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What makes X fast? Tom Knows.
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[Mike Warmels] “I am gaining experience, exchange experiences with a lot of editors, but for some reason I fail to see the greatness of FCPX.”
Charlie, as a highly experienced editor on all the major NLEs sitting in L.A., therefore having first hand knowledge of what he’s talking about in actual context, has a few great pointers. Showing big, but, most importantly imho, even a few seemingly “trivial” things that are not on any feature list, but make your life SO much easier. “Little” things like the way audio is displayed, simply changing the position of multiple clips at a time, realtime preview of filters and so on and so on. A long list of things that in and of themselves are nothing impressive, but put together make that HUGE difference for me (and many others) in the ability to continue thinking about my WORK unobstructed and not constantly my APP.
Of course whether you see that, disagree or whether his points pose any tangible difference to YOU is a whole, as they very much do for him and myself, different story. YM, as always, MV. Oh well. Horses for courses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPNbf98CBGE
And then there are things like THIS that, for me, are the epitome of what is so brilliant about X’s overall approach, specifically the MT…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRZgVZd9UmQ
[Mike Warmels] “I just have a stand alone set on which I run AVID and FCPX”
That particular dual install, from my experience, being the root of all issues we’ve had in the past. May very well apply to you as well.
[Mike Warmels] “I can imagine certain situation where you don’t want ripple effects on roles.”
I wouldn’t EVER want that. Certainly not by default. Do a multi-lingual, multi-national edit some day, and you’ll quickly realize why. That would seriously mess things up. I find it obvious and logical how and why they did it the way they did. But if that OPTION was added for whoever needed it, sure, why not.
– RK
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Hey Robin, thanks for the input. However… and I don’t mean any disrespect. This happens to me a lot. People say: you’re not using it right, show or tell me how and then I see video’s like that or their advice and… that’s EXACTLY how I am using it.
And I see all the little niceties, like the swapping around (never had much trouble with that in FCP7 or AVID, I just used a different, faster trick than in that clip your posted)… but I also experience the downside of it.
Like the audio display. When it comes to audio only tracks (like music) the waveform in the browser doesn’t match the music or sound when you get to the end of the track (in the single clip browser video). Or… levels on clips vary greatly in the display hone you zoom in or out. I find the graphics nice looking, but often a little dodgy when changing views.
Like when you are in browser with a single clip, which is quite long, I switch to the thumbnail view and… where is it? It’s not directly visible, it’s somewhere below or up. So I end up looking for it by scrolling.
And I certainly don’t hope having two NLE’s installed causes problems. Because I cannot afford another $6000 machine from Apple just to run another NLE. The authorised reseller says it’s fine. Plus… I work with a lot FCPX users that only have FCPX installed on the same MacPro’s in an editing bay, having the exact same issues. So I doubt it.
I like FCPX best when I start on a new project. Then it’s fast and snappy. After a few days, as the Library grows, new cuts are made, graphics get added it gets worse and worse.
I said this before: I like a lot of things about FCPX. I think some things are very fast and clever (like swapping, the keywords, the direct way to add a clip to a second storyline ), some things are kinda stupid (like the constant opening and closing of clips (CTRL-S) before you make do a split edit, how features that work nice and fast on the main storyline don’t work on the others, the Inspector interface where you constantly have to swap from menu to menu to check out the specs).
But, I keep saying this: I am disappointed in its performance. Now, I gathered a lot of work arounds this week from a lot of great posters here. But… they are still work arounds. And for me, that’s what makes FCPX disappointing, gives it an unfinished feel, it promises a lot but when it comes down to it, it often doesn’t deliver. Especially when suddenly my skimmer stops working, or clips on the browser suddenly stop displaying while the project still show picture. Then I know it’s time to restart FCPX again… or even the entire computer. And that several times a day.
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[Robin S. Kurz] “”Little” things like the way audio is displayed,”
Except that the display isn’t inaccurate. As you zoom in or out of the timeline, the height of the waveform changes. Zoomed out, the waveform show peaks that aren’t there when you zoom into that section of the timeline. A bug?
[Robin S. Kurz] “That particular dual install, from my experience, being the root of all issues we’ve had in the past. May very well apply to you as well.
“I hope you are joking, because that’s not my experience. I run multiple machines with multiple NLEs installed and there’s no difference. Some with Media Composer, some without. It’s quite common these days to have machines with 4 and even 5 NLEs installed (FCPX, Premiere, FCP 7, MC, Resolve) with no impact on the performance of any of them.
What I do see is that the more plug-ins you have installed on X, the worse the performance gets, at least in initial load time and in accessing the effect palette.
