Andrew Richards
Forum Replies Created
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My mistake, yes, the Playback tab. You have plenty of bandwidth with the G-RAID mini, but if it is very full and fragmented that will degrade performance a bit. You’ve got your Events on the G-RAID, right? For both Optimized and Proxy media, FCPX only puts that media in an Event’s storage. If you have your original media on the G-RAID, but your Event in your Home folder (in Movies), you will be pulling both Optimized and Proxy media from your internal drive.
Best,
Andy -
To be safe, I’d assume that FCPX exports based on the media it is connecting to (though I can’t say for sure), so the safe thing to do is to switch back to Optimized in Preferences > Editing prior to an export. It is just the one radio button to immediately switch everything, so it is easy to stay on the safe side.
If you have After Effects, you could do an export each way and do a difference map in AE to see if there is indeed a difference in exports from Optimized vs Proxy.
Incidentally, the likely culprit for your poor performance with Optimized media (which is ProRes 422 standard) is disk speed. Laptop hard drives, unless they are SSD, will not be able to deliver all the bandwidth you need for smooth operation with high bitrate codecs like ProRes 422. This is why the lower bitrate ProRes Proxy proxies are performing better for you.
Best,
Andy -
[Peter Wiley] “The local high schools now routinely get DVDs made of their musicals each year. What happens to these projects in a post-DVD world? Parents and grandparents like tangible products. “
Just to play devil’s advocate a little, do these high school plays get delivered on richly authored DVDs with deep custom menu structures and lots of DVD “extras”? Or are they pretty much pop’n’play discs that at most have a single menu with a “play” button?
Best,
Andy -
[Mark Morache] “Vimeo has a pro level for $199/year, and it streams on phones and pads. Could be a good way to go.”
I hadn’t seen the new Pro level, that’s cool. I’ve got a Plus plan, it was all there was when I signed up. The Approvals pages are particularly interesting. Vimeo is good stuff.
Best,
Andy -
The DVD and BluRay capabilities in FCPX are almost exactly what you have available in Compressor 3.5. Very rudimentary, not an authoring tool at all like DVDSP.
Best,
Andy -
[Walter Soyka] “You are far too polite! I have both a GTX285 and a Quadro 4000, and I think that “relatively poor support” is an incredible understatement.”
I’m not sure who is at fault either- it is Apple not letting NVIDIA in or NVIDIA not writing drivers for OS X? Probably Apple…
Best,
Andy -
[Dennis Radeke] “While this is absolutely true with regards to 64-bit, our commitment to metadata, file-based workflows, practical integration points between Adobe apps as well as competitive applications, all were happening well before CS5. These are things that FCP X is just now talking about and that only partially.”
True and fair points. However, I think the Mercury Playback Engine was the big eyebrow-raising feature that really started making FCP users jealous. The other goodies, at least from my personal anecdotal experience, were not tempting many FCP users to seriously consider leaving FCP for Premiere Pro prior to CS5. After all, FCP had been supporting metadata (albeit limited), file-based workflows, and round-tripping within its own suite since Final Cut Studio and Final Cut Studio 2. CS5 was the bucket of cold water that woke up a lot of long-time FCP partisans to take a serious look beyond their comfortable surroundings. Hence my contention that it was CS5 that leapfrogged FCS, rather than maintaining relative feature parity.
I’m not suggesting PPro was any kind of slouch prior to CS5, I’m just saying it didn’t generate much buzz among FCP users prior to CS5.
Best,
Andy -
[Walter Soyka] “I was wrong on the date, but I don’t think it changes my main point all that much: FCP7 was a relatively minor upgrade over FCP6, and FCP7 is not built for native file format editorial. I understand why some people will hang onto FCP7 as long as they can, but I also understand why some people will move now rather than waiting for FCPX to continue adding features.”
I agree, FCP7 really started sounding creaky when Premiere and Media Composer were able to work so much more effectively with camera-native formats. And I understand and agree that it feels like we’ve been waiting forever. It already feels like FCPX has been out forever- and it’s only been a month!
[Walter Soyka] “Since FCPX is not backwards compatible, no FCP editor can upgrade. All must migrate if they move on. Since FCP7 is EOL, why not use what works best today and re-evaluate FCPX once it has a more competitive feature set?”
Totally. From what I can tell, reading reports from the likes of Walter Biscardi and others, Premiere is similar enough to legacy FCP that there is hardly any learning curve at all. The fly in the ointment is the relatively poor support for CUDA cards in Macs these days (versus Windows, anyway).
Best,
Andy -
[Walter Soyka] “Perhaps you’ve forgotten the general disappointment over the FCP7 in 2009. Many users were putting up with FCP7 largely because Apple said the next release of FCP would “awesome.””
Terence and Philip had a good discussion around that in their most recent podcast. Worth a listen.
[Walter Soyka] “Apple’s competitors are not standing still, and some editors and facilities have been waiting on a big new FCP release since 2007.”
I have to call “since 2007” a bit of an exaggeration. Final Cut Studio 2 (FCP6 et al) was a huge release, and it shipped in May, 2007. It was the one that included Color for the first time, Motion finally got 2.5D, Soundtrack got a lot of enhancements, and it proved to be the last time Apple had a booth at NAB. ProRes was born. Walter Murch was at the booth giving demos. Final Cut Server was teased. This was the release that pushed FCP over the top in terms of broad acceptance in the very high end. FCP graduated from up-and-comer to heavy-weight player.
I don’t recall everyone seeing all that new hotness in the Spring of 2007 and collectively shrugging, deciding to wait for something even bigger. Maybe some did, but nothing could reasonably be considered lagging until FCP7 came out in September, 2009. That’s when the real widespread shrugging and deciding to wait for something bigger went on. Expectations had been built and were ultimately not met. Now we point to 2007 as the beginning of the end? I think most folks were pretty psyched about FCP in 2007. I bet a lot of the more conservative users waited until 2008 to upgrade to FCP6.
Apple clearly mismanaged expectations ahead of the release of FCPX, and everyone feels like they’ve been had. I don’t dispute that at all. But the idea that FCP had been uncompetitive and withering on the vine since 2007 is a stretch. Adobe only leapfrogged FCP capability-wise with its 64 bit CUDA PPro CS5 in 2010. Avid only embraced a little FCP-ishness the same year with AMA, the Smart Tool, and some third party I/O. It isn’t like FCP was eating anyone’s dust prior to Spring, 2010, and even then lots of people held fast hoping for a 64-bit FCP8 that never came.
Seems to me the real waiting for “awesome” was less than two years (September 2009 till June 2011), not more than four. Trouble was, when awesome showed up, it wasn’t the awesome everyone imagined.
Best,
Andy -
I think he means you can’t manipulate individual audio channels across cuts (L or J style) in the main timeline without detaching them from the video, thus putting them at risk of being moved out of sync (with no sync markers to let you know).
Even with mono tracks, FCPX displays all the audio married to video in the main timeline in aggregate. You can drill into individual clips to manipulate the discrete audio channels, (using the “Open in Timeline” option), but you are limited to edits within the scope of the single clip (you can’t highlight multiple clips and “Open in Timeline”).
This all makes handling mono audio channels separately rather wonky.
Best,
AndyEDIT: Oliver answered while I was typing.