What does Apple need to do better with FCPX?

[Joe Marler]

Alex implies that Apple needs to support Hollywood-type workflows more directly, but then he says “I am not convinced that the vocal tiny minority in feature films and TV are worth supporting”.

Avid has a near-total lock on Hollywood. Yet the last time I checked, Avid’s stock was near a 25-year low, their revenue from video editing and solutions has declined each year since 2011 and is currently at about $200 million per year. Apple makes more on adapters and watch bands. The “street cred” from Hollywood using Avid near-exclusively may amount to something, but in real-world revenue it’s not much.

Alex then says “The last gap in the Final Cut Pro X feature set is collaboration: where multiple people can work the same media and timelines at the same time”.

I agree with that. However this is technically difficult. It is essentially a multi-user distributed database. Google has this in Google Sheets — each user’s spreadsheet changes are color coded, their change history is tracked, and there’s an integrated chat feature. Google makes this look easy but it’s very difficult to do with near-100% reliability and without an on-premesis server. However that would be much more useful to my team than 360 VR features.

Alex then says “It is likely that over 95% of videos made in the world are made by a single person”. This implies that an investment by Apple in multi-user FCPX technology might be misdirected. But are 95% of videos made by one person because that’s the best workflow or because multi-user collaboration is so difficult and unsupported by current software that only 5% try it? I’ve worked on some small teams where it would be very beneficial to have two geographically-separate assistant editors marking keywords and ratings while a lead editor made an assembly edit. There are 3rd-party workarounds for this using MergeX but it’s tacked-on.

Multi-user video editing collaboration is often discussed solely in the context of a co-located team on a LAN. That’s true for large professional teams but for the more typical (and numerous) smaller FCPX workgroups, they are geographically distributed. Such collaborative editing is generally discussed only regarding the timeline. With FCPX much of the work happens *before* the timeline phase, as media is rated and keyworded in the Event Browser. Geographically distributed, cloud-based collaboration on *that* phase would be useful — and in keeping with FCPX orientation. This might seem difficult but Google has solved it with Google Sheets.

Re other issues, for years FCPX was vastly faster than Premiere at exporting to H.264. This performance lead has now evaporated. After seven years of not supporting Quick Sync, Premiere CC on the Mac can export to H.264 as rapidly as FCPX. At least FCPX still supports it on the decode side, which Premiere hasn’t yet done. Resolve performance seems to be improving month by month. There’s a lesson here — if you stop making rapid advances your competitors (no matter how sluggish) will eventually catch up.

There are websites with huge “grab bag” lists of requested FCPX improvements — color-coded video lanes, etc. I personally would like a auto-scrolling timeline but I can scroll it with my finger. I don’t have good workarounds for the poor management of external proxies, non-existent collaborative features, or nagging UI issues like the timeline jumping when applying color correction.

[Steve Connor]

[Joe Marler] “or nagging UI issues like the timeline jumping when applying color correction.”

Currently the most annoying “bug” in FCPX for me.

[Ronny Courtens]

I agree there is a lot of contradiction in that text. Apple will do with FCP X whatever seems beneficial to its further expansion, and that may not always exclusively be what movie and tv people want.

I think Apple has well learned from the past. They nearly went bankrupt when they only catered to the professional crowd, they will not make that mistake again.

I think that collaboration would be high on their list now and yes, there are a whole bunch of wish-lists floating around for any NLE. That only proves that we all have completely different opinions on how our favorite tools should work, whatever these tools are.

BTW Joe: you can activate the auto-scrolling timeline in FCP X with CommandPost.

– Ronny

[Eric Santiago]

This happens with almost any other mouse moving to a different area other than project timeline move.
I guess its time this was fixed.

[Brett Sherman]

I do think FCP X should incorporate better collaboration. However, I don’t think that would improve their standing in Hollywood by that much. Mainly I think it’s inertia and specialized tools for workflows already set up for Avid. You might open up possibilities for a disruptive group that starts using FCP X, but that’s about it.

