[Dave Gage]

Just got back in and emailed it to you.

Dave

[Dave Gage]

Andreas,

The screenshot didn’t show up, but I can email it to you if you’d like to see it.

Thanks,
Dave

[Dave Gage]

[Andreas Kiel] “let me know about features you like to have.”
It’s not quite working for me yet. I uploaded a screenshot, hopefully it shows up okay. Once I click okay on the error window, the program opens, but no drives show up. This may well be because I have 3 partitions on my main boot drive and also I have a new drive I just installed a couple of days ago when I removed the Optical Drive, but it’s not currently mounted.

Dave

[Dave Gage]

Andreas,

Really cool and a quick turnaround! I saw your post over at fcp.co also. Does the “S” in “SDH” stand for Spherico?

Thanks,
Dave

[Dave Gage]

[Julian Bowman] “but more so was curious if my BU drive also having the projects on them at the same time is going to be an issue as FCPX says it won’t load one. I think it ignores the BU version but was just curious if others new.”
If Events and Projects are in the correct locations for FCP X, it will see them. I never got around to buying Event Manager, so I still just manually move stuff around before I boot FCP X. As I said, I’m use to doing this before opening FCP X, so I don’t give it a second thought.

My boot drive/Movies folder has Events and Projects, but I hide them from FCP X by sticking them in folders called:
“Final Cut Events NOT-USING”
“Final Cut Projects NOT-USING”
Most of the time the main Events and Projects folder on my boot drive are empty.

Dave

[Dave Gage]

Julian,

I have two internal drives in my MBP. If I don’t want the 2nd drive to be on the Desktop, I just right-click on it and “eject it”. This seems to work fine for me. Yes, it is a thing that you would need to remember to do before you launch FCP X, but like all the other silly workarounds and hoops we must jump through to make it through the day, you get use to it.

I do agree that it would be nice to be able to eject a drive once inside FCP X.

Dave

[Dave Gage]

[Jason Jenkins] “I also have a 17″ 2011 Macbook Pro, and I just replaced my optical drive with a 750GB HDD. I haven’t had a chance to edit off the HDD yet, but I got it to do just that when I want to go mobile.”
Please keep me posted on how it goes. We all basically have the same MBP.

I don’t have an office anymore, nor do I care to, so I’ve been trying to get a nice mobile editing setup set up for at home and out. I just bought one of these:
https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Seagate/ST750LX003/

I’ll move the boot drive over to the optical slot and put this in where the boot drive is now. Benchmark sites say you can get 200MB/s working off this hybrid HDD with the SATA 6.0Gb/s connection. For what I do, this should be plenty. I should have it working by the end of next week, so I can post back here with my actual benchmarks.

I had a thread over a year ago and you had mentioned that you bumped up to 16GB of RAM. I’ve been too broke, but with the price down to $95, it’s hard to say “no” now. I’ll get that going in the next couple of weeks also.

Next year, I’ll look into replacing the boot drive with an SSD and see if the external ThunderBolt RAID 0’s have come down in price.

Thanks,
Dave

[Dave Gage]

[Dave Gage] “Here’s some numbers from an 1:03:00 class from yesterday:

Original ScreenFlow file: 2.78 GB
ProRes 422 Export: 67 GB
ProRes 422 LT Export: 49 GB
H.264 (data rate- 2000 kbps): 942 MB (look great by the way full screen)
—

I will try the H.264 file this weekend and create a Proxy from it and see how it edits, then export from the “original media”. Because this is a screen capture of an Adobe Connect class streamed off of their servers, the fps and sync is not great anyway. It is highly unlikely I would do any color correction for these classes, so Proxy should be fine. It’s not likely I would need to go back and re-edit any of these classes, but if I keep the .screenflow doc and the H.264 file, I could if I needed to. There’s no way I can warehouse the ProRes 422 files with 3 classes a week.

I’ll post back with the results.”

I got busy, but got a chance today to edit one of the classes with an H.264 export from ScreenFlow. Here’s what I came up with:

1. ScreenFlow exported file was: H.264, PCM 48k, video data rate: 3000 kbps, size: 1600×1000, 54 min. long, final file size: 1.76 GB.

2. Used my 2-drive RAID 1 enclosure via FW800 for media/Events/Projects. (I could have connected via an eSata ExpressCard, but wanted to see how it felt with FW800 first). This is all with my Early 2011 i7 MBP 17″ with 8GB RAM.

3. Decided to try it first with “Original Media”. Next time, I’ll see if it’s any better with Proxy, but this went fine.

4. Did my edits on a 720p, 30P Project, did not render. Exported standard Pro Res 422.
—

Conclusions:

It was fine. A couple of short beach balls, but not much problem at all. I can try it with Proxys, but it may not save time if I’ve got that going on in the background while I’m editing. I thought FCP X did surprising well with the compressed H.264 format.

The H.264 quality is more then sufficient for the low-quality video captures I’m getting via the Adobe Connect servers (I think they only put out about 10-15fps and because of the Internet delay, the audio is not quite in sync with the mouth movements).

The FW800 connection was fine too. As much as I’d like to say I’ve seen big differences between a FW800 and eSata connection, I haven’t. I’ve gotten tired of trying to edit in different locations and dragging around external drives (powered and non-powered). I broke down last week and bought a new Hybrid HDD drive to replace my optical drive (although I will move my boot drive to the optical slot). The benchmarks I’ve seen should put this Hybird media drive at about twice as fast as the external RAID 1. (When I get time, I’ll also convert the RAID 1 to RAID 0 for when I’m working at home and see if it out performs the new internal Hybrid drive.)

That’s my story. If I come up with any other significant info, I’ll post back at this thread with an update.

Dave

[Dave Gage]

[Craig Seeman] “BTW there’s a ScreenFlow form although it could use more presents from users.”

Did you mean forum?

Thanks,
Dave

[Dave Gage]

Thanks for the replies. I will run some tests tonight with FCP X and see how it goes.

I have enough editing chores on these class videos that I need to do it within FCP X. The built-in editing features of ScreenFlow are impressive, but I need more.
—

Here’s some numbers from an 1:03:00 class from yesterday:

Original ScreenFlow file: 2.78 GB
ProRes 422 Export: 67 GB
ProRes 422 LT Export: 49 GB
H.264 (data rate- 2000 kbps): 942 MB (look great by the way full screen)
—

I will try the H.264 file this weekend and create a Proxy from it and see how it edits, then export from the “original media”. Because this is a screen capture of an Adobe Connect class streamed off of their servers, the fps and sync is not great anyway. It is highly unlikely I would do any color correction for these classes, so Proxy should be fine. It’s not likely I would need to go back and re-edit any of these classes, but if I keep the .screenflow doc and the H.264 file, I could if I needed to. There’s no way I can warehouse the ProRes 422 files with 3 classes a week.

I’ll post back with the results.

Thanks,
Dave