[Dave Gage]

[Charlie Austin] “There’s a bunch of nice stuff in later versions of FCPX”

Nothing I need at the moment, as my work is fairly low end compared to what most of youse guys require.

[Charlie Austin] “Anna was/is running FCPX 10.0.8 on OS X 10.6.8 though, which doesn’t seem to work well… ;-)”

I did notice that, but I wanted to make the point that 10.0.4 is reasonably solid on 10.6.8. as we’ll still likely have more future posters stop by that may still be on Snow Leopard. The OS and FCP X upgrades don’t give me anything I need at the moment, so upgrading for the sake of upgrading is silly. But, I can only fight it so long. I do need Lion or ML to run Xcode and iBooks Author so thus the partition.

By the way, I tend to lurk more than post, but thanks for all you do here. There’s a few of you that do the lion’s share of heavy lifting around here. (Or in my case, I should say the “Snow Leopard’s” share.)

Thanks,
Dave

[Dave Gage]

[Craig Alan] “The only possible downside is accidentally hitting b, which would split a clip unintended. Hard to do that with the pointer becoming a blade.”

Craig,

For my edits, I’m constantly adding lower 3rd text annotations. Most of these I copy and paste in from elsewhere so I right-click on the text area choose “Paste and Match Style”. But, sometimes I just get the info in my head from elsewhere and come back and begin typing. I can’t tell you how many times in the past I’ve come back to FCP X and began typing into what appears to be the still selected text area. Well, sometimes it is and sometimes it’s not.

If I come back and decide to just type in info I just found elsewhere, the keystrokes begin doing all sorts of unintended actions which I then need to un-do. I have considered re-mapping all the keyboard short cuts so that there are no single key shortcuts, but I’ve messed this up so many times now, that I seem to have out-grown this problem. Time will tell. But anyway, I’m personally a fan of modifier keys, I make less mistakes when I’m moving quickly.

Dave

[Dave Gage]

[Charlie Austin] “10.6.8? oohh… my guess is that’s your problem. If you can, update to OS X 10.8.3, which is where we’re at now. That bug was introduced in FCP X 10.0.6 I think, and it took an OS update to fix it. The other “solution” would be to get a copy of FCP X older than 10.0.6, but I’m not sure how you’d do that”

Charlie,

I’m on 10.6.8 and FCP X 10.0.4 on an early 2011 MBP i7 with 16GB RAM and everything works fine. I have archived every version of FCP X that has come out for giggles, but the combo of my OS and version of FCP X is problem free. I have loaded OS 10.8.3 and FCP X 10.0.8 on a separate partition, but haven’t had a chance to play with it. I know for a fact that the Mountain Lion OS will “break” a lot of my older software, plus I have no time to mess with that and the slightly new OS learning curve. Someday.

Anyway, 10.6.8 and FCP X 10.0.4 work great together.

Dave

[Dave Gage]

[Aaron Peterson] “No Kernel panics and I have not done disk warrior.”

I suggest Disk Warrior also. I had “hardware problems” with an older Dual G5 for a couple of years and did troubleshooting with Apple, Macsales.com, local Apple repairs stores, and forums. I tried all the RAM and other hardware suggestions and nothing worked. I finally got off my cheap butt and bought the $100 Disk Warrior. It not only solved “slow” issues with my two laptops (one of which is identical to yours), but then for the fun of it with nothing to lose, I ran it on the Dual G5.

It turned out the directory structure was so hosed on that OS that I had trouble even getting it booted, but I was able to finally run Disk Warrior. It completely solved all the issues and has not crashed once since the fix.

In my experience, Repairing Permissions does virtually nothing (although I run it anyway), but Disk Warrior should be mandatory with every purchase of a Mac.

Good luck,
Dave

[Dave Gage]

[Craig Alan] ” It would be even cooler if they had a slot where you could swap out your media drives.”