Ironically, the long ago decision to stick “Programs” inside “Events” has made incorporating collaboration much more difficult. If they were separate then users could muck around inside Events all they want and combining them is a simple Boolean Add operation. However once “Programs” are inside Events then versioning has to rectified. It’s not impossible, but more difficult.

I wish when the moved to Libraries, they kept “Projects” in their own container separate from “Events”.

[Robin S. kurz]

[Joe Marler] “Re other issues, for years FCPX was vastly faster than Premiere at exporting to H.264. This performance lead has now evaporated. After seven years of not supporting Quick Sync, Premiere CC on the Mac can export to H.264 as rapidly as FCPX.”

Sorry, but that is just plain false.

https://youtu.be/IkkVLFFxaUI

… which also mirrors my own tests 100% btw. Adobe will also never get PPro there without a complete rewrite, sorry. But I guess that’s what the “Project Rush” is all about.

– RK

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[Joe Marler]

[Joe Marler] “Re other issues, for years FCPX was vastly faster than Premiere at exporting to H.264. This performance lead has now evaporated. After seven years of not supporting Quick Sync, Premiere CC on the Mac can export to H.264 as rapidly as FCPX.”

[Robin S. Kurz] Sorry, but that is just plain false.”

Historically FCPX has been much faster than PP, esp. at H.264 playback and encoding. This was due to several factors, but Premiere’s lack of support for Quick Sync (esp. on Mac) was key. In general editing 4k H.264 using Premiere on
even a high-end Mac was very sluggish. In 2016 Premiere introduced proxy support, which makes scrubbing and JKL responsiveness faster, but the issue is how fast is Premiere vs FCPX at 4k H264 without proxies.

You can see some of the earlier tests I’ve posted showing how much faster FCPX was at H264:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/344/45875

As I described here, the FCPX viewer update rate when scrubbing a 4k H264 timeline was about 10x
faster than Premiere: https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/335/100210

However more recently PP got a lot faster (for exporting) in the 2018 update 12.1.1. It was no faster for
decoding, which means timeline scrubbing was no faster, but export performance was equal to or even faster
in some cases than FCPX on the same hardware. I posted test results here:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/335/101459

Whether the Metal or OCL playback engines were used made no difference.

After I posted those tests, another PP update was recently released, 12.1.2. I just re-tested this on both top-spec 2017 iMac 27and a 10-core Vega64 iMac Pro, using the same Sony Alpha XAVC-S codecs mentioned in the above video.
My documentary team has seven of these cameras including two A7RIIIs, and if all our multicam teams
are active we shoot about 1 terabyte per day, so we deal with a lot of this material.

Playback: Premiere 12.1.2 is no faster than the previous version on a top-spec 2017 iMac or a 10-core Vega 64 iMac Pro. Playback at 1/4 res of 4k H264 multicam without proxies is extremely laggy and slow. JKL keyboard lag is severe. FCPX 10.4.3 using the same material on the same hardware is a little sluggish but much faster.

On the iMac Pro (which does not have Quick Sync due to Xeon), both FCPX and Premiere are apparently using AMD’s UVD/VCE hardware acceleration. FCPX uses it on both encode and decode side, apparently Premiere only uses VCE which is the encode side. However FCPX is apparently not using hardware acceleration for HEVC 10-bit encoding, so it’s extremely slow.

Exporting: see below results. These tests used a 60 sec multicam clip from two Sony A7RIIIs. Material was XAVC-S, UHD 4k 8-bit 4:2:0, 100 mpbs.

