Thinking about making the switch to FCPX

[Cal Thorley]

Thanks Joe.

I’ll load it up a bit and see how FCPX goes.
I’d like to be working in 4K (or even 4K on a 1080p timeline – scaled down rather than transcoded to 1080)
If FCPX can handle 4K XAVC-I without being a slug then it’ll be doing better than PP.
I know H.264 isn’t much fun to unpack so if I need to transcode any footage off my Sony A6300, drone, or gopros then I can live with that. It’s always going to be a small percentage compared to the FS7 material which is still my main camera.

If I have to transcode the XAVC-I then I may as well just stick with Premiere.

Fingers crossed.

Thanks again.

[Cal Thorley]

Thanks Eric.
Time to jump into a project and start making rookie mistakes in a new program!

[Joe Marler]

[Cal Thorley] “If FCPX can handle 4K XAVC-I without being a slug then it’ll be doing better than PP.
I know H.264 isn’t much fun to unpack so if I need to transcode any footage off my Sony A6300, drone, or gopros then I can live with that. It’s always going to be a small percentage compared to the FS7 material which is still my main camera.

If I have to transcode the XAVC-I then I may as well just stick with Premiere.”

In my tests you likely won’t need to transcode XAVC-I. XAVC-S and -L are another matter — at least on current Macs, although there is some variation.

The current limitation is efficiency of hardware-accelerated decoding and how that’s used by the NLE. For these codecs Premiere does a horrible job on current Mac hardware. FCPX is a lot better, but on the iMac Pro which apparently uses T2 decoding, it’s still sluggish. On 2017 and later iMacs it’s somewhat smoother, and the 2019 iMac and MBP 16 seem a little better still. This is probably from incremental improvements to Intel’s Quick Sync. Resolve is also pretty good.

Longer term I think the new ARM-powered Macs may have a big advantage, but nobody knows for sure. At least Apple will gave total control over hardware accelerators and the ARM design favors greater use of these due to the smaller chip real estate consumed by the CPU core.