Agreed. But, with the Seagate Momentus 750 GB Hybrid media drive, I just add/remove what files I need to external drives and it works really well. I also have a bus-powered FW800 drive that is dedicated to just backing up the Seagate media drive. It’s pretty easy to be anywhere with or without power and even be able to back it up.

Dave

[Dave Gage]

Bruce,

I agree and disagree with Tim. I have the exact same model MBP as you do, the i7, 17″ 8,3. I upgraded from 8 to 16 GB and it did absolutely nothing for my particular workflow. I edit three 45 minute classes every week that I export from Screenflow as H.264 files, edit in FCPX without using proxy or optimized files and it works great (I also never render). The upgrade to 16 GB made zero difference with my fairly low stress workflow. I do some color correcting and add audio filters, use a lot of lower 3rd annotations, and some transitions, but that’s about it.

But, I do agree that the RAM upgrade at Macsales.com (OWC) is a complete no-brainer and that you should do it. Their video tutorials are excellent (I pull them up on my wife’s laptop as I take apart my own).

I also, at the same time as the RAM upgrade, removed my optical drive, moved the boot drive to it’s place, and in the boot drive slot added a Seagate Hybrid drive as my media drive. I could not be happier with this upgrade. It benchmarks as fast as my 2-drive RAID 0 eSATA enclosure, but I can edit anywhere at any time with the extra media drive built-in. I even get 90-120 minutes of edit time on battery.

Sorry if I over answered, but it’s nice to see someone else with the same MBP. I do find the extra RAM helpful in general, but just not specifically for editing at this time. If I change my workflow, the RAM will be there if I need it.

Dave

[Dave Gage]

[Michael Garber] “FCPX tends to get sluggish with thumbs and waveforms. For instance, it is constantly redrawing waveforms in the timeline (although I have yet to test with .8 to see if it fixes any of that). This constant redraw can be a headache when editing.”

I agree. Unless I need to see the audio waveforms, I shut down the timeline thumbnail view with the little light switch hud. As someone suggested here, I’m experimenting with also closing the Inspector when not in use also. But, certainly shutting down the waveform re-draws makes a big difference, at least for me.

Dave

[Dave Gage]

One other trick that helps me and is similar to closing the Inspector, is to go down to the timeline view menu (light switch) on bottom right and select the far right view which doesn’t display any icons at all (blue bar). This greatly speeds up the timeline re-draws. And as suggested for the Inspector, I just change the view back when I need to see the audio waveforms.

Dave

[Dave Gage]

[Oliver Peters] “Expand the video and audio on the clips first (cntrl+S). When you apply a transition it will only be added to the picture. You can expand all clips and leave them expanded if you like. Unfortunately it’s not the default.”

Yes, but it can cause other problems with moving the audio. Take a look at this thread and the video example by David Eaks-
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/344/18364

As I said in posts here and have sent feedback to Apple, it sure would be nice if there was an option in the Inspector to not have the transition affect the audio (maybe a checkbox). You can’t even disable the audio portion of the transition in Motion.

Dave

[Dave Gage]

[David Eaks] “Everything seems to stay just as I left it through a reboot, with either workaround (nudge audio or nudge video). I can even nudge the clip back into place then make a cut and it has that same buggy behavior again.”
Whew, that’s good to hear.

[David Eaks] “I’m glad we got the basic behavior of the bug figured out, but I really dont like FCPX changing our edits without telling it too. Be it just a few thousand samples or not. I’ve sent feedback as well.”
I’m sure it’s a bug that hasn’t been pointed out to Apple yet.

[David Eaks] “OS X 10.8.2 FCPX 10.0.7”
Okay, I’m still back on 10.6.8 and 10.0.4 and the behavior is the same. I don’t know when I’ll get a chance to upgrade to Mountain Lion. It doesn’t fix a single thing for me and I know it will break a ton of 3rd party software that I will need to upgrade or dump completely. I suppose as soon as the next version of FCP X comes out (that I want and need) that no longer supports Snow Leopard, I will upgrade everything at that point.

Thanks again,
Dave