There are also plenty of performance issues and quirks that result in successive OS installations without the occasional clean install. If you’re on an older machine (like a 2010 MP tower, for example) and migrated all the way up to EC without a clean install somewhere along the line, you are asking for trouble.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Oh wow… thanks Oliver. It’s not just me then…. about the graphics… or about the running of two NLE’s on one machine. I’ve always had that, for well over ten years. With no problems whatsoever. So glad to hear it’s not me thinking that would be weird.
I am on a late 2013 MacPro. I would expect that to run FCPX properly. I have just a very few plugins installed from FX Factory.
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[Oliver Peters] “[Robin S. Kurz] “”Little” things like the way audio is displayed,”
Except that the display isn’t inaccurate.”
If you actually watched the video, then we could be talking about the same thing. His example, the one I was referencing, had nothing to do with the timeline.
[Oliver Peters] “I hope you are joking…”
Nope. I described it elsewhere. And never mind that I wrote MAY. If your experience differs, great.
– RK
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[Mike Warmels] “People say: you’re not using it right, show or tell me how and then I see video’s like that or their advice and… that’s EXACTLY how I am using it.”
There is no way I or any other external person could possibly say what the issue could be, considering the near endless variables that play into something like that. But the mere fact that you say yourself that others can apparently easily show you that whatever it is you have an issue with ISN’T an issue (with them, hence their advice) kinda tells you that it clearly can’t be FCP by itself, no? At least to me that seems pretty logical. And I don’t see anyone claiming that you couldn’t possibly be having any issues, but rather that it’s not happening with them or someone they know. Do you not have competent local support? Correlation is not causation. Simply deducing that since it isn’t happening with Avid, that somehow it clearly can only be FCP and nothing else, is picking very low hanging fruit. If what you describe WERE in fact some sort of typical, classic, FCP related issue(s), you’d see more people chiming in concurrence, no? (which somehow I know will now of course happen) At least I don’t recall seeing any, as opposed to the opposite. So again… what is the logical, objective alternative for you going to be, other than “FCP is buggy” if those issues are apparently not reproducible elsewhere?
[Mike Warmels] “I just used a different, faster trick than in that clip”
Then you most definitely need to let me in on the secret. Because I not only used legacy FCP for 10 years, but also trained it for five and there is absolutely nothing that I can conjure up that could be even REMOTELY “faster”. Feel free to use the clip as an example and tell us what you would have done differently to make the comparison even so much as a TIE. I’d really love to know, since I clearly missed something very essential for 10+ years!
[Mike Warmels] “the waveform in the browser doesn’t match the music or sound when you get to the end of the track”
That’s in fact a bug, yes. Or rather a result of how the waveforms are currently generated and then displayed. Just like in the timeline, one “resolution” of the waveform will be used to display it at certain zoom levels before it needs to be re-rendered for another zoom level to show the size and detail relative to that. If you happen to have scaled to somewhere right on the verge of two display sizes, you can get that discrepancy, yes. I’ve had that a few times, too. But aside from being a slight “cognitive dissonance” I hardly found it very problematic. And slightly resizing in the one or other direction, vertically or horizontally fixed it from there on in anyway. We’ll see when and if they address that in a future update.
[Mike Warmels] “some things are kinda stupid (like the constant opening and closing of clips (CTRL-S) before you make do a split edit”
So I guess I can only assume you see little value in the concept of clips being collapsible as a whole? Since in that case you can simply choose “Expand all Clips” and leave it that way. Done. Of course if you DO see value in it, then I don’t actually see how you can logically avoid having to do that one way or the other, since it serves an obvious and overall very helpful purpose. In which case you might simply try a DOUBLE-CLICK on the audio as opposed to the comparatively much more tedious and superfluous shortcut, yes. Unless of course you didn’t even know of that option to begin with?
– RK
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The issues I mentioned ARE reproducible. I know a dozen editors who run into these issues.
And I’m not going to start up an ancient FCP7 project to show you how I used a trick in an NLE no one should be using anymore. That’s just downright silly. And I never said that it was faster than FCPX, it could be done faster than it was in that clip. So FCPX wins. As it does on some other counts. Again, some of you think criticism is an attack on you as an editor. All I am saying is that not everything about FCPX is divine.
So, do I see value in the concept of collapsed clips? To be totally honest: I dunno. In FCPX it has value because if I work with several storylines (music, fx, voice over, graphics, secondary storylines etc etc) I prefer to see my timeline in one glance. So by using collapsed clips I can do that. And in fact, it’s the only way, since I am very limited in determining the look of my timeline, when it comes to the sizes of the clips. (Yes, there are five presets, I know… that’s what I call LIMITED).
