[Fred Turner]

Thanks, Claude, appreciate the suggestion! I had thought of that as well, but I didn’t want to fool w/ the aggravation of tape. After all, I’ve just recently been trying to get my last bit of tape footage archived onto server/RAID!

I wound up connecting my Rode VideoMicro from my G85 via mini RCA cable, plugging it in to my OWC ThunderBolt 2 Dock (didn’t work directly into MBP15 Mid 2015, I’m guessing because of power, which the mic does not have on its own).

Still odd to me that QT Player can record straight from the DV input while FCPX cannot. I guess you could record that way while watching the video in FCPX, then sync them up after, thus avoiding the tape recording and import process…

Thanks again,
Fred

[Fred Turner]

Hey Tadeas—

Wow, that sounds like a cumbersome project! …from a we-can’t-ever-get-started-editing standpoint anyway. ???? Will be cool to be able to condense years of building into a half hour or hour film.

Q1: Sounds to me like you already have a pretty good system for accumulating and storing the footage. I really like the triple-location redundancy. If you start to go over your 4TB capacity, for storage/archival, I’d say just add another drive at each location. And like Tangier said, make sure to spin them up and do a read of the whole drive once a year or so.

Q2: I may be a bit different, but I like to organize my media in folders, usually starting w/ date, e.g. “2018.07.27 Panama City Beach Trip”. Then for a new “project” (not an FCPX “Project”), I make a Library (or Event) to match that folder name, but I don’t copy the media to the Library in most cases. So, you could possibly just create a Library on your MBP, hook up your working 4TB drive(s), import your media by linking not copying, and work on it that way. As long as you arranged your footage in the same hierarchy on each disk or set of disks, they would be interchangeable later if one were to fail, get lost, etc.

As Tangier said, FCPX will autosave Library snapshots as you go, so just make sure you are backing those up and/or copying offsite, and you’ll be able to recover your work in the event of disaster. For better performance, prior to starting your edit, you may want to invest in a TB3 RAID and copy one of your source disk sets onto that to work from.

Q3: I can’t imagine the latency would be tolerable in a purely online media workflow. However, I guess Google Drive would be caching files locally and syncing changes as you worked. Perhaps you could store your Library w/o media there for safe keeping? Not sure if that would demolish your Internet connection tho w/ all of the reads and writes that FCPX would be doing. And if you wanted to store your media in Google Drive, you’d obviously need a volume big enough to locally cache all that footage.

Hope this helps. Good luck!
Fred

[Fred Turner]

Whoops…somehow missed Joe Marler’s post during my initial read. Obviously most of my post is rehashing what he already said. ☺ Let us know what you find!

[Fred Turner]

[Steve Connor] “FCPX is very dependent on the GPU and the Intel one on the Air isn’t great, your previous MBP probably had a faster GPU.

Definitely worth doing a speed test on the drive as well.”

Intel HD Graphics 6000 should be fine, though, especially since we’re talking ProRes, and don’t even need any QuickSync functionality.

I agree about speed test on the drive. Also, Mandy, I’d recommend copying some of that footage to your internal drive (may have to clear some space first…looks pretty full) and testing there for comparison. ProRes @ 1080p and 720p shouldn’t be so demanding that a “current” MacBook Air and decent enough USB3 HD cannot handle it. One other thing, try arranging your windows so that you can have Activity Monitor up in the background while you attempt to view/scrub, then note if it looks like your processor cores are fully pegged. If so, you may be running out of CPU power (although that would seem unlikely to me).

[Fred Turner]

[Jeff Kirkland] “Apple have never been afraid to adopt the latest and greatest at the expense of older hardware and software. It’s part of their DNA. If we use their stuff, it’s part of the deal.

The alternative is to continue support and become like the bloatware that was the Windows platform – made almost unworkable by the need to pile code base upon code base in an effort to continuously support legacy apps and hardware.

No thank you.
“

Jeff, I understand your appreciation for a modern NLE on a modern OS, etc, but this forced march does not NEED to be this way for you to have modern tools. Having everything updated to the latest version ALL the time is often not practical, affordable, or desirable. But there’s simply no need to make the cutoff so recent.

Apple is aggravatingly almost gleeful in their enthusiasm to cut off things that people NEED AND DEPEND ON that’s more than twelve days old. Think about this again: FCPX 10.4.1 cut out 50% of the OS releases supported by 10.4.0 (difference of 0.0.1) and only runs on THREE (3!!!) releases of macOS. And 10.4.0 only supported systems back about a year. Gimme a break. It doesn’t have to be this way to still be good and modern.

Fred

[Fred Turner]

[Mark Smith] “I get your point about options but realistically how long do companies have to support legacy software ?”

