Brett Sherman
Forum Replies Created
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Second one.
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Sluggishness when having many events open at the same time. However, I will say this was an even greater problem when FCP 7 had to access large amounts of material from multiple drives. And dealing with sparse bundles. It works for me, but there are pitfalls and limitations.
Biggest time savings. FCP X speed with finding footage when not bogged down. And FCP X almost never crashes and when it does I don’t lose anything. I calculated that I probably saved about 40 hours over the year with this compared to FCP 7.
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On the OP. There’s something that would rub me the wrong way about an editor totally dismissing X. While it may not be everyone’s cup of tea, there is a lot in there that editors should like. If they can’t find anything to like, I would start to wonder how good of an editor they really are. Good editors are open-minded, dedicated to their craft, always looking for new ways to do things – not merely followers of the latest trends. Also, h8rs are no fun to work with.
So if I were hiring an editor for Avid if they also knew X and had a balanced review of it, I think that might indicate a maturity and confidence in their skills.
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No it doesn’t. But I did a few tests with a trial version of Episode with x264 and found that x264 took longer but didn’t produce noticeably better results. But this is all subjective of course. I do think Turbo.264 hit the nail on the head for quality:speed:bit-rate balance.
I haven’t tried x264 on Compressor. Didn’t know it was there. Is it an add-on? I have no doubt it beats Apple’s H.264 implementation which has always been rather crappy.
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What makes less sense to me is why projects have to go in events. I think just about everyone is going to create an event that just contains projects. Why not have a library automatically separate events and projects so you wouldn’t have to go through the extra step of creating a special event to contain your projects. Not to mention if true sharing happens with events down the road, it will be much harder to sort out when projects are in it. Synchronizing two concurrently open events could be basically just a merge. When you add projects in the mix it gets really difficult.
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While I think Compressor is a worthwhile tool to have in your belt for $50 (same goes for Motion), I currently don’t use it for the type of operation you’re doing.
I export FCP X as a master file (ProRes) for higher quality. Then I drop that file in Turbo.264 software edition (also $50 I believe) to create a compressed MP4 file for uploading. It’s much faster and does a better job of making a small file size while retaining quality. Apple’s H.264 encoder really only works at high bit rates, which means longer upload times.
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One reason alone that Compressor is worth the $50 is that it is the only way to get custom settings into the Share window in FCP X. I also find I use it to make one-off DVDs when I don’t want to do it through FCP X.
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If you use “external” media rather than “managed” media. You can make a library that contains all of your finished projects. When a project is completed drag a copy of the event containing your project into that library. That way you’d be creating a repository of projects. Of course to make changes you’d have to go find the original library, but at least it would show you at a glance all of your projects.
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It’s definitely a choose your poison. No reason you can’t do what you need in either Premiere or FCP X.
For me, the transition to FCP X was a lot easier than the reputation would suggest. The other editor at my organization also had no trouble, and he’s not the best at learning new things. By far the hardest transition I made with NLE’s was Media 100 to Avid about 12 years ago and I was younger and more nimble then.
But as they say, results may vary. Some people just do not take to the FCP X timeline structure. For me it was not hard.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “When you open a job, how do you know which 50 bundles to open?”
Easy. Create a folder in sparse bundle that contains my projects(timelines) called “Bundles to Launch”. While I’m working on the project when I’ve mounted a sparse bundle that contains an event I use in the timeline, I drop an alias of the drive in that folder. Then the next time I open the “Bundles to Launch” folder and OS X goes through and mounts all the sparse bundles for me.
It worked pretty well. Kept the number of events open down. But my new workflow will have to be more based on the timeline with supporting events dragged into the library from some sort of repository. The tricky thing with this is the location of the events is going to be divorced from the location of the media. With my previous system, events and media always resided on the same volume. Now, I’ll have to maintain a list of the logical drives that need to be mounted for each job. Probably a similar “Drives to Launch” folder.
The advantage of the new system is that more than one person can work with the same media at a time. Before that wasn’t possible. Although the times that happened were extremely rare. There are two of us and we don’t work concurrently on the same job.
[Jeremy Garchow] “What is Job A now? A Project? Or a bundle?
Job B has to have a Library as well, so you’d have to have a Library on Job B, and yes, you could copy your Event from Job A to Job B. If you have already Consolidated the managed media out of the Library, then you’d delete the media out of the Event, update to a Library and relink Job B to the media on the NAS.”
I guess I’m using Job and Project interchangeably. A Job to me is one or a few timelines (projects) on the same subject.
My question is what does FCP X do when you convert a project that uses an event that is missing? Can it later recognize that event if it comes from another library that you’ve already converted?