[Alban Egger]

There is a bug in the EQ right now. It indeed often defaults when you reopen it.

Waveforms: do you have enough RAM ? 16 GBmin! And when you import clips FCPX takes a while “rendering” the waveforms, although the import is basically done. When you cancel X while this process is still working, then you might have your issue.

Beachballs: when I use a fast RAID I never see it. When I use FW800 drives they occur often.

[Alban Egger]

In competition with Adobe they don’t need to hurry to bring features, since Adobe tries to catch up with FCPX and not the other way round.

In terms of days since the last update, yes, it has slowed down, but 10.1.1 is so good and stable, there is no need to rush updates just for the sake of changing things…..

[Alban Egger]

Not a big surprise. Their options were Avid or Adobe, since Edius (which I would choose, if I was a news network) is Windows only and FCPX (my next choice as a newshouse) is Apple only. CNN has to work with both sides of the OS-giants.

Avid is not going to work for news-people who are not editors, but writers mostly. So anything else would have been a surprise. But CNN has a special business model, so their lead is not helping any creative editor in his decision.

[Alban Egger]

It could be not FCPX or the 25fps were the issue but the specific encoding of those 25fps files. Did they all come from the same source?

I recently had a similar issue with audio peaks AND video glitches when I encoded some h.264 files I got from an agency into Windows Media (it was supposed to play in a Digital Signage system). After Effects, Edius and MPEG Streamclip on the PC failed.
I then tried MPEG stream clip and QT7 on the Mac side of my studio. No chance to get them clean. And MPEGStreamclip doesn´t fail very often!

Finally tried FCPX (without much hope)….worked like a charm. Don´t ask me why and how, but it was the only software that was able to re-encode these h.264 move into ProRes which I could then work with normally. All this was while I maintained the 25fps. No conforming necessary.

So maybe their is something with the GOP order or keyframe settings that FCPX didn´t like in your case. If they all come from the same source, maybe their settings are exactly what throws FCPX off, while the ones I got where apparently the other way round.
If they are different sources /encoders, then we might see more of this and it could be a conforming issue.

Did you try to conform them to 23.98 within FCPX instead of Cinema Tools (now called auto-speed, was conform-speed).

[Alban Egger]

First you need 16GB Ram
Then a GPU. I have a 2009-MP with a 4870 card and a 2011 McBookPro and the MacBook is much better for FCPX and has Thunderbolt. New MBooks have USB3 also. If you don’t need the MacPro for Pci cards I would go for Macbook or iMac, before you put money into an old box.
I will soon sell my MacPro to someone who needs a server and will upgrade to an iMac or MacPro2013.

Going to PrePro and or Windows is a totally different decision!

[Alban Egger]

[Jeremy Garchow] “But I can’t figure out why I would need more than one Event in a Library, unless of course I want an Event that is Projects only.”

I have to agree here. Of course their are situations when you need several events, but since keywords are “sticking with” events I will often only have one event per library.

E.g. having a sports-team season in one library. You could make each game one event. But if you then have highlighted (key worded) every players scoring plays it would not make sense to create #80-touchdown in every game. Instead I will follow my “pre 10.1 workflow”: make folders with keywords for a) games b) highlights c) players etc.

For me I believe Events will be a way to share media around. I already used the “Copy Event to Library” command a few times. Works great and allows to put certain parts of jobs into external Disks/Libraries/Events.

But I am sure different workflows will come up as we keep using 10.1 just like they did with 10.0.x

[Alban Egger]

[Michael Sanders] “Personally I would like a way where render files, transcoded media etc could go on my fast RAID (where they need to be) – and not in the project file. The project file would then be nice and small and could live on the system drive and get backed up with other small files like motion projects, image files etc.”

You can tell FCPX where to store the Project-Library and where the media. You can have media on a big fast RAID-5 and the Library on a fast SSD if you want. I use both ways with media either being contained within the Library or being sym-linked to an external drive/RAID/SAN. It really depends on the job and if I work with others or not or how long the media will be needed online.

The fact that render files end up in the Library pretty much tells us that Apple expects all pros to have fast and big drives for their libraries. In the worst cases you can always switch to proxy-mode to have smaller library-sizes.

What you call a FLAW is a great feature set. I really liked the Event/Project structure as it kept everything in place. Now with libraries this is elevated to another level of flexibility, if you know when to use which method.

[Alban Egger]

[Oliver Peters] “FCP X is quite simply unpredictable in its sensitivity to other issues. Plug-ins certainly could be a factor.”

Well, isn´t any NLE or any specialized and high-demanding software sensitive? And isn´t that the reason in the first place why we use Mac OSX and not Windows, where these problems are even more common.

I have no problem at all on my machines. I sometimes upgrade OS and FCPX mid-project and sometimes I wait. I am right now editing the same project on a MacPro with Mountain Lion and 10.0.9 and a Macbook with Mavericks. Both run flawless. Both have some plug-ins in common and some plug-ins to itself.

So in my experience FCPX behaves just like any other NLE: they want to be caressed before they hammer away.

[Alban Egger]

[Bret Williams] “But in iMovie, if you use a clip from another library, it doesn’t ask or even mention it. It simply copies it from one library to the other in the background. Impossible to screw up.”

Well, again. No one here knows IF we get such a library structure. And what you mention here is a terrible feature. I don´t want FCPX to copy stuff that is referenced in another event. Yes impossible to screw up, but in 2,5 years I never screwed up with media in X. Sometimes I copy, sometimes I reference. It all depends on the workflow I use (depending on client, timeframe, distribution…).
I can always tell FCPX to copy the media into certain events, but it is up to me to decide if and when that happens and which event/drive I want the footage to live in.

[Alban Egger]

Bret, FCPX Paradigm goes far beyond naming Projects Events or libraries. I am very sure you will still be abke to turn a clip or graphic in an event into a timeline which then can be used in a project (sequence) where you make it into a compound combined with other clips or timelines and then this compound ends up in a multicam clip. Lost me? Thought so.

You can already now drag clips and keyword collections from different Events on different drives and with two commands (depending on your workflow) have the media placed where you need it so you never lose media. So the new library (IF it comes to FCPx) would not improve that really, because it works great already.

There is one demand a lot of cloents have: some sort of collaboration with several people working within the same event. If this library does that, fine.