Organization Events vs. Libraries

[Craig Alan]

I[Renny McCauley] “I haven’t created any proxy or prores media yet.”

Then I’m not sure how you are judging the speed of FCP X. I would try ProRes 422 first and if that is too slow then try proxy. Your new drive will be a huge factor as well.
If the library only contains links to the media files, I think you’d be fine with one library.

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV40, Sony Z7U/VX2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; FCP X write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Mark Morache]

May I ask… what’s the lesson here?

It seems to me that there would be a great benefit to having all of your media in one library. It seems that having separate events means you don’t need to load all of your material in the event browser at once, you can keep it down to one event at a time.

At what point do things get bogged down in FCPX?

It seems that using the original media would also be beneficial. Optimizing the media would help functionality, but it would require a great deal of transcoding and hard drive space. Proxy footage speeds up the editing process, but again requires a great deal of transcoding, and you need to create proxies of everything, correct? I tried using proxy footage one time, and I just created proxies of the footage with the largest bandwidth, but when I switched to proxy editing, the footage without proxies went offline. Has this changed?

Again, it seems like if you have a box with a good processor, and a fast raid, you should be in good shape, until your library or timeline becomes so large, the database gets bogged down.

Most of my edits are 5 minutes or under, so I haven’t run into those kind of problems yet. How much can we push things?

———
Don’t live your life in a secondary storyline.

Mark Morache
FCPX/FCP7/Xpri/Avid
Evening Magazine,Seattle, WA
https://fcpx.wordpress.com

[Don Smith]

I agree with Mark. I’m editing a project with thousands of clips in the Library. The speed is no different than having a few clips in the Library. Only the thumbnails are kept in memory, not the clips themselves. However, ‘no different’ and ‘full performance’ are not the same as I’ll explain below.

That’s my home system.

On my old Mac Pro at work I sometimes have a half a dozen big projects open. No speed difference.

My take-away is that there are other factors at work if FCPX bogs down. I’m facing the slow-down problem on my brand new 2013 Mac Pro at home. It’s not performing better than my 2008 work Mac Pro which has a fraction of the RAM. And, my new Mac Pro is maxed out. 12 cores, 64GB Ram, D700 graphic cards, etc. My new Mac Pro is connected to a new Promise Raid R6 with Thunderbolt 2. It should be SCREAMING but something, SOMETHING is slowing it down. I’m on the trail. My point in all this is that performance on a given system doesn’t seem to change whether the Library has a few clips or thousands. That’s my experience anyway.

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