Small jobs and big jobs with FCPX

[Bobby Mosca]

Tim,

I’ve been doing local episodic television in segmented talk show format (half-hour) with FCPX for several months. I actually consider these small projects because they are low maintenance. There’s not a lot of demand on the color, so long as it’s balanced correctly and isn’t too hot or cold. Lighting is simple and standard. The audio is run through the Logic compressor to level it out, easy-peasy. Basic lower third IDs. This isn’t Emmy winning stuff I’m doing here. So even an hour long one of these I would still consider a small project.

However… I’m thinking of putting together some local Emmy contending episodes in documentary format, and also breaking out to try my hand at short movies. These would fall under big projects because I will be using more tools to create more storytelling. More color grading. More audio (backing tracks or sound fx). More complex titling. VFX, maybe (might do some sic-fi-ish shorts). The shorts may only be 7 minutes, but they’ll require more stuff, and I’d call it a ‘big’ project. For that I’ll move over to Adobe’s suite for the goodies.

So in my case, when I say big and small projects, it’s less about the length of the finished project as it is about how much effort I’m going to put into whatever I do create. Even a dynamo :30 spot could be a big project.

Hope that helps! And good question.
Keep on,
Bobby

[Timothy Auld]

Thanks. Bobby. I understand how shorter can be more complicated. It doesn’t look like FCPX is going to work for me at this point. I will be very curious to see how it further develops.

Tim

[Ben Holmes]

[TImothy Auld] ” It doesn’t look like FCPX is going to work for me at this point”

A free trial and a copy of 7toX will prove if you can work with the kind of projects you usually do. Just open up the largest one you have handy in FCPX. Cost: $10.

All NLEs (especially FCP7) suffer from some slowdown with larger project sizes. Avid has always done better with them, thanks to it’s file and metadata management, but the others have always been much of a muchness.

FCPX is capable of handling more RAM, and should in the future handle larger projects better. For now, I find it quite capable of the kind of work most people do (including most documentary work).

Ben

Edit Out Ltd
—————————-
FCP Editor/Trainer/System Consultant
EVS/VT Supervisor for live broadcast
RED camera transfer/post
Independent Director/Producer

https://www.blackmagic-design.com/community/communitydetails/?UserStoryId=8757

[Erik Lindahl]

Somewhat related to this topic – how would one solve my problem fast in FCPX:

– I’m going to do 220 (two hundred and twenty) versions of a given film
– What is dynamic in each version is 1 audio-clip at the start of each film as well as 1 video-clip at the end of each edit

Could the above even realistically be done in FCPX? I wouldn’t call it a “breeze” to do in After Effects / Final Cut Pro but there won’t be any issues solving it there. From my experience it takes a few seconds for FCPX to simply create and open a sequence…

[Mitch Ives]

[Ben Holmes] “All NLEs (especially FCP7) suffer from some slowdown with larger project sizes. Avid has always done better with them, thanks to it’s file and metadata management, but the others have always been much of a muchness.”

I did a lot of 2 hour shows in FCP7 (even longer actually), and while it slowed a bit, it doesn’t seem to be anywhere near what people report here with FCPX.

Some go these programs had 30 layers, all had color correction, effects, etc. I think we’re talking a different thing altogether in FCPX. In it’s defense, it does try to load up everything in the known universe, and the database is doing a lot more…

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[Oliver Peters]

[Mitch Ives] “and the database is doing a lot more…”

Doing more than what? FCP 7? Maybe. More than Media Composer? No way.

In the Avid world, there is a concept called “building the pipes”. This basically means that the software has to have complete “look-ahead” forward and backward on the timeline, including mixes, effects, etc. Anytime you make a change this has to be rippled in both directions so that anywhere an editor puts the playhead, the software is ready to play the complete timeline.

On older systems, doing this on a feature film was very cumbersome. Nubus machines were glacial with a 2 hour timeline. There was a console command (later turned into an actual user commend) called “toggle play length”. The user could invoke this command plus a number, which limited the length of play. So PL+1 meant you could hit play (fwd or rev) and the timeline would play for 1 minute and stop. Using this made trimming in a 2 hour timeline very fast by comparison and tolerable when working with a director while making adjustments to an entire film. I’m sure all NLEs suffer from this design issue, but it’s just that machines have become much faster, so it’s far less obvious or show-stopping.

In the case of FCP X, it makes better use of RAM, but the UI design also requires more RAM for the equivalent function in a less “pretty” NLE. As a result on large projects, performance gains could be a wash. Loading an entire FCP X project in the browser and having it be skimmable is equivalent to FCP “legacy” doing its “preparing video display” thing when loading a large timeline.

I also wonder if keywording causes slowdowns. For instance, if I use multiple descriptions as keywords, every instance of this on a clip places a “subclip” into a separate collection. You might have the same clip in several different collections and each of these collections might only be populated with a few clips. In a traditional NLE, this info might not be a “subclip” but rather simply a text description in a user-defined column within the bin. Less taxing on the database. Not a big deal for a basic commercial, but could add up exponentially on a feature film-sized production.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Olly Lawer]

Just a thought on managing larger projects.

I see that FCPX creates and pulls in Events and Projects from two designated folders in the Movie folder (in Lion at least anyway).

After playing around with it for a bit and following some tutorials with some pre-made Events and Projects, I noticed that FCPX slowed down somewhat.

I couldn’t see any easy way to load up FCPX without bringing in all the Events and Projects in that folder, so I created two new folders and pulled in the unwanted Events and Projects in finder.

Now when FCPX boots it is much quicker and only brings in the Events and Projects that remain in the two designated folders.

I’m thinking that, for larger projects at least, it could be an idea to create several Events and Projects as I think has been alluded to in this thread, and then pull them out of the default Event and Project folders essentially segmenting them off into different projects as I would with FCP 6.

Of course if all these Events and Projects need to come together to form a final edit, then it would simply be a case of pulling them back into the default folders so FCPX see’s them when it loads up.

This seems like a slightly messy method of managing a large project, but one at least that may yield a better performance on FCPX.

Happy to hear other methods tho.

Olly Lawer