Why do users say FCP X is fast? Some new numbers.

[Walter Soyka]

[Mathieu Ghekiere] “So it’s nice to see your results too, which pretty much confirm that FCPX is a very fast renderer”

It’s not just fast. The FCPX rendering pipeline is 32-bit floating point and color-managed, so it’s good, too. (And it’s cheap. So much for the Triangle of Truth.)

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Andrew Kimery]

[Walter Soyka] “It’s not just fast. The FCPX rendering pipeline is 32-bit floating point and color-managed, so it’s good, too. (And it’s cheap. So much for the Triangle of Truth.)”

It’s only cheap if you already have a Mac to run it on. 😉

[Christian Schumacher]

[Bill Davis] “Not sure I can see the foundation for your reasoning, Christian. The experience of using X has been one of continuous utility and speed improvement since the day it was released. “

Using FCPX since 2012 I have seen two companies trying to use it. It didn’t work out for them unfortunately. I personally own FCPX and use it now and then for personal projects. But I’m cautious and still running 10.1.3 and 10.9.5. Maybe sometime in 2016 I’ll consider 10.10.5 and FCPX 10.2.x Please, consider this if you want to know if I’m qualified to talk about FCPX. I like the timeline index, scopes and proxies built in. And depending on what you’re editing it is fast. But the biggest problems with it for me are split in two (see later why) 1) Editing – It’s fine in theory and its implantation is pretty good, but this should be waaay better developed by now to be truly seen as revolutionary. Primary vs secondary with its constrains like lack of keyboard shortcuts and no locks whatsoever, it’s a mouse fest really and spotty connection points abound, at the end it’s all as clumsy as track patching can be 2) Tagging – The better part of FCPX! But for me it sort of falls apart when one cannot set keywords on timelines. Still stumped on why they haven’t done this yet and what else? Does Roles applied on timelines reflect back to the master clips? No, right? That’s half baked for apple’s capabilities in my opinion. There seems to be something beyond glitchy between the browser where you work on the clip tagging and the timeline where you work on editing these clips, and it’s not just the lack of a windows layout system – or the match frame throwing you away from your keywords or the frame buffer stickiness in the viewer – it’s the overall experience of a somewhat schizofrenic procedure. They have to fix that. There’s still hope for treatment though, with the size of apple’s pockets they could turn this wacko into a sane person. Or they could improve the export times – rimshot 😀

[Charlie Austin]

[Christian Schumacher] “Primary vs secondary with its constrains like lack of keyboard shortcuts and no locks whatsoever, it’s a mouse fest really and spotty connection points abound, at the end it’s all as clumsy as track patching can be “

All due respect, and while I in no way think fop x is perfection, I gotta disagree with you on this. I own FCP X and use it on professional projects. I rent Pr CC and use it on professional projects. I’ll agree that X could use some more KB shortcuts fro edit/clip selection etc. But connecting clips in X is in no way as clumsy as track patching. Different? Yep. Clumsy? Nope.

[Christian Schumacher] “But for me it sort of falls apart when one cannot set keywords on timelines. “

You can rename secondary storylines and easily find them in the index, is that what you mean? Or do you want the ability to add new KW ranges in a timeline? Why? Serious question.

[Christian Schumacher] ” Does Roles applied on timelines reflect back to the master clips? No, right? That’s half baked for apple’s capabilities in my opinion.”

No, and again, why would you want them to? It would be a nightmare. You set Roles on master clips, and if you need to change them, or reclassify them in a timeline, why would you want that to flow back to the master? If you decide that you’ve assigned the wrong role to a master, change the master.

The ability to assign finer grained roles, for lack of a better term, in the timeline without affecting the master is a feature IMO, not a bug. If I’m in Premiere and have a master multichannel audio file with DIA/FX/and MX, and I put an explosion from the comped effects channel on to another track, should that then change the channel configuration of the master? Absolutely not right? So if I assign the Role “explosion” to a bit of my master “Effects” audio channel , I do not want that channel in the master to suddenly change to “explosion”. Right?

Again, please don’t lump me in with the “FCP X is perfect and cannot be improved” crowd. I’m not a part of it. I actually use X and other NLE’s all the time, for the same types of projects. X has lots of room for improvement, but a lot of the stuff you brought up just isn’t an issue.

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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”~

[Christian Schumacher]

If a lot of the stuff I brought up just isn’t an issue why, wait how should I put this? Why are they an issue? It’s these sort of problems that is driving people away from FCPX Charlie, and people want that stuff to work. Maybe not you. you find it perfect, right? 😀 Regarding roles being affected on the timeline only, I agree to a certain point, because this should be an option out of many apple decided not to include in the application. And that is a shame if you ask me. FCPX relies heavily on roles so it will be fundamental to apply a role on a timeline at the master level. I can’t believe you haven’t heard that before or wouldn’t know what this would accomplish. Weird. And did you never really hear nobody asking for setting keywords on timelines? Or for what purpose people would want this? Even weirder. How about the lack of windows layouts? Let me guess; never! The match frame throwing you away from your keywords? That one too? The frame buffer sticking in the viewer between the timeline and browser? C’mon that’s not existant. Maybe any severe memory leaks? Hmm?

