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still driving me nuts
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Come on Michael, if your clients didn’t leave those JPEGs back at home you’d probably make money, and so your status as a starving artist would be in jeopardy.
BTW, do you remember the genesis of the Tasmanian Devil as your Cow avatar???
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss ProductionsDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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Mac App Programming Guide explains how libraries should be organized and they’ve been used in many Apple applications.
And remember FCP X when it first came out: the library was designed by default to hold your entire media collection so that an editor had access to every video ever created at his/her beck and call.
More than any other design element, I think that was the one that most suggested to many that it was not ready for prime time.
When you import your photos into iPhoto, you can choose to have iPhoto automatically organize the photos into a single Event or several. And where are the events stored — why in a library.
That leaves “project”You can read a tutorial for past versions of iMovie and see all these terms and their very similar structure.
I actually preferred one variation where within an event in a library you created a new “movie” (timeline) and then imported your media. They didn’t make this stuff up based on professional NLEs or starting from scratch and giving it heavy thought. They based it on iMovie and consumer media apps they had developed. I don’ think the name of a folder in a library container is too annoying though it shouldn’t then surprise anyone that by default the sub-levels of an event are based on dates. After all, an event took place on a certain date/time. Same concept in iCAL. But still it’s just a container within a container in the browser. I’d call it a folder or a container or a collection, really doesn’t matter much. But “project” is incommodiousThat does not make FCP X less than a professional app. And personally, I like the idea that an app can scale from beginner to pro. But I would use pro vocab/concepts for beginners not the other way around.
Personally I find consumer level features often are much harder to use than pro features. Many consumer level devices seem to reinvent the wheel and add features for the sake of advertising rather than ergonomics.
Ever try to set the white balance on many consumer level camcorders? Some are three levels deep in the menu system and must be reset from every use. As opposed to zoom in on a white card and hit the freaking WB button.
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.
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[David Roth Weiss] “Easy! The answer is file security.”
While I see what you’re saying, Walter has pretty much covered it.
If we are taking about a failed boot drive, the you’re dead in the water until you restore from a backup anyway, or boot from a clone. If your clone just happens to be PCIe SSD, you could restore a Time Machine backup very quickly.
This still does not portend editing on an extremely fast boot drive. You should always have backups in place so that in case of catastrophic failure, you’re a short distance away from recovering.
[David Roth Weiss] “If you recall, there have been innumerable discussions over the years on the FCP Legacy Forum about whether to store FCP project files on the boot/system drive vs the media drive(s). That discussion revolved around the best solution in case of a catastrophic failure – what’s more important, storing the project files alongside your OS and applications; or, alongside your media files. Of course, a RAID may or may not be configured with RAID 5 or RAID 6 protection, and that has some bearing on that discussion.”
I’m sorry but this is days gone by. All of my OS and editing software is now available in the cloud. I can do an erase and install from the cloud in under two hours. Granted, this is bare minimum working environment and does not include most plugins (but some). This is going from ground zero erased drive, to download, boot, and update. It truly is a new day. Also, I’m not devaluing RAIDs. They are useful, and still relevant, but this conversation started with trying to help someone get a bit more performance out of the existing equipment. In the days of FCS3 a clone was worth it just to not to have to sit through the 7 install DVDs. I had (and have) images of these disks so it went faster, but still, things are just simply a bit different now.
[David Roth Weiss] “Meanwhile, back to the present, your single SSD scenario seems to have no built-in file security… If that SSD drive fails, you would lose everything, and it could happen is an instant. That being said, since we often find that many Cow members don’t have any file security measures in place, i.e. no backups, no boot drive clones, no protected RAID, etc., any discussion of best practices often falls on deaf ears of those who think file security is only for big facilities and wealthy people.
“Time Machine is fall down easy and cheap. I have a time machine disk on all of our machines. There’s no reason not to have one. So if my cache is on my boot drive and it fails, I can restore even my cache, and if I had media on it (for the record, I don’t store big media on my boot drive) that would be restored too.
While RAID security does offer some failure protection, it also offers many more points of failure, as Walter mentions, and it also does not absolve from proper backups, which we all have mentioned.
I still don’t see a reason to not store a cache on a boot drive.
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[Craig Alan] “BUT I did a simple test when this thread began and selected a relatively small clip on a timeline, applied a color correction, and then went the finder to see what happened as a result in the cache/render folder. It added a render file of over 1 gig. It was clear to me that render files are not small little files, they could quickly add up. “
It does add up, but it also easily deleted.
Someone please check this math as I am away from my abacus.
Let’s say you had 750GBs of 1 TB free. That means you could have 750 1GB files on your machine before you had to do anything. Let’s say you edit for 8 hours a day, and let’s say you render a 1GB file every 10 minutes. That’s 6GBs an hour. It would take you 125 hours to amass 750GBs of render files. 125 hours at 8 hours a day and generating 6GBs hour would give you 15, 8 hour days before you had to delete anything. You could work for an entire fortnight (plus a flex day) before you had to do delete old render files.
That’s quite a bit, and surely, you aren’t generating 6GBs an hour of render material that you need to keep for 15 days, and if you are, you will need to store your cache on a bigger, slower drive.
Also, especially with newer machines, rendering in X is less and less necessary. I never render color correction as it all plays back in real time. Only certain effects and multiple text effects I need to render.
Sincerely,
Jeremy “Enough Cache For a Fortnight” Garchow
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[Jeremy Garchow] “It does add up, but it also easily deleted.”
I would also suggest – as it relates to render files – there is no reason with either X or PPro to routinely render everything. Certain troublesome shots with heavy effects? Sure. Auto-render everything? No.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Jeremy Garchow] “Also, especially with newer machines, rendering in X is less and less necessary. I never render color correction as it all plays back in real time. Only certain effects and multiple text effects I need to render.”
This is very true. I have not had background rendering on since I bought my MacProCylinder. I also don’t have any need to render to ProRes or Proxy intermediates. And I edit a lot of quick turnaround corporate short (up to 10 minute) documentaries almost entirely composed of 2 – 3 camera multicam clips (and all cameras are AVCHD source). This includes color correction and sometimes audio sweetening including izotope RX4 plugins.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “That’s quite a bit, and surely, you aren’t generating 6GBs an hour of render material that you need to keep for 15 days, and if you are, you will need to store your cache on a bigger, slower drive. Jeremy “Enough Cache For a Fortnight” Garchow”
I also recommend keeping After Effects’s cache on that big beautiful solid state system disk on nMPs. The performance boost is really something. But 6 GB is just a couple minutes of work there! That said, the Ae cache is self-pruning and user-limitable in size, so it can still all work out.
Cheers,
Walter “640 PB ought to be enough for anybody” SoykaWalter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[James Culbertson] “And I edit a lot of quick turnaround corporate short (up to 10 minute) documentaries almost entirely composed of 2 – 3 camera multicam clips (and all cameras are AVCHD source). This includes color correction and sometimes audio sweetening including izotope RX4 plugins.”
Ok, that’s cool and all, but do you have a solid state system disk, and if so, what do crazy stuff do you store on it? Step into the cage with us!
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Walter Soyka] “But 6 GB is just a couple minutes of work there!”
Don’t even get me started on Ae and performance, Apple has spoiled me.
Jeremy “My 6GBs Takes A Fortnight While Yours Takes A Few Minutes” Garchow
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Don’t even get me started on Ae and performance, Apple has spoiled me. “
It’ll get there. Someday.
Walter “Despite Everything I Said Above, Sometimes Speed Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up To Be” Soyka
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn]
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