viewer? Or just the little browser clips? We have to do a lot of fast skimming through long clips, with the need to go fast and slow, and in FCP7 we loaded a clip in the viewer and used the magic mouse to scan through quickly; worked like a dream. JKL works, shift arrow works, but finger-scan mouse skimming is much faster for what we do. (If problem #1 is solved, this won’t be as much of an issue though.)
Not being able to do any of this is a major PITA. I hope it’s user error and I’ve just missed a preferences setting somewhere.
Thanks for any help.
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15 Replies
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Those settings depend on System Preferences for Trackpad- try there.
Noah
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[Scratch Sperber] “In filmstrip view in the browser, long clips in the browser wrap around to the next line. When my mouse hits the end of line 1, I have to move it down to the beginning of line to continue skimming the clip. “
Starting with FCPX 10.3.x, there is a “continuous playback” option that continues across clip boundaries. Using this and JKL you don’t need to worry about end of lines. For initial evaluation you can often use a thumbnail-per-clip. View>Browser>Continuous Playback.
If you want touch-based skimming, that works right now with the trackpad. The Magic Trackpad 2 is pretty good, so that’s one option.
If you want touch-based skimming on the Magic Mouse, that might be possible using Better Touch Tools, but I haven’t examined this:
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Good suggestions and info, thanks.
[Joe Marler] “…there is a “continuous playback” option that continues across clip boundaries. Using this and JKL…”
JKL hasn’t been my favorite for our workflow, but maybe old dogs can learn new tricks. Finger skimming’s felt more controllable. OTOH, continuous playback would feel more like the linear tape ingest we did up until this year. Which could be good, or bad. TBD. Tape is dead, long live clips.
(For context: We make individualized travelogues for 20-30 wilderness bus tours every day. We get about 15-20 minutes of footage from each bus, shot by bus driver interpretive guides (aka, not videographers). We skim VERY rapidly through the clips but need smooth variable skimming, to find the usable parts and see where the caribou lifts its head, or the moose calf turns toward the camera, etc. Slow down skimming speed, mark in, skim ahead, mark out, insert clip into appropriate gap in template of stock landscape footage. Repeat for the rest of that tour. Remove gaps in timeline, adjust edit points, add corrective filters as needed, add transitions, add canned music, backtime last music piece, done. Repeat for tours 2-30. We rarely play clips in real time unless there is some amazing footage, or we have the rare luxury of making an actual edited sequence.)
Yes, I know. But I do get to live and work in a gorgeous place for five months a year, so let’s move on.
In FCP 7, we had this down to a super fast workflow, using locked music tracks, fast mouse skimming, keyboard commands… Moving to FCP X is a hurdle, since some of the features hinder more than help us. And of course file sharing on our NAS is different due to library structure, so we need a new file management process… but we’ll figure it out.
tl;dr: I work in a video factory and have to skim through a lot of footage at variable speeds, but mostly super fast, and still see entire content while skimming.
[Joe Marler] “If you want touch-based skimming, that works right now with the trackpad. The Magic Trackpad 2 is pretty good, so that’s one option.”
Do you get decent, smooth, variable speed skimming on clips in the browser with the Magic Trackpad 2? (Our footage is AVCHD at 28 Mbps, on fairly beefy Mac Pros so performance shouldn’t be an issue.)
Better Touch tools looks promising, thanks for that. I’ll give it a try.
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[Scratch Sperber] “Do you get decent, smooth, variable speed skimming on clips in the browser with the Magic Trackpad 2? (Our footage is AVCHD at 28 Mbps, on fairly beefy Mac Pros so performance shouldn’t be an issue.) “
Yes, this isn’t limited by the trackpad but the codec and computer. On H.264 1080p it’s lightning fast on almost any hardware since 2012. If it’s H.264 4k, it can be a bit sluggish even on a top-spec 2015 iMac 27. The solution in that case is use proxy or get a faster computer.
AVCHD uses H.264 so it’s dependent on resolution and hardware — except AVCHD has the additional complication of inducing possible performance problems if it was imported with “leave files in place”. Doing that requires copying the video files out of the folder tree, which should never be done for AVCHD. If you only have the video files it’s often best to rewrap these before import using EditReady: https://www.divergentmedia.com/editready
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Great to know. Will try a trackpad; sounds like that could work.