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

Charlie just typed: X has a lot of room for improvement and don’t lump me in with the crowd that says it’s perfect, and you reply with: ‘for you it’s perfect, right?’
:-s

I agree with Charlie about the roles not affecting the Master Clip. Now it’s always a very certain logic: if you do something in the Event Browser to a clip before you put in the timeline, it gets transferred to the timeline, but not reverse way. I also agree it would be a mess if it would work both ways.

You don’t loose keywords if you do Match Frame, unless I’m misunderstanding you.

I also have a bullet point list of 30 or 40 points that I wish Apple would change or make better in the program, but I also think most of what you say isn’t that high on my list, or non-excistant at all.

[Mitch Ives]

[Steve Connor] “So is the timeline and edit performance significantly increased? I honestly don’t care in the slightest about output renders as that’s such a small percentage of my project time I don’t mind a slightly longer wait. What I do care about is the timeline and editing in FCPX having less lag.”

Agreed Steve… my thoughts exactly…

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[Bill Davis]

I completely understand the comments in the above two responses – once again they are perfectly reasonable reactions of people who are judging X processes against a knowledge base of “this is how I’ve always edited – so where are all the tools I’m used to?”

That is completely fair and completely understandable.

But it’s not entirely relevant to judging X, IMO.

The way you previously ran your daily editing operations are usually NOT the way you run them in X in very fundamental and significant operational ways. When you truly get used to the X system, many of the things you depended on for editing daily simply become NOT as important as they used to be. Not ALWAYS. Not for EVERYTHING. And it’s certainly possible to miss things that you used to have. I get that.

And I certainly understand those who face poor performance or slowdowns. I’ve run into that too over my X experience with my last system having problems with things from bogging down in heavy motion constructions to crashing out of a lot of the new 3D text stuff. But new hardware made that stuff disappear. It returned large amounts of fluidity to the most challenging parts of my editing operations. So I’m not sure I’ll lay that on X itself since that stuff disappeared with a hardware upgrade. (X loves new hardware – surprise, surprise)

But what I found is that for everything that I initially missed about saying goodbye to track based editing, I suddenly had half a dozen new things that became much more important to my work – particularly in organization, efficiency and speed of getting from Import to invoice.

Given that critical part of what the software does for me. I can happily put up with imperfections until they are addressed. (or even live without them if necessary!)

The key is that I didn’t FOCUS on the imperfections when I was learning X. I focused on the growing awareness that the tool was letting me get way more accomplished – way faster – and with an affordable, excellent quality system – that freed me up to approach my entire practice differently.

That may not matter to someone who wants to keep a seat in an editing facility. And I get that. (Tho I do wonder if it will matter to the bean counters above him or her in the long run!) But it DOES make a whole lot of difference in someone who has to compete with a world increasingly awash in “video editors.”

To riff on Walters value triangle post: I don’t aspire to be cheaper. So I had damn well better be as good and fast as I possibly can. And X helps.

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.

[Charlie Austin]

[Christian Schumacher] “How about the lack of windows layouts? Let me guess; never! The match frame throwing you away from your keywords? That one too? The frame buffer sticking in the viewer between the timeline and browser? C’mon that’s not existant.”

I didn’t say there were no issues, just that what you talked abut in the original post wasn’t a problem. It can always be better. Shall we talk about bugs in Premiere? Media Composer? Nothing is perfect. I could ask things like why do I have to Patch tracks in Premiere? Why is it so hard to do a split multichannel output in Media Composer? Answer? It’s not. It’s just how the apps work. And The Roles and Keyword Range settings are just how FCP X works. Neither of those things are bugs, that’s all I’m saying. As you point out, there are actual bugs too, as with anything. 🙂

————————————————————-

~ My FCPX Babbling blog ~
~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Aindreas Gallagher]

[Bill Davis] “The way you previously ran your daily editing operations are usually NOT the way you run them in X in very fundamental and significant operational ways. When you truly get used to the X system, many of the things you depended on for editing daily simply become NOT as important as they used to be.”

But It’s like you’re on the starship enterprise bill. You know, like FCPX has a neural net Data SQL database only the chosen can fully perceive.
Or maybe it’s just some software amongst many that some people really don’t respect at all. And they really don’t. And they are exactly as intelligent as you.
But you do respect it, and that’s all cool Bill.

https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics