[Andrew Johnstone]

Thanks Joe,

I did all the usual house keeping and made sure all systems and software was up to date. I have also cleared some headroom on my main system HD.

I have now traced the issue down to a faulty SD card. I refomatted another SD card and FCPX is playing nicely with the material at import.

Hopefully this is all it was.

Thanks for all your help

Andy

Andy Johnstone
Wild Dog Limited
film & multimedia production
http://www.wilddogworld.com

[Andrew Johnstone]

And now we are back to crashing again.

It seems that FCPX has it in its head that it does not like this file type or codec something.

I am going to have to do some major housekeeping to try to find out what is going on here. All suggestions welcome

GRRR

Andy Johnstone
Wild Dog Limited
film & multimedia production
http://www.wilddogworld.com

[Andrew Johnstone]

OK, so I managed to import one clip and now the app has started to crash again.

It is possible that it is a corrupt project file, so I will try and renew it, but honestly,. this is a pain.

My experience with FCPX has been that when projects start to crash, you never get them back. Very flakey.

Andy Johnstone
Wild Dog Limited
film & multimedia production
http://www.wilddogworld.com

[Andrew Johnstone]

Oooh! Now this may be working.

So my Q then is why does the latest update of FCPX not include this patch?

Andy

Andy Johnstone
Wild Dog Limited
film & multimedia production
http://www.wilddogworld.com

[Andrew Johnstone]

Have just installed latest version of FCPX 10.4.6 and it still crashed.,

Looking at this Pro Video Format update now.

Andy

Andy Johnstone
Wild Dog Limited
film & multimedia production
http://www.wilddogworld.com

[Andrew Johnstone]

I am having this problem.

I have just bought an A7s2 as a B cam and a gimball cam for my Ronin. Each time I try to import into FCPX it crashes.

Andy

2017 imac, 3.6ghz i7 , 32 GB 2400 MHz DDR4 Mojave

Andy Johnstone
Wild Dog Limited
film & multimedia production
http://www.wilddogworld.com

[Andrew Johnstone]

I posted at some length higher up on this thread and expressed my dismay at some of the features of FCPX that I did not like very much.

Since then I have cut several pieces for TV and fed news cuts from the field and got to know the system pretty well. I have overcome my frustrations with the sticky timeline and with audio mixing/fades etc. In fact because my main client (BBC) uses FCPX for all its news and regional feature/docs, I have not touched premiere since cutting a 1/2 hour doc in Jan and my subscription has lapsed. I can;t afford to have various edit packages lolling about on my system, costing me money if I am not using them – this has always been my beef about subscription based software. It does not take into account the needs of many users.

But back to FCPX…I really like the ease with which you can grade in FCPX and there are clearly benefits to the system converting content to a flavour that it prefers. But its data management is also a major headache for me now.

In Premiere Pro, my main issue was system speed. My current machine does not have enough RAM or a faster enough Graphics card to render & grade as fast as I would like in Premiere. But other than that it works brilliantly reading directly form the source file. All my rushes are copied directly to a mirrored Thunderbolt RAID and I can work directly from that. I appreciate tat there are downsides to this workflow, a mirrored raid is not as fast as a single RAID and there is also the danger of drive failure from overuse. But in Premiere I can start work the minute the material is put on the RAID and the project files are relatively small when it comes to archiving.

FCPX however is a different issue. And this is GRIPE 1:

While I can, in theory ingest material into a ‘library’ (a ‘project’ in old money…why did they change the names…!) and ‘leave files in place’ FCPX does not in practice let me do this with material from my FS7. It sees an Sony card file structure as the card it self, not the copy of a card and the only option I have is to ingest the material into the library.

Example: a recent 10 minute wildlife film, shot in Slog , created over 481GB of project data on my project drive (I run a single thunderbolt drive for projects – a legacy from FCP7)

Problem: Now, not only do I have a back up of the original rushes on my mirrored RAID, I also have a duplicate of all the material in the film’s ‘library’. All the music for the film (which I store on my project raid) also gets copies into the library. This creates a massive storage night mare and means that to archive my projects I have to buy terrabytes of harddrive space – much more that I needed for Premiere. And don’t under estimate the time it takes to copy all this material to external drives either. I am copying as I type.

GRIPE 2: The size of the FCPX project files creates a massive issue for my system. I filed two news package from the filed the other day. The lunchtime package was fine. But when I came to cut the package for the evening show, my 13inch MBP ground to a halt. I have found with FCPX that you really have to let it sit and munch away at everything before you start cutting on my system. Even on the much faster Macs at the BBC, the background tasks grind to a halt if you are cutting.

The bottom line for me is that I need to throw even more money at Apple and at the external hard drive mfrs to get this edit package to whizz along.

There are lots of benefits to this system, but unless I am doing something wrong the data management is a real headache.

Andy

Andy Johnstone
Wild Dog Limited
film & multimedia production
http://www.wilddogworld.com

[Andrew Johnstone]

Ronny,

Thanks for your kind offer of help.