Certainly not forever…I’m not even suggesting Apple *support* FCP7 in this case. Just stop making newer releases only run on such a small number of OS releases. Hell, I even thought it was pretty danged restrictive when FCPX 10.3.4 to 10.4 cut the supported OSes down to 10.12.4 thru 10.13.2 or so, but at least it was still 2 major release versions. If Apple hadn’t made the current OS— which is still maturing and still needs some debugging— the ONLY version upon which FCPX 10.4.1 could run, the FCP7 option via Sierra would still be viable. Now we have to make a choice to forego one or the other.

I know this had to happen at some time or another. But slamming the door on all but the 3 most recent builds of High Sierra is WAY too restrictive. ESPECIALLY given the overly fast pace w/ which Apple rolls out new, full OS releases (annually). Just think if they supported a mere 2 systems back (current + 2) and instead of racing to release every year, produced better-polished upgrades every *other* year. That would give you nearly 6 years of “trail time” before you had to cut off whatever old program you were trying to retain use of (FCP7 or otherwise), rather than 6 months.

FT

[Fred Turner]

Thanks for listing all of the newer/better/higher stuff available since FCP7. Of course there is. Of course the foundations are different. Of course FCP7 is long-since EOL’d…I didn’t say I wanted an update to it. Of course it’s time to “move on”.

But you’re missing the point— you’re talking about 7 years of advancements in video…I’m just talking about a coexistence that was possible on the latest FCPX mere _days_ ago. For those occasions when one might want to access an old FCP7 project on a system running the newest FCPX, that could be done 0.0.1 releases ago…just days prior to now! I cannot fathom that macOS 10.12.6, released just a few months ago, is such a dinosaur it’s simply incapable of handling the massive jump in technology [hint: sarcasm] from FCPX 10.4.0 to 10.4.1.

And you also missed the point that, again, forcing such an incredibly narrow operating system window is inconsiderate and hurts more than just one single program like FCP7. Not everybody wants to (or can!) upgrade every piece of software they have to the latest version all the time to satisfy the frenetic pace of minimum OS requirements Apple seems to gleefully apply. It’s unnecessary and aggravating. And it breaks other crap.

Instead of assuming that everyone is always fine running the veryvery latest OS all the time, Apple should consider that some of us would like to have a little greater choice in the matter. HEVC doesn’t work prior to High Sierra (although why couldn’t it…it’s just a codec??)? Fine, don’t make it available in FCPX pre-HS. ElCap or Yosemite can’t handle a certain function in an update to FCPX? Fine, disable that function for those systems. But stop kicking OS releases to the curb so quickly, especially when the *entire* system version changes once a year.

Seriously. Only THREE OS point releases for 10.4.1?? Really??

FT

[Fred Turner]

To try to belatedly answer your last question: it is my understanding that HEVC primarily yields equivalent quality at lower data rate (and therefore smaller file size) than H.264. But the flip side of that is that you should be able to increase the quality/fidelity of your compressed footage if you give an HEVC stream/file the same data rate as you might have used for H.264.

Hope this helps,
Fred

[Fred Turner]

Yep, well put. It’s that damned middle part! ???? Seems like there’d be some creative workaround to manage this. What about something akin to the OfflineRT format? Those clips are 320×240 for DV, while DV is 720×480. And apparently, it was smart enough to accommodate the change in frame size (from the manual):

Using Full-Resolution Graphics in a Low-Resolution, OfflineRT Sequence

Even though your OfflineRT sequence is set to small image dimensions, as you edit, you can import and use your full-resolution still graphics in your low-resolution project. Therefore, it’s not necessary to create your graphics with two different dimensions for offline and online editing.

When you edit graphics into your sequence that are larger than that sequence’s frame size, Final Cut Pro automatically resizes them to fit. For example, while working at offline resolution, your sequence frame size is 320 x 240. If you edit in a still graphic that was created with a frame size of 720 x 480, Final Cut Pro sets the Scale property of this graphic (shown in the Motion tab of the Viewer) to 50 percent to fit the sequence’s
320 x 240 frame size. Generators used in your sequence always inherit the dimensions of the sequence they are in.

When you create your full-resolution sequence for online editing, the dimensions of your graphics and generators are automatically set to the proper dimensions.

I guess this probably only worked for original video of a certain size/codec (like DV), wouldn’t work for what Phillippe is trying to do…

FT

[Fred Turner]

I would think you could pretty easily batch convert your initial 4K footage (it’s _recording_ in ProRes?) to 2K/1080p using Compressor or MPEGStreamClip, then edit that. Once you’re done, disconnect the media and relink to the 4K stuff, assuming they’re the same length and start w/ the same frame at 0:00:00.

The part in the middle is what I’d be hazy on…how do you make sure the sequence scales the replaced footage correctly. Someone else would have to answer that. Maybe David could humor us and give his recommendation on the middle part… ☺

Fred