[Adam Schoales]

[Robin S. Kurz] “I think you may be “overthinking” the matter. First off: do you need optimized or do you (at this stage) just plan to use the original media and proxies? Because if you don’t need optimized media, you simply need to set up your library to REFERENCE (leave in place) the original, external media and set your proxy media to the library that you store locally on your machine. With that things should work exactly as you expect. I.e. that’s how I have done it in the past and still do for the exact same reasons. That way if you’re connected to the original media you can edit with that, if not (you’re out and about) it will go offline and you can switch to proxy to continue. There’s absolutely no copying, reconnecting or the likes needed or necessary, since the directories never actually change. Only one goes missing temporarily. But even if you DO initially save the library externally and copy it back and forth as needed, there should be no such problems for the same reason. And the library should only always contain the proxy files and nothing else.”

To clarify, I may have been confusing terminologies here. Original media is ProRes so there is no optimised media, but I was using the two terms interchangeably.

So; there’s original prores media that’s over 1.5 terabytes and stays at the office, and there’s the proxy media which is at the office and on a portable drive for working at home. My hopes were the proxy could live on the portable drive, outside the library, so I’m just copying new library files over (and have the added benefit of being able to easily backup library files to Dropbox). With having Proxy files living INSIDE the library it was way too big to easily backup.

Based on your thoughts, this is exactly how I worked before. The downside was that making any changes facilitated copying the whole library file over which has ~130 gb of proxies (while it’s true I could simply copy project files from one library to the other, in the early logging stage there’s no real way to do that), so my THOUGHT was having the proxies live outside the library meant that I’d just be copying a tiny library file back and forth. Obviously that’s not (yet) the case (or I’m doing something wrong).

At any rate, I’ll switch to my old setup (proxies in the library) and go from there.

[Adam Schoales]

Thanks for the suggestions guys. My first inclining of turning off auto-render seems to have done the trick.

There’s a new weird glitch that’s bugging me now but hopefully I’ll have it sorted out as well. Basically opening a library and clicking around will randomly trigger FCP X to pull up the “loading” progress bar and start “loading” random projects in my events.

Granted, there are a lot in there because everytime I version an edit I would create a new project. So there’s a lot of them. But for it to just randomly start “loading” them and force me to sit and wait is really frustrating.

[Adam Schoales]

Thanks Dave.

I think what I might try is combining some smoke footage and using it as a track matte over some light leak footage, and see if I can create something similar.

[Adam Schoales]

Perfect, thanks very much for the clarification. Greatly appreciate it.

[Adam Schoales]

Canon C300 media is already optimized in FCPX. You can’t create ProRes movies from it in FCPX (optimized media is greyed out)

So, you import the footage, and when you click the import button, you will get the import preferences screen.

The first radio button under the Event section is “Media Storage: Copy Files into:”

From there you select the door down and select “Choose…”

Then chose a folder on the server for FCPX to rewrap the footage to 50Mbit 422 MPEG2.

Now, forgive me if I’m mistaken, but the FCP 7 method *does* result in ProRes files. If we wanted ProRes files rather than raw Canon XF files is there a way to do this through FCP X?

I don’t know for sure if we actually *do* need ProRes, especially since this case it’s for a FCP X workflow, I just know my boss always wants us working in ProRes for easy cross-compatability. In other words, I’m just trying to cover my bases.

[Adam Schoales]

Thanks everyone. This seems to have answered my question, and will allow us to stay entirely in FCP X.

[Adam Schoales]

That was sort of my next step consideration. That or perhaps a 3rd party tool like Shot Put Pro?

[Adam Schoales]

Thanks for the tips guys.

Dave you’re right about the waves breaking, though truthfully since this will likely be used just for a title screen I just want it to look like the water in the distance is moving, less concerned about the breaking waves (even though, you’re right, that’s what would happen).

I’ll see if those plugins help.

[Adam Schoales]

Well the problem has been solved.

After numerous attempts at “solving”, and thinking we had found the solution the problem kept coming back. We were at our wits ends but I finally decided to sit and watch the editor work and see if I could be present for when the problem started to occur and work our way backwards to reverse-engineer the solution.

And that’s exactly what I did.

Turns out the editor had been flipping on “show duplicate frames” and in so doing was causing final cut to have to re-calculate that information every time an edit was made. By simply turning it off the problem went away which explains why whenever we built a new timeline/sequence or even a new project the problem would never occur for us because we did not have that setting turned on by default.

While there are probably other issues that certainly didn’t help (like rogue XDCAM footage making it’s way into the project) this seems to be the root cause and the problem is solved (unless it comes up again *touch wood*)

So, in short, if you experience any sort of long delays while cutting check to ensure these processor intensive options like duplicate frames or audio waveforms are not enabled.

Best.

[Adam Schoales]

Clearly I’m too much of a newb here… I’m having trouble figuring out what it is that I should be doing… should I be drawing a mask? how do I go about making this track matte? man, im dumb haha.