It gets even more challenging when you add a dissolve or something to clips that are originally rather small, like titles: suddenly the clip in the timeline doubles in size!So collapsed clips help to keep the timeline rather viewable. But… I find it rather tiresome to a) keep all of my timeline in view and b) open and close clips for very simple split edits. I could expand them all, but then I’d be scrolling up and down my timeline all the time. That doesn’t help much. Plus, I’d like to keep the tracks together while making a split edit and not drag every individual track (sometimes 8) underneath a clip before or after that. It’s just means more work.
And honestly, using CTRL-S or double click makes no difference at all. For one method you use one hand, for the other two… time wise it’s just personal preference. You still have to open and close it. (at least, I like it closed to prevent the timeline from looking messy – my preference.)
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I would literally love to see anyone do what Tom does at the 30:00 mark the way he does it and at even vaguely the same speed, in any other NLE. Where he doesn’t even waste so much as a second on thinking about his audio/audio design whilst madly whittling down his timeline, but STILL it’s all exactly the way it should be in the end. Certainly in FCP 7… not a snowball’s chance.
And once again, at 34:25… perfect AAF export via X2Pro. With him getting an email later from the audio guy saying had never gotten such a clean audio layout (AAF) before. Go figure.
So if isn’t workin’ for you… hmmm.
– RK
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[Mike Warmels] “Like the audio display. When it comes to audio only tracks (like music) the waveform in the browser doesn’t match the music or sound when you get to the end of the track (in the single clip browser video). Or… levels on clips vary greatly in the display hone you zoom in or out. I find the graphics nice looking, but often a little dodgy when changing views.”
Yeah, the zoomed waveform thing is annoying, but they know about it. In practice it’s not a big deal to me, and the ability to see all the waveforms without need to load and/or play every clip when hunting for SFX etc more than offsets the keystrokes to zoom in to see the correct waveform. Like, way more. 🙂
[Mike Warmels] “Like when you are in browser with a single clip, which is quite long, I switch to the thumbnail view and… where is it? It’s not directly visible, it’s somewhere below or up. So I end up looking for it by scrolling.”
This seems (for me anyway) to only be an issue on a large, second monitor if you have only the Library/Browser on it. In single window mode, the clip/playhed snaps to the center of the viewer as soon as you hit play. For the large second monitor situation, zooming all the way in usually “centers” it. It would be nice to have a “center selected clip” command or something for that scenario.
[Mike Warmels] “I like FCPX best when I start on a new project. Then it’s fast and snappy. After a few days, as the Library grows, new cuts are made, graphics get added it gets worse and worse.”
Size of the Library seems irrelevant for me… Sometimes it’ll get a little laggy after a few hours, especially when using bunches of Motion templates or compositing titles/generators etc. A quick relaunch solves it, and X launches faster than anything else. Also, as it saves every keystroke as you go, if I ever need to force quit, or the power goes out… I just pick up where I left off. I’ve had to go to a backup exactly once in the last 3 years of using X. In other NLE’s? I’ve lost track. That’s a huge timesaver when it occurs, and it occurs using all NLE’s. So a relaunch of X, for me, is a complete non-issue. YMMV of course. 🙂
[Mike Warmels] ” Especially when suddenly my skimmer stops working, or clips on the browser suddenly stop displaying while the project still show picture. Then I know it’s time to restart FCPX again… or even the entire computer. And that several times a day.”
That’s weird, I honestly can’t remember ever needing to reboot the computer because of X. My Libraries are generally huge, and my projects are not… uncomplicated. Seems like something else is going on? I mean, I have X, 7, PrCC, MC 8.5, R12, Motion, Logic, Reaper, Plugins from mObject, RG Universe, FxFactory, Coremelt, and tons of other random crap on my 2012 iMac at work. And that’s just NLE/DAW related. The list of other system add-ons/background utilities etc is too long to list. And I’ve “never” done a clean install. If anything, I’ve done the opposite. I install so much stuff it’d make your hair curl. 🙂 I do stay on top of regular maintenance though. So far so good. :knocking wood:
Point being… there’s nothing wrong with preferring one NLE over another, and you make some valid critiques, but as to the stability/usability of X our experiences seem vastly different. There certainly are things in MC/Pr etc that I miss when in X, but honestly, I feel like I’m constantly doing more workarounds in other NLE’s to do things that are dead simple in X. Matter of perspective I guess..
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~ My FCPX Babbling blog ~
~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~ -
Plus… he sends it to Logic.
I don’t know any sound editors that work on Logic. It’s either ProTools or Nuendo.
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