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Newer is better, right?
Just reinstalled / upgraded our trusty MacPro 2008 8-core machine and found something odd with the “new” editors around. Imported 217 clips (1 hour 42 mins) of ProRes 4444 media shot with an Alexa. All clips where on a FW800 drive, all apps have their media / cache folders on either a 300 MB/s + eSATA RAID or the internal SSD-drive (Samsung 830 / 512GB).
– Final Cut Pro 7 required less than 1 second to import all clips
– Final Cut Pro X required about 60 seconds to import all clips (!?)
– Premier Pro CS 6 required about 10 seconds to import all clips.For reference I’ve disabled most of if not all the various apps analyzing abilities as these are quite useless for the given test. I truly do wonder what the hell FCPX is up to. FCP7 does a rather quick and dirty import where I beilive Premier Pro CS 6 does some media-scanning during import which takes a little time (I guess a side-effect of the all-native vs FCP7’s QuickTime native way).
But again, what the hell is FCPX up to? Newer is better, right?
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25 Replies
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Remember that when FCP X imports QT files – even when no copies, proxies are created or analysis is done – there’s still more happening than in FCP6/7. Specifically an event folder is written to the hard drive and each clip gets a corresponding alias file with metadata about the original. It takes a bit of time for X to read and write that info.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Are you aliasing the media or actually importing it (file copy) in to the Event?
Fcpx also generates peak files (thumbnails, waveforms, etc).
If copying the media, of course it going to take longer.
While the process might take a longer time, you can start working on the files right away and the process continues in the background.
You will also find there’s no reel numbers. To me, that’s the biggest bummer of the whole situation.
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This would explain a bit, but creating aliases of the files in the finder take 1-2 seconds, not 60. I just can’t se what FCPX is up to. It’s also extremely sluggish to scroll through the file list when it’s finally imported the clips.
I’m just doing linked imports, not copying or excessively analyzing the media.
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The sad thing is it takes FCPX 60 seconds (give or take) before I have ANY control (the app is locked with a pop-up window). In 60 seconds I could have started to get working in FCP7 or with-in 60s I’ll have fully generated thumbs in PrPro CS6. Seems odd.
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What is the pop up window, the import dialog?
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“Processing files for import” pops up. Now, the second time I imported the files, it went much faster however. Maybe it’s cached some info about the files somewhere?
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I’ve generally found X to be slower in almost every interface function it does automatically, when you make a direct comparison to FCP 7, Media Composer or Premiere Pro. On the plus side, there are many things you can do as combined steps in a single function. For example, applying multiple keywords to a group of clips, is a lot faster than similar subclipping in 7. Or highlight five dissolves on a timeline and change the duration for all in one step. So you have to take the good with the bad.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Could be true. The general UI responsiveness is quite poor I’d say. This is quite an important part of a “pleasant user environment” so to speak. I was surprised to see how slow a seemingly simple operator was though.
How well, more tests to come. We’ll have to move forward sooner or later.
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Software getting slower apparently called “Wirth’s Law”…
https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/10-laws-of-tech-the-rules-that-define-our-world-1067906
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I’ve frequently found that you have to wait a bit after a large import for the app to “settle down”. That’s even though the gauge sits at 100%, which would indicate no background activity. It could be a RAM flush problem. Sometimes, the app reposnds better once you close and relaunch.
In general, there are a lot of UI animations that by definition take time to execute. I personally think it sucks for the user experience, but it seems something that’s targeted at people who don’t edit for a living.
Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com
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