[Alban Egger]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “FCPX is a souped up iMovie. It is, by definition, and the fact that it is trying to empower consumer hobbyists to step it up a gear by employing near identical methodologies to their free consumer video product, a prosumer solution. it is trying to lead consumers into more powerful capabilities, while still offering them the simplified hand holding amateur software environment they are used to.”

Haha….you are funny….I am sure the same was said by “pros” when the NLEs came out on Amigas and Pentium2 computers that were suddenly affordable. Or when we started shooting broadcasts with DV-cameras…..the shockwaves in the industry can still be heard…and amplified recently with the DSLR revolution. A lot of people who started on miniDV are now on F3s and C300s and REDs. All the power to the people, if you ask me. So if someone comes from iMovie fine.

I have tried iMovie once with my son. It is unusable for me and VERY far from anything any NLE does. It has events, yes. But so does any other NLE, only they call it Project library or something else.
The difference is how you fill these bins and how this helps you in the end to make better editing decisions. Had Apple called it Project Library and the Project Library Timeline Library would that make you happier? Hanging on these semantics is a bit childish if you ask me and most of your complaints about FCPX are matters of taste. If you tried it and don´t like it and have nothing constructive to add why do you come back to an FCPX forum? I mean I tried AVID, didn´t like it and don´t hang out over there bashing their tool. It works for them. Fine.

[Alban Egger]

You are right about the 110 IRE. They need to fix that.
But if you don´t use the arrow (which flips open a board) but click on the square color picker instead you get a traditional colourwheel where you have to click to get the color which you want. Fairly straightforward if you ask me 😉

[Alban Egger]

[Franz Bieberkopf] ”
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/335/37972#37972
This one is about “massive amounts of footage” (by which they mean only 700 Gigs) and “long timelines” (over 30mins as well as discussion of the events folder getting too bloated (from 75 scenes).”

In this project the problem was (from flying over it, I have work to do also ;-)) that the OP had 700 gigs of media that wanted to be transcoded.
I had an event with 1,2 Gigs without problems. Of course when you tell your Mac to process 1,2Gigs while you edit with the same data it will cause problems in any NLE. In many workflows the material gets transcoded or re-wrapped before actually ingesting it into the NLE. X allows you to do that on import or later. I often Import the native material and the over night tell X to optimize the event. The fact that background-processing is not really background-processing is probably more a Mac OS problem than anything else. Where´s my Amiga these days?

I see no reason to split events into two just to keep them smaller. I have 16GB RAM in a octa-core-2009 Mac Pro (Lion) and it works even with FW800 drives. My colleague uses an iMac, 32GB, Thunderbolt drives and X is flying even faster on his machine. Skimming is very responsive on that machine even in big libraries with Waveforms on (I turn waveforms off in the event, because I miss the extra RAM).

I can recreate a bloated Project with massive Compound clips, but so far have not seen an issue with it. But to be honest I usually have compounds of max. 20-40 clips (e.g. the sound-effects of a timeline for final mixing). Usually my compounds are just a handul of clips. But I can have dozens of these small compounds without issues.
X demands hardware. Mine is probably the lowest limit. Many of the problems I read are found there (especially RAM). 64-bits take their toll.

If Apple adds audio-mixing and MXF-export I will be happy and the feature set will be pretty much complete for me 😉

[Alban Egger]

[Oliver Peters] “5. The difference between how actual timeline editing functions using the magnetic (A), trim (T) and position (P) modes is very significant. Magnetic and Position have absolutely no parallel in any other NLE. These are two different editing styles built into the same software. All three modes are needed to use X well.”

I read your list and also the threads you opened which Franz now pointed me at.
On your list are several obvious recommendations that have nothing to do with X, but NLEs in general. Of course a fast drive helps (SSD or Thunderbolt), of course it is better to optimize h.264 material before editing especially in long projects where you end up with hundreds of GoPro, Contour and DSLR clips in between high-qulaity broadcast formats.

And the editing modes have to be used in all NLEs. Every NLE needs a slip, a ripple and sometimes a position tool. It is a mix of your subjective preference and your project and the state of it (rough layout or end tuning) if you like ripple trimming or the position tool (which is simply wild dropping of content into the timeline). I see no difference.

The difference in the magnetic timeline is that you don´t have to worry about the connections up and down the line. A trim here doesn´t affect sync 30 minutes later. There are no clip collisions and everything stays in correspondence to each other as you left it. And you don´t need to lock or select tracks for all that. So to me this is a feature, not a problem. Because if I want to have sync with a audio track or want to keep a static project-duration I either use “P”, “T”, secondary story lines, compound clips or other measures. X is very flexible to achieve exactly what I need no matter if it is a 50-minute doc, a music-video or a corporate same-day-edit. But it takes a bit of time to get used to it of course. But it took me more time to “get” FCP5 when I started with it coming from Fast and Edius.

[Alban Egger]

[Franz Bieberkopf] “There are certainly few reports of people using X with large amounts of footage over long edits. So if you have experience, please post.

As for the rest – I’ll resist repeating myself here (timeline, audio, bins vs. sequences, compound clip issues all covered many times), except to say that it hasn’t yet enticed me to experiment.”

What is a long project to you? I made a 52-minute sports-documentary for a festival that was done in 10.0.0!! And it worked. It had 7.000clips, about 55 hours footage.
I had problems on my 2008 MBP with 4GB RAM, but my 2009 MacPro with 16 GB had no issues at all. Now my 2011 MBP edits big projects fine as well. So hardware might have been an issue from early adopters.