I actually had a one hour one to one session with Jas one of the BBC trainers who was down from Brum in Plymouth yesterday and it was very useful. I have ironed out several issues for me. One of the interesting things seems to be that FCPX works better with snapping on than Premier does as it minimises the magnetic timeline’s tendancy to make clips hops about in the work space – somethign that really annoys me! I am used to putting a clip in a spot and it stays where it is put..! #oldschool

I am afraid I am utterly auto-didactic and I have to find my own way of working and I have to wrestle with the beast until it is tamed, but Jas’ help was bang on and I have had to sheepishly admit that FCPX is not a shit as I first thought. (You won’t find me admitting that publicly on a forum though…ooops…!).

Part of the issue is how the BBC has set up it own workflow & media storage) which make sharing projects between users harder than it might other wise be, but we plotted a work around for that.

I am still not convinced that I will abandon Premier Pro yet for longer form projects or for work that has to go out to post/grading, but I have been impressed with how easy and fast it is to grade Slog footage in FCPX. The system is fast, even on my creakingly old iMac, but with the timeline now over 10 mins, the system is slowing down as I am pulling so much data off my Thunderbolt 2 project drive. The only solution to this I think is some new kit.

Anyway, thanks for your offer of further help and I’ll drop you an email of the forum.

Andy

Andy Johnstone
Wild Dog Limited
film & multimedia production
http://www.wilddogworld.com

[Andrew Johnstone]

Just back from a really interesting session with one of the trainers for BBC.

I find my self hating FCPX less than I did a few short hours ago which is a good ting. The ‘range’ tool is a clever thing and being able to select audio roles for each track in a clip is very clever. So perhaps I’ll end up liking this app more than I thought I might (it seems quite a few do) but I stand by the point that forcing so many people to go through so much paint to learn to cut on this platform was probably not a great idea.

Andy

Andy Johnstone
Wild Dog Limited
film & multimedia production
http://www.wilddogworld.com

[Andrew Johnstone]

Thanks Oliver and thanks all for comments on this thread.

I have settled into a way of working with FCPX that works, but still leaves me tearing my hair out over certain issues with this app.

I have a working layout now that is fine, if inflexible. My 24″ studio monitor is running the edit windows and timeline (or whatever it is called now)

My Right hand screen (main iMac screen) is for all my bins. I find, because I can’t scrub through clips in the viewer window, the most useful layout is to have the clips as a list, with the long preview window at the top of the list.

My script is running on my laptop and I can swing my mic (on a pivoting arm thing) down to record guide VO. Doing this is a lot easier now as this weekend I rebuilt my studio desk, replacing my old desk with a built in 2m wide workstation, “custom designed by a master-craftsman” (errr….me!)

What drives me potty is that even though this workspace is saved on my system and I am the only person using this machine, FCPX does not re-open at the start if the day with the workspace laid out properly and I have to manually drag one of the windows on to the LH monitor and then drag it to size. Anyway, when I have completed this house keeping at the start of the day things work well.

Someone mentioned that FCPX does not transcode, but ‘re-wraps’ data and stuffs it in the library. I would say ‘semantics’ – the bottom line in that the app likes to deal with data in its favourite flavour and It’s ProRes. When you have everything ingested, it flies through the work in a way that Premier struggles as it is managing data on the fly. Premier requires a much more powerful machine. I can’t grade in Premier on my system (2013 iMac) but grading my S-Log Sony FS7 rushes in FCPX works fine. The machine stutters form time to time, but that is mainly because it is pulling data from my Gtech thunderbolt project drive.

So on balance, speedy working (once you have done your ingesting and housekeeping) in FCPX is good. Where the system falls down is in the crappy way editing is implemented. All this guff about the magnetic timeline is just so much guff. Premier has a magnetic timeline that is so much better than FCPx because you can ignore it when you want to, there is still a ‘track tool’ that enables you to move everythign down the time line if you need to open up space (rather then the very clunky ‘insert gap’ tool in FCPX. Better yet, when you place a clip into the timeline in Premier the rest of the media stays where you want it to stay rather then hopping all over the place and requiring you to make adjustments. In FCPX I have yet to find out how to do a simple three point edit.

Premier maintains all the elegant simplicity of a classic NLE with simple tools like being able to add an audio fade between two clips by simply highlighting the edit, hitting ctrl+Click and selecting ‘apply default transition’ to the edit. The FCPX solution requires, detaching audio and applying a video transition (or one solution is ‘buy a plug in’…..agggggh! Third party/User created plugins…! Don’t get me started!) etc…Now try to relink the audio clip with the video clip…

The way FCPX keeps audio all pegged together is quite clever, but trying to pick up the fade handles on the ends of audio clips is really annoying and of course the is no Pen tool for quick key framing (Cmd+K on the highlighted clip with the playhead). Grrrrr!

I have managed to get to a point when I can cut a film on this system and I am over the major bumps in the road. That major bump was accepting the fact that it is not a clever as it thinks it is…

Andy

Andy Johnstone
Wild Dog Limited
film & multimedia production
http://www.wilddogworld.com