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Replace connecting clip
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Really interesting write-up of your experience, many thanks.
I find the sluggishness to be a very serious issue – ultimately far more of a concern than almost any of the other problems.
Like you I found that adding not a particularly demanding layer of effects and overlays made everything grind to a halt and start behaving unpredictably all over the place. For example: zooming in and out on the timeline became teeth-achingly painful; I couldn’t type in a new name for a duplicated project without qutting and trying again; the inspector wouldn’t show up without repeated prodding of Cmd4, etc., etc.
My machine is less powerful than yours: dual quad core (2 x 2.26GHz) with 8GB RAM and ATI Radeon HD 4870, but it’s not significantly underpowered either.
The main reason the world was waiting for a new version of FCP was that it would be 64-bit and lightning fast, and most important of all take advantage of all that unused power in our machines not addressed by legacy FCP.* And this manifestly hasn’t gone to plan if your experience and mine is anything to go by. I get significantly better overall performance out of FCP7 than FCPX.
What’s clear is that its RAM usage is needlessly wasteful – I notice for example that it tries to cache all the available projects in the event and if these have unrendered effects in them it becomes a problem even if the active project is fully rendered.
I’d be very interested to hear a discussion of this from people who understand it a lot better than I do – for the time being this issue has leaped to the top of my list of reasons why I won’t be doing anything serious with FCPX except watching and waiting for a good while yet.
* Within the last 12 months I experienced another application migrate to 64-bit, namely the excellent 3D app Modo, and the speed increase was breath-taking – rendering is quite literally twice as fast with my 8 cores suddenly behaving like 16 cores. I don’t believe we are seeing anything like this sort of 64-bit advantage in FCPX.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Simon Ubsdell] “What’s clear is that its RAM usage is needlessly wasteful – I notice for example that it tries to cache all the available projects in the event and if these have unrendered effects in them it becomes a problem even if the active project is fully rendered.”
FCP X certainly seems to love RAM.
I wondered about the impact of multiple projects, especially since I tend to use them like multiple sequences.
I don’t know what the impact is, but I can assume it’s not free. It would be nice to have a command to close a project. It seems the only way to do that is to quit FCP X.
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[Oliver Peters]“The issue I had wasn’t in mixing the VO/music/SFX, but rather visually organizing the clips.”
Since visual organization is your issue I’ll suggest a couple of things. One is the use of Roles. I know you said it doesn’t work for you, but if the SFX are assigned an SFX role, then you can select all of them in your project at the same time in the index and then hold shift and drag them past all the VO/DIA tracks. Do the same with music until they are all in relative order.
However, that might not be enough for you since you may not have VO/SFX/and music all stacked on top of each other at all times.
Instead of using a compound clip, you can select all the VO/DIA clips and add them to a secondary storyline. Do the same with SFX (unnecessary with music). Because the secondary storyline places gaps in between former connected clips, you’ll have a virtual track that spans your project all the way through.
Andy
https://www.timesavertutorials.com
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[Andy Neil] “Since visual organization is your issue I’ll suggest a couple of things. “
Thanks and all good suggestions. But, since I’m already manually moving clips, how does this change the process, other than a different way to drag them? Either way, a move is still involved, or am I missing something?
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Well in the first suggestion, a move is still involved but you get to move all the clips at once, making it much faster than individually moving clips as you go through your timeline.
In the second case, moving should not necessary. If you start with DIA/VO tracks by selecting them all, when you create the secondary storyline, it should default to the topmost audio position (right below the primary storyline (provided your VO/DIA isn’t in the primary storyline). It’s vertical organization is determined by the vertical position of the first clip you select in the project (because that’s where the anchor will be).
Andy
https://www.timesavertutorials.com
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[Andy Neil] “If you start with DIA/VO tracks by selecting them all, when you create the secondary storyline”
OK, got it. Some of these clips do overlap, however. Thanks.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters]“Some of these clips do overlap, however.”
Well, hell. Unfortunately, FCPX won’t allow you to create a secondary storyline for overlapping clips. That would require another secondary storyline or else just leaving the overlapping clips as connected clips and moving the SFX below them.
Andy
https://www.timesavertutorials.com
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I’ve cut two paying projects in FCPX so far and am working on a feature doc. Had a HUGE issue with a paying project in regards to offline media which dismayed me enough that I dabbled in Premiere. Still prefer FCPX however.
The sluggishness is a problem. It’s a bit of a double sword, since playback and the lack of rendering seems mostly great, but the operation (zooming in on the timeline, switching between panes, etc) is almost ungodly slow. FCP 7 feels snappier from a UI perspective. I’m on the latest and greatest iMac 3.4 i7 with 16GM ram and the 2GB graphics card (and running the system from an SSD), so I feel it should be a bit snappier.
I hope Apple doesn’t get so caught up in adding the bazillion of requested features (most of which are a non-issue for me, hence why I am working in FCPX) that they lose sight of the thing we all really want most: the fastest, most responsive, most rock solid NLE on earth.
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FCP Guru
http://www.fcpguru.com -
Did revisions on my spots today and needed to freeze an end tag (with prebuilt graphics) to hold it longer. Used Retime-Hold. None of the 3 video quality options are acceptable for a clean freeze. All soften the image or create aliasing.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
I’m on the latest and greatest iMac 3.4 i7 with 16GM ram and the 2GB graphics card (and running the system from an SSD), so I feel it should be a bit snappier.
It’s really telling thst you’re having issues even with a beast of a machine like yours.
Speed is absolutely the thing that will either sell me on this or put me off it altogether – not interested in waiting for anything in this day and age, let alone hanging about while the UI redraws itself.
My worry is that these issues are probably not trivial and there is a lot of work to get it operating at a decent overall speed.
And the project I have been have trouble with from this perspective was only 90 seconds long! I’d hate to think of how unpleasant it could get with something more long-form.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com
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