The “little things” in X.

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

There are 2 options:

Sync’N Link where you can have it all automated. If it’s logged correctly, it’s a program for 200 dollars, that can make all synchronised clips for you, just trough XML and with all the tracks named (and I THINK also in Roles, but don’t quote me on that) like it was logged by the sound recorder.

Another option is a free program called Role-O-Matic (if I’m not mistaken) made by our own Charlie from the board here, where you can put Roles on seperate tracks.

[Michael Hancock]

[Mathieu Ghekiere] “The whole logic from X is:
changes from the browser, trickle down if you use the clip afterwards in a timeline.”

FCPX needs to add an Update Project/Sequence or Refresh Project/Sequence, like Avid has.

How I envision it working:

You inherit a project where the roles weren’t set up properly (or at all), or you messed up assigning them. So you go through your source clips and assign/reassign roles, right click on your Project/Sequence and “Update/Refresh”. It ripples the new roles from the source clips through your timeline. Avid does this with motion adapters, color transformations, frameflex settings, etc…, but it’s not automatic. You have to manually invoke the refresh, which is great because you may not want your new source settings to update in your sequence. Or you may want to duplicate your original and only refresh the duplicate, so you have two identical sequences with differing roles assigned, in a matter of seconds.

You may lose a little work if you were to do this and had set up some custom roles in the timeline already, but I think in many cases it would get you about 90-90% of the way done, very quickly. And then you wouldn’t have to worry about directors/producers not being disciplined up front – you can just set the roles, update the project, and move on.

—————-
Michael Hancock
Editor

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

Yes that sounds Like a good Idea. And if you do a snapshot duplicate of a timeline it shouldn’t update.

[Bill Davis]

BIG RED FLAG here for me.

How many tracks does your field audio recorder grab – and how many of them are blank?

IIRC you are editing on an older version of X?

When I recorded the X presentations at NAB last year, we were working with a BlackMagic recorder that did 8 embedded tracks by default – with as many as 6 of them blank – and my editing almost ground to a halt!

The solution (thanks to Noah Kadner!) was to “open in Timeline” and delete the unused tracks. I went from hours of delay to minutes. It appears X was attempting to analyze LONG audio tracks that didn’t have anything on them. It didn’t like that.

Also – You’ve REALLY got to convince your team to upgrade to more recent versions of the software.
A LOT of this stuff has been addressed in subsequent upgrades.
Performance in 10.2+ in a whole range of these areas is MILES ahead of where X used to be.

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.

[Mike Warmels]

Yeah, big red flag for me too, now.

The audio recorder has at least 8 tracks. But sometimes we use only three, sometimes, 6 or 7. It varies. Some even didn’t play right because within one XD-Cam disc there were differences of used tracks. And it sure couldn’t hack it.

And yes, it’s causing huge delays. Every click on a clip or in the timeline there’s a beach ball. But the point is, the tracks aren’t that long. There’s all relatively short clips. Everytime the camera stops, a new audiofile is made. But to me it seems that it considers the whole synchronised clip as one entity it has to analyse over and over again.

The reason why I believe that is I tried consolidating two short clips from two synchronised clips (one didn’t show audio after synching, while it was there in ‘Open in Timeline” the others did). When I made a consolidation in a separate library it included ALL clips from the synchronized clip: about 85 minutes of video and 85 minutes op separate audio.

There’s some major programming mistakes here.

So deleting the unused tracks would be the solution? In my case that would be the 8 unused tracks from the XD-Cam video.

Oh and it’s not my team, it’s my biggest client. Can’t bitch to them about too much, they’ll get annoyed. They have to transfer their entire SAN system to Yosemite first. All a bit late if you ask me, El Capitan is about to hit the shelfs.
Anyway, walked into a good friend of mine who told me she’d been streamlining their entire editing department and I urged her to get this transition going if they want to save some money. It will happen soon I hope, doesn’t help me with this project tough.

[Bill Davis]

Mike,

This almost killed me at the NAB edits until Noah figured it out. Open in timeline and delete the blank tracks made X suddenly work like X again. Night and day. It was how X worked up until the 10.2 transition, I think. Haven’t seen it since. Drives you CRAZY when it’s happening – then once you solve the puzzle, it simply goes away. Some subset of Murphy’s law, I suspect.

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.

[Mike Warmels]

You know, I deleted the unused XD-CAM tracks right away (even though they weren’t blank) when you wrote that. And kapow… its performance increased immediately.

It’s still 10.1.4 but at least I can get into the rhythm of cutting again.

I gotta SAY: SUPER TIP! Thank you thank you thank thank you and the guy who told you this. It’s a bizarre bug, but this tip is a life saver! I just hope everything is really synch because now there is no way of checking it with the guide track anymore.

They better fix this some day, because in the end, I would like to have the guide tracks available for checking. But for now, I am happy (even on X.. 😉 ).