16GB RAM are needed for long-edits. That´s about it. Since 10.0.4 it is a very complete feature set with 3rd party apps filling some specialists´ holes (e.g. OMF out, Xto7, 7toX).

I am also repeating myself here 😉 but a lot of the perception of FCPX comes from the first 3 days of its launch and urban myths that evolved from that, not from hands-on experiences.

A lot of my stuff is broadcast as 26-minute pieces, but I have no doubt a two hour-edit from 10.000 clips or a series of ten 45-minute films would work just fine in X within one event.

[Alban Egger]

[Franz Bieberkopf] “The project I described is just pushing past 100 hours of source material with more shoots to come, and this is typical for the projects I work on. The mix of formats is also typical.

When I read about restricted timeline durations, the difficulties of the timeline paradigm, an underdeveloped audio mixing paradigm, and uncertainty with compound clips, I am not enticed by small examples. I’m not won over by the use of meta-data as a selection tool (though I understand others find it useful), but I am excited by the new push in terms of integrating meta-data into editing software (FCPX is not alone in needing development on that front).”

Well my current project has 31 hours. Nothing FCPX cares about. It works just like it does with 2 clips.

Timeline duration limitations? Never heard that one. Tried it now. Put 4 hours into a project/timeline and made a compound out of it. dropped another few hours. made a compound of all again. dropped more hours and compounded the lot. In the end I had over 15 hours in one timeline compounded about 7 times into each other. I can skim in the timeline and in the project browser. FCPX does´t really care. It takes about 40 seconds until FCPX responds when you drop 4 hours into a timeline. That´s the only holdup.

difficulties of the timeline paradigm…..as you can imagine I disagree there. There are workarounds needed in certain situations, but once you used X you are forced to many more workarounds in FCP7 when going back. And soon you realize they are not workarounds, but different approaches to the subject just like PP6, Avid and Edius do different tasks different.

audiomix is currently underdeveloped. Agree.

uncertainty with compound clips? What is that about? They work great for me. What´s uncertain there? Compounds are even a great tool to mimic tracks if needed/wanted.

Metadata: Just like you I do not use it (enough) on import. Anyway not more than the way FCP7 can use it (camera name etc). The organizational tools that make X better are the metadata the editor creates. Range based keywords, smart collections and the way you can “bin” your footage easier than in other NLEs. Sure you can sub clip and duplicate in FCP, but X does it much more elegant and the event is better structured with a better visual overview than the bins in FCP7.

I am afraid some here still are thinking 10.0.0 when talking about FCPX. A lot has changed. A lot of uncertainty and bugs are gone. A lot of different workflows have proven to be just fine in X and most requests I see are easily handled. Most, Chris Harlan for example has some specific audio-requests, which X can´t easily handle yet. At least from my point of view, because I simply don´t do 5.1/7.1-editing.

[Alban Egger]

[Oliver Peters] “Except that in actual practice, you couldn’t cut Hobbit on X in its current form. The film is being cut on multiple Media Composer systems with shared storage and conformed with Quantel Pablo.”

I didn´t claim it was edited on X!! I said the “Hollywood-trademark” has nothing to do with tape based network workflows. And FCP7 is just as far away from The Hobbit as X is.

[Alban Egger]

Mathieu,
Read this, I explain it there
https://www.eggermedia.com/blog/2012/7/21/conforming-50p-without-cinema-tools.html

[Alban Egger]

[Franz Bieberkopf] “One of the projects that I’m cutting this year is shot on Epic, C300, FS100, GoPro, 5D, some HDCamSR (and a few other formats) in a variety of frame rates.

I’m cutting it (like the other projects I’m working on this year) in FCP7.

What “flexibility” am I missing?”

Well, Franz, just a small example: Let´s assume you are editing in a 1080p25 distribution timeline.
the C300 shoots 100 clips in 720p50 (so you have slow-motion and audio), a lot of over cranked 720p25 (with S&F recording enabled and mixed between 32 and 48 fps) and the rest in 1080p25.
In FCP7 to go the correct way of conforming the clips 720p50 clips so they play in slow-motion you would have to identify them, duplicate the original clips (to keep them untouched), then import the clones into cinema-tools and conform them (which is a destructive process!) and then re-import into FCP7. This will take you a while if all operators shoot that way and it happens a lot in our documentary productions.

In FCPX cinema-tools is implemented (just like the 16-bit engine of Color, the Logic effects etc). I have mapped the letter “4” as my conform tool. So I have all these mixed clips in my event and drop them into the timeline. Here I can decide if I want them to be 50p (and keep the natural speed and audio) or 25p (making it slomo and I now have to decide what to do about the audio). It is a button in the timeline. No roundtrip to cinema tools.

I have just finished production of a 9 day-shoot with 4000 clips (31 hours) and a lot is NOT in 25p and I never ever have to worry about it.

This is a small example (which can be huge on the time you spend in organizing your media) and once you get into key wording, pre-selecting and sorting footage it gets more and more in favor of FCPX. And that´s before you even start the editing process.

The only problem FCPX could have in your setup is ingesting the HDCamSR footage. Something we would have to solve out-of-house anyway, because we never owned any HDCam equipment; always rented.

EDIT: Since I was at this I made a small tutorial about this procedure: https://www.eggermedia.com/blog/2012/7/21/conforming-50p-without-cinema-tools.html

[Alban Egger]

I find the share-to-vimeo very useful for shares of previews to clients over night (don´t need to wait for the render). And it also works. But the bitrate is usually too high.

My way of exporting to share masters on vimeo, youtube, Facebook etc is by using Share-Export using Compressor settings. Here you can use your optimized compressor setting and define the export-directory.