We have the Canon XA30s set to shoot HD 1920×1080, 59.94P, at 28 Mbps — nowhere near as demanding as 4k as far as I know. Since our effects are minimal, we’re not optimizing on import (the file size difference of the ProRes vs. native was mind boggling) and that seems to work fine so far. Everything runs super snappy on our Mac Pros: 3.5 Ghz 6-core processors, dual video cards, and 16GB RAM. Hope that holds up as we add lots more media. Our external shared storage was designed to be speedy for editing HD, time to put it to the test finally.
Still exploring best practice for workflow, but definitely not leaving files in place. FCP seems to be playing nicely when copying them over.
The Better Touch Tool is pretty cool, can assign JKL and more to gestures, and gets me a lot closer to what I want, but can’t really do the true touch based skimming I’m looking for. I prefer keyboard editing in general, so most of what BTT offers isn’t relevant. Great tool though, for anyone who does want to create customized gestures.
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[Scratch Sperber] “We have the Canon XA30s set to shoot HD 1920×1080, 59.94P, at 28 Mbps…Still exploring best practice for workflow, but definitely not leaving files in place. FCP seems to be playing nicely when copying them over….”
We formerly used several of those cameras. It will also record 1080p/59.94 MP4 at 35 Mbps, which is what I recommend. This enables import with “leave files in place”, which is faster and takes less disk space than library-internal AVCHD — assuming you are importing from a disk copy of the files not the camera card. Also the MP4 files are more manageable in Finder than the AVCHD bundle.
Of course if you already have libraries with imported material, mixing “in place” content could be confusing from a management standpoint. However the internal content can be consolidated outside the library using FCPX. For new libraries you could import with “in place” for MP4s.
There is no one right way to handle this, but I deal with lots of documentary content so use “in place” wherever possible. The main issue is don’t import “in place” using AVCHD files copied outside the tree, which you fortunately are not doing.
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Regarding Magic Mice—- I have an MM2 and it will skim clips if I swipe horizontally. I don’t believe i did anything special to set it up to do that, it just seems to do it.
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[Mark Smith] “I have an MM2 and it will skim clips if I swipe horizontally.”
Does it do a smooth variable speed skimming, based on how fast you swipe? I can two-finger swipe my MM1 in the timeline only, but it doesn’t skim — just jumps to next clip (even when snapping is off).
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Oops my bad. I have 2 edit set ups one with Track pad and one with MM2. THe MM2 set up does not scroll horizontally, while the trackpad system does scroll horizontally across clips in the browser with clip skimming turned on. The track pad set up can skim through clips pretty darn fast. I don’t know if it is fast enough for your needs but I suppose you could give it a try.
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(This discussion has migrated to storage and file types, but I’ll keep it here for now.)
We chose AVCHD with the understanding it was higher quality and easier to edit natively in FCPX. Is this not true? I just did a quick test, and didn’t see any difference editing, but FCP had a much harder time letting go of the SD cards after importing mp4 files. May be unrelated, but I had to force quit twice to stop spinning beach ball after import.
I thought “leave in place” required you to copy the mp4 files off the SD card and to a hard drive first. Otherwise FCP would be looking for the original files on the SD cards, right? Am I misunderstanding something?
Manually copying mp4 files to our storage drive and then “leaving in place” seems like a slower workflow. Especially since we are working factory style, importing from 20-30 cards every day via two 4-card reader hubs on two different macs.
I don’t see a real difference finding the original files in the finder between the two — we are not storing media in the library but in an external location. It’s a mess in the finder either way, since we’ll have duplicate clip names/numbers from 20 different cameras every day. So finding original files in the finder isn’t pretty. Luckily FCP, with the search and filter features, makes this a lot easier so maybe we won’t have to go to finder much at all anymore.
Head spinning from trying to come up with new workflow for sharing projects and templates, since FCP X doesn’t allow the level of simultaneous sharing that FCP7 did. Time to let it all bubble in the background for a bit now.
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