[Craig Alan]

I agree but the mac doesn’t crash with anything other than the dock and the thunderbay. I’ve edited for hours with a Pegasus on the same computer. Granted just still. And then I did an all day verify with dock and it didn’t crash.

So if I can rule the ram out or in it would help.

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV40, Sony Z7U/VX2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; FCP X write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

I’m in the same camp as you. BUT I just got a iMac 17 4K, top graphic card, OWC 32 gig of ram, Thunderbay 4xHGST 6TB drives.

Thunderbay comes with soft raid. Was using the softraid to certify drives (again something I’ve never done).

But they kept crashing – the mac will freeze and crash. Both with thunderbay and with an OWC thunderbolt dock.

contradictory symptoms in terms of what component is causing the problem.

Been working with customer support from softraid to narrow it down.

RAM may or may not be the issue but knowing one way or the other would be a help and its the prime suspect at this point. He has recommended memtest which uses command line terminal to run in single user mode.

The last time I tested ram I used rember which was a UI for memtest.

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV40, Sony Z7U/VX2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; FCP X write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

This used to an easy search now all links are out if date except built in diagnostic which happens pretty quick. Also with smart apple dies not seem to tap into this feature built into hard drives to warn of potential failure

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV40, Sony Z7U/VX2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; FCP X write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

Both and not either or. Fcp x evolved the browser to fit the fast and loose run and gone cameras are everywhere a zillion takes and angles are cheap work flow. But old school work flow which starts on the page not only has advantages but should be rediscovered. Too many projects are visual eye candy with as much nutritional value as any sugar product.

Not everyone will agree but I think magnetism is a huge evolutionary step beyond snapping for those that like to arrange/experiment on the timeline for these newer workflows. But sub clips were favorites in a less evolved state. And the timeline having fixed positions in time had advantages as well as disadvantages. Any program can create any of these projects.

I would love to see Apple continue to add -not change for change sake- new features specifically for different needs. And to enhance the effects/inspector/timeline to work more ergonomically which I think they are doing but rather slowly as of late.

I think it would be very cool to have both custom and presets for window layouts. Apple is pretty great at coming up with clean interfaces. How about one tailored to color correction, audio, for working on a single clip, (without turning it into its own timeline), etc. I think it could have a great future; but I am concerned that apple doesn’t care that much and could dump it in 5 years for something new and shiney.

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV40, Sony Z7U/VX2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; FCP X write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

Yeah I use FCP X for color as well but resolve for my visually creative students seems like a nice addition. Most of this type use photoshop which I don;t teach and again can’t budget for a monthly payment

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV40, Sony Z7U/VX2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; FCP X write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

Our classes are only an hour per day and I can teach FCP X basics in very short order. 2 minutes with a kid who never used it before will be doing a rough cut. 2 more minutes and they can adjust the audio, or do a transform or crop or basic color correction. One on one with someone showing you how to use the interface as you need it is just the fastest way to learn. Far easier to teach than FCP 7. Even basic smart collections and keywords are pretty easy to demonstrate and the kids take it from there. Though most of our projects at least in class are short form and don’t need a lot of organization. But events do.

How do you handle round tripping between after effects and FCP X and resolve for that matter?

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV40, Sony Z7U/VX2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; FCP X write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

I don’t disagree with any thing you are saying. The compliments (if that is the right word) I was referring to was: that they know how to use kino flos and fresnels and grip equipment and audio mixers and boom poles and coil cable, and camera operation. how to frame a shot. production vocabulary. how to write in script format and read and write a shot sheet. etc. As far as editing is concerned, it’s an advantage to already know the editing programs that are available at that school. At one college, a professor required that the students learn AVID. However for any of their projects, they were just required to turn in the exported video. So this student took a class on AVID and edited with FCP X on his laptop.

My initial concern was not that you couldn’t edit on FCP X but that it wouldn’t help them going forward. I chose FCP X because it fit our needs much better than AVID and I did not have the type of funding that would allow us to make monthly payments. But I was nervous that it wouldn’t get developed and that it wouldn’t be used by the colleges and the industry. I feel I made the right choice. Several of the colleges that initially decided not to use it at all, now use it about even with Adobe.

Traditional Hollywood studios and TV broadcast are still old school. But I think we’ll see more and more independent productions using FCP X.

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV40, Sony Z7U/VX2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; FCP X write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

Bill, have you used a thunderbolt-firewire adapter to connect firewire devices into a modern mac? The last couple of gens of Macs I had a lot of problems getting certain devices to show up on our Macs. Canon Cams were really hit or miss (canon used a slightly different standard than others for firewire). What I do for tape is use a AJA Ki Pro. It transcodes it to Pro Res 422 onto a drive, which could be used like any external drive. But you loose stop start detection – aka clips. You can also connect the Ki Pro to a monitor to see the footage you are capturing.

