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Multicam Synchronization is so slow
I don’t know if its the length, or the number of video & audio channels? I have a new Thunderbolt 2 G-Tech drive going into a Macbook Pro 2.5 Ghz with 16gm of ram and usually things run pretty quickly for me and FCPX. This is my first heavy lifting Multicam sequence I am setting up and I renamed all my clips according to each camera, take and scene. Made sure it was all Scene 1 with each of the 4 video and 4 audio channels, and it is dragging on forever. It’s been almost 3 hours so far and I’m not sure what to do. I did one round and got the beach ball, this round is going fine but it is just slowly crawling.
Anything I can do to speed this up? I can’r really separate this into chunks, but I guess I could try? If I didn’t transcode PROXIES, how would I go about using Proxies instead of the masters to maybe speed things up?
I’m fairly new to this so any help would be great!
Daniel
Daniel Elder
producer
http://www.elderpictures.com -
16 Replies
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You have to transcode in order to use proxies no way around that. How long are the clips and what codec? If they are hour+ H.264s, expect a long wait on that hardware.
Noah
FCPWORKS – FCPX Workflow
Call Box Training -
PluralEyes 3 by Red Giant is a much faster way of creating and organizing multicam clips for Final Cut Pro X. I work with multicam projects consistently and for me, using PluralEyes 3 is the only way to go.
Check out the demo from Red Giant here:
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Hi and thanks!
It was about 15 takes of 4 cameras + plus 3 audio. In all, about 30 minutes per video /audio. It hasn’t gone to the spinning ball, so I assume it is still going?
The original footage were Panasonic AVC, but I’ve transcoded everything to Optimal ProRes. I’m thinking I should do Proxies to help speed things up. That being said, I’ve not used Proxies yet, is there anything I need to do aside from Transcoding the footage to Proxies? When I go to sync everything up via Multicam, will it automatically go to the Proxies to sync up or do I need to tell it to use the Proxies?
Thanks for the help.
Daniel
Daniel Elder
producer
http://www.elderpictures.com -
and you’re doing all 15 takes at once? Yes this will take a long time.
Noah
FCPWORKS – FCPX Workflow
Call Box Training -
Yeah, the show was improvised so I don’t know which moments will be the best, so I need to bring everything in and handle it all. I know, crazy, but I think its how I have to deal with it.
Daniel Elder
producer
http://www.elderpictures.com -
I think I’m gonna give Plural Eyes a try to see if it handles it faster than FCPX does. I’ll give FCPX tonight to try to get this right, but it seems like Plural Eyes is far more robust and as a niche product, probably handles this past better.
Daniel Elder
producer
http://www.elderpictures.com -
What are your multicam settings?
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So I was going through the footage and realized 3 of the 4 cameras are 29.97, which is what my setting is for the timeline (720p, 29.97), but one of the cameras was shot at 720p, 23.98. When I removed that camera, it has been moving much quicker, for obvious reasons. So now I’m trying to figure out if I should go to the camera that shot 23.98 and convert it to 29.97 outside of FCPX in some conversion software? Or how should I handle, I still need that camera badly, so I need to figure out a workflow to get all that footage (3 days worth) into a format that will play nice with my 29.97 footage.
Any thoughts? Any good third party software to convert from 23.98 to 29.97?
Thanks,
DanielDaniel Elder
producer
http://www.elderpictures.com -
The time savings in using Plural Eyes over FCPX syncing will pay for itself in under two weeks. I have to sync two hour timelines all the time. Not even worth trying in FCPX. I only use the NLE sync for sequences under a 10 minutes. If you have long takes, it may be ok. But stop/start run and gun over a long period of time….fuhghetaboutit.
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IMHO, definitely convert it to 29.97 outside of FCPX. Compressor will do that nicely. Be sure to turn on Frame Controls and select the highest quality for rate conversion.
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