2017 iMac 27, 32GB, 4.2Ghz i7-7700K, RP 580, 2TB SSD, macOS 10.13.6: FCPX 10.4.3, vs Premiere Pro CC 12.1.2:
============================================================================

FCPX: 4k H264 Fast Encode, 30 mbps: 40.4
Premiere: 4k H264 VBR 1 pass, 30 mbps: 41.8

FCPX: 1080p H264 Fast Encode, 20 mbps: 39.4
Premiere: 1080p H264 VBR 1 pass, 20 mbps: 27.6

FCPX: 4k HEVC 8-bit, 16 mbps: 1:25
Premiere: 4k HEVC 8-bit VBR 1 pass, 16mbps: 1:29

FCPX 4k HEVC 10-bit, 18 mbps: 33 minutes
Premiere: 4k HEVC 10-bit VBR 1 pass, 18 mbps: 11:27

2017 iMac Pro, 64GB, 10-core, Vega 64 GPU, 2TB SSD, macOS 10.13.6: FCPX 10.4.3 vs Premiere Pro CC 12.1.2:
==========================================================================

FCPX: 4k H264 Fast Encode, 30 mbps: 47.3
Premiere: 4k H264 VBR 1 pass, 30 mbps: 39.1

FCPX: 1080p H264 Fast Encode, 20 mbps: 28.8
Premiere: 1080p H264 VBR 1 pass, 20 mbps: 24.7

FCPX: 4k HEVC 8-bit, 16 mbps: 44.9
Premiere: 4k HEVC 8-bit VBR 1 pass, 16mbps: 42.3

FCPX 4k HEVC 10-bit, 18 mbps: 24 minutes
Premiere: 4k HEVC 10-bit VBR 1 pass, 18 mbps: 4:12

[Robin S. kurz]

Ah. So you were literally talking about H.264/5 only. I took the “performance lead has now evaporated” to imply in general, not exclusively in such an isolated task. My bad. The performance lead in general certainly hasn’t “evaporated”. Far from it.

I can’t speak to either codec, since I have near nothing to do with them other than maybe an occasional ingest from elsewhere, nor have I explicitly tested them recently. So not a yardstick that is in anyway relevant to me personally. But again, the video above comes to a very different conclusion, as does this article/video: https://bit.ly/2MkTS5C … though, granted, the version of Premiere is not mentioned (nor that of FCP) in the latter, so it could potentially be the pre-update version. But it is from yesterday…

– RK

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[Oliver Peters]

I’ve been in the process of testing a maxed-out 2018 15″ MBP with the Core i9 and with the 2TB SSD for a RedShark review. I have an identical test sequence that I created for FCPX, Premiere Pro, and Resolve. It’s mainly 4K Alexa files (with a default Log-C LUT added in the NLE) and some 1080p Broll clips. All ProRes, since this is from a media managed project. The sequence is an :80 1080p/23.98 timeline. Obviously there’s scaling on the clips, but one is also reverse slomo with optical flow. I have done testing with the media on both the internal SSD and an external USB3 SSD.

Basically all apps play this at full resolution without any issues. The one exception is the optical flow clip. It stutters in Premiere at any resolution. Oddly though, in FCPX is stutters in “best performance” but not in “best quality”. I can set this timeline to continuously loop playback full screen to the display without any issues at “best quality”. Nothing has been rendered. Editing experience and fluidity is about the same in all three.

I ran export tests out to 1080p ProRes and 1080p H264 (10Mbps) from all 3. FCPX and Resolve both have incredibly fast export times. One interesting thing is that Resolve’s H264 export is even faster than FCPX’s. Premiere (via AME) is significantly slower in exporting the ProRes, as well as the H264 versions. Most of this seems to be the added processing time it needs for the optical flow clip. But even if that weren’t there, it would take longer.

I have a second test project of all RED raw 4K clips in a 4K timeline. Here I need to drop the setting down to “best performance” in FCPX and 1/2 resolution in Premiere. Then it plays quite smoothly. Can’t go higher or it chokes.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com

[Michael Gissing]

[Oliver Peters]”One interesting thing is that Resolve’s H264 export is even faster than FCPX’s.”

Whilst Resolve is blindingly fast, I have been constantly frustrated that it has problems with strong saturated GFX colors, constantly giving me flashing block errors. And not just these pure colors. It seems the encode is purely single pass as these errors are close to picture cuts and are likely the failure to create a proper I frame on the cut.

I’m on a grunty PC but clients and other editors are mighty impressed by render speeds in Resolve 15 (b6) but less impressed by these artifacts.
EDIT. This is only with H264. Other codecs are fast and accurate without these block errors