A nice benefit is you can continue to work on other edits.

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV40, Sony Z7U/VX2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; FCP X write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

Thought it was brought up whether it was good to go day 1. Not by me. This is also a debate forum centered around FCP X merits.

You overlooked, by choice I suspect because it didn’t meet your agenda, my opening line: “Like any other software I think FCP X now has its pros and cons but it’s a great program for my needs.”

You don’t feel it needs to round trip better with say Motion?

You don’t feel its ability to handle several layers of audio could be better?

You don’t think it should make the codec of each clip clear?

Just Critiquing my post is the true waste of words.

My concern in switching to FCP X (which I did do and stopped using FCP 7 asap and did not try to get it to behave like FCP 7) as a teacher was very real. If it failed to to be taken seriously by the industry it would be a bad choice. This was a debate taken on by all the local film schools which was a another concern. My students that go to film school get complimented on knowing the skills that are used in their programs. I like to use all industry standard stuff.

If you feel this makes me an ignorant non-believer toward the NLE messiah, FCP X, then you have freedom of religion in this country. Enjoy it. But I suggest you swallow your condescension. It’s a waste of words and counterproductive.

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV40, Sony Z7U/VX2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; FCP X write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

Like any other software I think FCP X now has its pros and cons but it’s a great program for my needs.

On day one I was pretty pissed off about a couple of pretty basic things.

One was the EOL of FCP legacy. It was just too central to the work flow of too many film makers to just end its life without a good deal of continued support and a much more developed replacement.

If Apple were a small company that was hanging on to a non-profitable product and issued a statement to the effect that it just wasn’t financially sound to continue to update it then its just how the digital age rolls.

But that was not the case.

FCP X at day one had a lot of problems. It’s hard to remember all of them but the one that I just couldn’t believe was having very little control over how and where media was housed.

One library for all your projects?

And only on the root level of any drive.

By default your system drive.

Seriously?

Yes there was a workaround: sparse bundles.

Which were tedious to create in Disk Utility.

CreateDiskImage saved the day here (copy paste function would be nice – but a great little app that just works).

BUT disk images have about the same odds of getting corrupted as any drive, which doubles your chances of loosing access to your project. On the other hand, it does make backing up very easy and perhaps makes it less likely to have sloppy organization in the finder.

If you did want access to media from a particular project that was not the one you were working on, you needed to open the given sparse bundle, not just navigate to the media you wanted to import from within FCP X.

The other problem at day 1 (and this in some ways continues to this day) from the perspective of a film teacher (at any level of the educational system) is its lack of acceptance by the Hollywood community. At this point if you are a film maker and you edit on FCP X no one cares. But there were people during the FCP 3-7 days that made a living with just FC. Not generalists just FCP editors. X changed that. There were only two NLEs that the industry cared about back then. FCP and AVID. And at the time FCP X came out there was a feeling that if Apple nailed FCP 8 with a major update that AVID might loose even more of its hold on the film and TV industry. No one took Premier seriously at that time. Though independent PC users did use it.

Even now there are things about the FCP Interface that feel annoyingly like an annoying consumer product. Yes I hate this aspect of Apple’s current software design even for products and apps I use on a consumer level. I want to export not share. I want to know what codec my media is in not have daddy take care of it for me. The Vimeo export doesn’t tell you H.264 or High Profile H.264 just its resolution. FCP X’s “optimized” means don’t worry about it (maybe transcoded maybe not). How hard would it be for FC to just report AVC-Ultra or imported as such and such transcoded to Apple Pro res 422. For example here’s a copy of a segment from the user manual from FCP 7.

To choose an Easy Setup for transcoding HDV
Choose Final Cut Pro > Easy Setup.

Choose one of the following from the Format pop-up menu:

Apple Intermediate Codec

Apple ProRes 422

Click the Use pop-up menu to see all of the Easy Setups related to your choice in the Format pop-up menu.

You can further refine the list by choosing a specific frame rate from the Rate pop-up menu.

Choose an appropriate HDV Easy Setup from the Use pop-up menu.

Important: Make sure to choose an Easy Setup that matches the format of your HDV source tapes.

Note: The Apple ProRes 422 Easy Setup option supports only 1080p24 HDV. You should use this codec when you have 24 fps footage stored with 3:2 pull-down in a 1080i60 HDV signal.

Click Setup.

The corresponding capture, sequence, and device control presets are loaded, as well as A/V device settings.

Simple enough for someone learning the program; informative and detailed enough for any pro. Can’t say the same of HDV though it was the cheapest option for many ‘prosumer’ film budgets. (Canon XL2/Sony PD150/170).

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV40, Sony Z7U/VX2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; FCP X write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.