Multicam Headaches – Any Suggestions?

[Jeremy Garchow]

Have you tried this without a sparse bundle?

Have you tried running activity monitor to watch what’s happening?

Have you tried this on other hardware?

[Bill Davis]

5 year old GPU?

That would be my first worry.

And the video card memory and speed for keeping up with blasting the rendered clips to the monitor

Either of these could easily be a bottleneck that causes X to stumble trying to manage that many streams of footage.

My 2008 MacPro can’t even come close to playing a lot of my multi-cam projects. My 2011 MacBook Pro can play them without breaking a sweat.

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.

[Rick Foxx]

Thanks for the reply Jeremy. Assuming I can find a safe method to transfer my data from the sparse bundle to the FCPX folders on my RAID, I’ll give that a try and see what impact that has. My CPU usage seems to briefly peg one core near 100%, but most of the time FCPX is unresponsive, there appears to be little CPU activity. Unfortunately, the only other hardware I have is an old G5 so I can’t test this on another system.

MacPro 8 core 2.8 gHz, 16GB RAM, Assorted Firewire Hard Drives, Final Cut Studio 3, Final Cut X, Adobe Production Premium CS6, Logic 8

[Bret Williams]

All sounds like corrupted prefs to me. I was having the same problems just the other day. Hard crashes and beach balls for no reason. Lots of RT errors about dropping frames I usually don’t get. And finally, after many many many reboots per hour, (I usually don’t even reboot the app or my computer for days or weeks), I trashed the prefs. All fixed. Works wonderfully again.

To adjust a clip for smoothcam, just enter the angle editor and add it there. If your clip is long, and has a lot of dynamic change (goes from a medium to a close-up or pans for example) you’ll want to add edits to the portion of the clip in the multicam you’d like to add smoothcam to. Can be a little tedious I guess, but it only has to analyze the small chunk that you slice out. Not the entire shot like FCP 7 had to. Much quicker and more accurate too imo.

I’m not sure about your esata playing back 5 streams of anything. Is it an esata raid? It may be striped as one, but without the proper (expensive) esata card it’s still stuck at singlel esata drive transfer speeds, only about 30% better than FW800. Your internals Raid 0 shoudld perform much better than a standard esata.

[Rick Foxx]

Yeah, I was concerned that my hardware might be a factor. I did upgrade to a Radeon 5770 last year, but I’m sure it’s relatively underpowered for what X needs. I just can’t bring myself to pull the trigger on a tricked out iMac with the MacPro rumors swirling around.

MacPro 8 core 2.8 gHz, 16GB RAM, Assorted Firewire Hard Drives, Final Cut Studio 3, Final Cut X, Adobe Production Premium CS6, Logic 8

[Rick Foxx]

Thanks Bret. I trashed preferences when my project locked, but it didn’t have any affect.

I am a big fan of smoothcam in X for that one reason. I never could understand the logic of analyzing the entire clip (especially when it’s a 2 hour concert) just to apply the filter to a 10 second cut. I hadn’t though of applying smoothcam in the angle editor, so I’ll give that a shot. That should be much easier than bringing in another clip to apply the effect to.

As far as the eSATA, I have a Sonnet Tempo PCI card, and I’m just running a single 2TB drive in the G-Tech enclosure. I can typically push 4 720P streams from the drive into FCP7 without significant dropped frames, although it does get a little bogged down from time to time. The performance in X, however, was horrendous.

MacPro 8 core 2.8 gHz, 16GB RAM, Assorted Firewire Hard Drives, Final Cut Studio 3, Final Cut X, Adobe Production Premium CS6, Logic 8

[Andreas Kiel]

“Thanks for the reply Jeremy. Assuming I can find a safe method to transfer my data from the sparse bundle to the FCPX folders on my RAID, I’ll give that a try and see what impact that has.”

It’s easy to copy things from a sparse bundle.
Just quit FCPX take the Event/Project structure and copy it to the RAID.
Unmount/detach the Sparse.
Relaunch FCPX. You might have to re-connect files.

Sparse bundles (images) can get go corrupt — same as any file or disk.
A little advantage is that in most cases you can repair them using DiskUtility. With a corrupt disk you don’t have a chance.

While most people don’t think about file fragmentation these days (the OS does it to certain extend) big files maybe not de-fragmented. So with all the file to file relations this can slow down something like FCPX.

Disk space is cheap and therefore it’s always a good idea to backup to a freshly initialized drive and initialize the source drive (after verified backup). Then make a backup of the backup to the source disk (not volume or drive).

Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Rick Foxx] “Thanks for the reply Jeremy. Assuming I can find a safe method to transfer my data from the sparse bundle to the FCPX folders on my RAID, I’ll give that a try and see what impact that has. My CPU usage seems to briefly peg one core near 100%, but most of the time FCPX is unresponsive, there appears to be little CPU activity. Unfortunately, the only other hardware I have is an old G5 so I can’t test this on another system.”

I know you said you made proxies, but do you have the “use proxy media” preference checked?

[Rick Foxx]

[Jeremy Garchow] “I know you said you made proxies, but do you have the “use proxy media” preference checked?”

Yeah, it’s set to proxy on the playback tab.

This morning, FCPX seems to be behaving itself. I haven’t had any real issues besides the occasional stutter. I’ll press on and see if anything goes wonky again. I really appreciate all the replies. I’ll keep you posted.

MacPro 8 core 2.8 gHz, 16GB RAM, Assorted Firewire Hard Drives, Final Cut Studio 3, Final Cut X, Adobe Production Premium CS6, Logic 8

[T. Payton]

[Rick Foxx] “Shouldn’t an eSATA drive be fast enough to play back 5 camera angles in proxy?”

Humm. I think something else is going on with your system. I just tried this on my aging 2007 MacBook Pro, 2.2, 6GB Ram and a 128MB video card, and on my internal drive I get about 33MB/sec. and a 5 angle multi clip plays and edits without trouble. Here is a screencast:

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I would do as much maintenance and troubleshooting as you can on that system. Perhaps your drives are very full or something else is running in the background. Maybe even reinstall FCP X.

By the way, instead of the built in stabilization I would recommend Lock&Load X from CoreMelt. It analyzes only the portion of the clip you need and does so in about real time. Plus you have much more control than the built in function.

——
T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque