Multiple Problems with Final Cut

[Jeremy Garchow]

It looks to me like your footage and project frame rates don’t match.

I imagine you are shooting some sort of 24p with pulldown added, and you should be editing in a 29.97i timeline. If possible, you should try and shoot in actual 24p, to work in an entirely progressive format with progressive timelines. You would have to check to see if your camera is capable of 24p.

This may explain some of the slowdown you are seeing.

As far as import, AVCHD is simply a very unfriendly and processor intensive format. Using something like EditReady (https://www.divergentmedia.com/editready) to unwrap or even Transcode the footage before import may help you.

What kind of USB drive do you have connected? Is it a RAID? USB3?

[Ryan Neuman]

This camera actually does have 24P, I’ve been shooting PF24 because I thought that was the normal fps to shoot at. If my timeline settings were 30fps and I shot in 30fps wouldn’t that solve the issue? Is there a way to get the Canon XA10 to just do MOV files instead of AVCHD? Because I have heard of EditReady but don’t want to spend the extra cash especially if I get a new camera in the near future.

And I believe I have a USB3 cable, I attached a picture of it to make sure.

What kind of cable would make my work flow faster if I stick with operating off an external hard drive?

And any idea why the audio keeps cutting out during playback?

Thank you once again

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Ryan Neuman] “If my timeline settings were 30fps and I shot in 30fps wouldn’t that solve the issue?”

Not if you’re shooting interlaced. You could shoot 30p if the camera allows it.

[Ryan Neuman] “What kind of cable would make my work flow faster if I stick with operating off an external hard drive?”

Is this a single drive or raid?

[Ryan Neuman]

I still don’t fully know what interlaced means, what would be the best option to shoot in for Final Cut then overall?

And it’s a single drive

[Jeremy Garchow]

Interlaced video is a legacy transmission and delivery format that is, and this is an over simplification, made up of lines of video. Computer monitors typicallyndont dips play interlaced video accurately.

The audio is cutting out probably because everything isn’t matching up in terms of frame rates and playback, or your hard drive can’t keep up.

There are a lot of variables to narrow down. The first thing I would do is make sure your footage and timeline frame rates and formats match to see if that helps. From there you can make more decisions like editing in a progressive Project and deinterlacjng the video if needed (FCPX can do this easily).

Jeremy

[Kevin Rag]

A single USB drive is not good. Not good at all. Get a RAID. An USB 3 RAID. Or Thunderbolt RAID, which is much better.
Edit Ready costs only $49. It does a great job of transcoding or rewrapping your files. I love ER. You’ll have to spend a bit of money, you just have to. And that would save you a lot of time and headache.
You’ll have to learn quite a bit too. Like how to differentiate between USB2 n USB3.
Caldigit, GTech, Owc make USB3 RAIDS and Thunderbolt RAIDs. I’ve used all of these and am currently using Promise Pegasus Thunderbolt RAID.
Spend a bit of money now to save yourself a LOT of trouble later:)

K

[Brett Sherman]

Or get an OWC drive toaster – https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/U3DRVDCK2/

And buy 7200 rpm hard drives to put in. It’s an ever expanding storage solution. Buy a new drive when you need it. But old ones on the shelf.

————————–
Brett Sherman
One Man Band (If it\’s video related I\’ll do it!)
I work for an institution that probably does not want to be associated with my babblings here.

[Jeff Kirkland]

I have an XA10 and and the camera’s codec isn’t what it could be so I’d highly recommend rewrapping or transcoding the footage using Editready, which is great at dealing with the XA10’s PsF weirdness.

You could also try importing the footage into FCPX and in the browser, manually set all the clips to progressive in the info panel as one of the main issues is that FCPX misinterprets the PsF. I’d probably also get FCPX to optimise the footage.

—-
Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer & Cinematographer
Hobart, Tasmania | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Joe Marler]

[Ryan Neuman] “been editing professionally for over 2 years now with Final Cut and I feel like I’ve reached my limit with it….- MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015)…I shoot primarily with a Canon XA10 24FPS 1/48 Shutter Speed. I’ve posted a few other times on this forum about glitchy/liney footage and I’m still having the same problems…The solution I’ve been using is opening the AVCHD footage and saving to my desktop (I think by doing this it saves as a MOV file?) and then I drag that into my timeline. Is there a way to avoid this because it takes a ton of time….I had to go back and fix A LOT of the footage I took. I remember before the latest Final Cut update (10.4) it never did this. Is there a converter I can use that doesn’t take long?…Lately, Final Cut has been SUPER slow too (almost to the point of not even being able to use it). I operate off the external hard drive…Do I need a firewire, is that why it’s been so slow?…

I have a lot of 1080p 29.97i XA10 AVCHD material and it works fine on FCPX 10.4 and earlier — provided you do the right thing. But this can be a confusing area, as is typical with interlaced material. Also, AVCHD (and how FCPX handles that) adds another layer to manage.

Whether it’s classified as PsF or not, the video header in those files is flagged “interlaced”. That means FCPX should treat it as interlaced, so the first clip dragged to a default project will create an interlaced project. When exported this in turn will produce an interlaced file. That file will exhibit interlaced artifacts if the player does not deinterlace.

You can play the original .MTS file in VLC with deinterlacing off and it will show comb-type interlacing artifacts. So the file itself has those characteristics, FCPX isn’t necessarily doing anything to it.

On 10.4 you can set the deinterlace check box in Inspector, if you pull down the bottom left selection to “Settings”. That will hard deinterlace the output. Or you can upload the interlaced file to Youtube and it will deinterlace it.

Re import and editing performance on AVCHD and space consumption, you should never copy .MTS files out of the AVCHD bundle and import those with “leave files in place”. This will cause significant I/O performance problems. You should (1) Import from the AVCHD bundle. That automatically re-wraps and copies the content to the library. Or (2) Re-wrap with EditReady, which enables proper importing “in place”. The re-wrap is very fast and then importing with “leave files in place” will be lightning fast.

Re “glitchy/liney footage” I don’t see that on XA10 footage that’s been properly processed in 10.4. I think prior to 10.4 there was a behavior if you imported interlaced footage to a progressive project without setting the deinterlace check box for that clip, it would discard every other line, producing poor-quality “liney” footage. It doesn’t appear 10.4 does that. This may have been isolated to certain Canon PsF content; I can’t remember.

If you upload to Youtube an improperly deinterlaced file, their encoder cannot tell the file is interlaced so it leaves it that way. If every other scan line has previously been discarded, it will look poor. Or if an interlaced file was uploaded but the video header is marked progressive, it won’t try to deinterlace it.

[Fabrizio D’agnano]

It’s a known problem that affects several Canon’s. Everything was running smooth with XA10, HG10, M46, etc, until the latest release of FCPX. I own several of those cameras and things have turned into a nightmare because the importing process has become a hassle. My line of work is based on a lot of footage I only need small bit of. All footage coming from the Canon’s shows that problem. It’s obviously not related to cards or drive speed, because the very same set used to work just fine before latest upgrade of FCPX, and because the very same media imported via ClipWrap does not show any issue. My problem is I don’t want to transcode hours of footage to get three or four minutes out of it, and for my line of work I need to keep all media inside the Library and I don’t want to have media out of it. So it’s more steps needed. I think this problem should have been already addressed by Apple by now. However, it’s true they are old cams and maybe need an upgrade anyway, but for the time I’ll try to go for Edit Ready, because ClipWrap won’t allow me to set in and out import points on the clips. 49 bucks is still better than buying 5 new cams, and building underwater housings for them.

Fabrizio D\’Agnano
Rome, Italy