[Greg Fulcher]

Migrate your media to a fast external drive (Thunderbolt, at minimum). Only in an emergency would I ever consider storing footage on the same drive that runs the OS and applications.

To do so, copy the Library in question over to your external HDD, and then open it either by double-clicking on the copied library, or from within FCPX. Once you confirm everything is working fine, it’s OK to delete the original Library from the internal drive. Personally, I’d also back it up to another drive, and use an app to continue your backup on a daily basis (I am a huge fan of ChronoSync).

I suspect you’ll see great improvement in performance.

Good luck,
Greg

1013media | produce. edit. enable.
San Francisco, CA | http://www.1013media.com

[Greg Fulcher]

I’m grappling with the same issue, only for a logo (layered PSD file). On the right edge of the logo layer, is the same ‘artifact’ witnessed above. I’ve attached a screen capture of it. Like others, it looks great in PSD, and if un-rendered in FCP X, perfect as well. It’s only after rendering does it appear (flickers on and off, as there is a slight push of the graphic). FCP X outputs the file with the artifact, as well. [see below for fix]

I have found that whenever the layer edge (in PSD) is right up against the element edges, this occurs in FCP.X. My fix has been to add an element in PSD, just off screen, so that the actual imported layer doesn’t come into FCP.X tight against the elements’ edges. You can crop a few pixels off the layer in FCP.X to effectively remove the objects in PSD to increase the size of the layer. Not sure if I explained that well… Pre coffee, you see. Check out the image below — this is the layered PSD file as-imported into FCP.X. You can see the white dots (just a period from a text layer, merged with the logo layer before saving in PSD). I just crop those off in FCP.X, and problem solved!

1013media | produce. edit. enable.
San Francisco, CA | http://www.1013media.com

[Greg Fulcher]

Hey there, All… Last week I encountered this exact “problem” with my Panasonic AG-AC160. The camera has been performing flawlessly for several months, has never been dropped or taken a hit of any kind. Last night, I decided to investigate further the focus issue at near-full zoom, replicating the basic scenario from my shoot last week (I’m under NDA so I can’t share with you the ‘real’ footage).

I’ve posted it to the AG-AC130/160 group on Vimeo, so you can see the issue in action. https://vimeo.com/groups/ac160/videos/34816634

Camera settings are described in the video description.

After reading this thread, the explanation of the lens transition from macro mode makes sense, but I’m not convinced this isn’t a problem yet.
Thanks much! Shoot on!

-greg

1013media | produce. edit. enable.
San Francisco, CA | http://www.1013media.com

[Greg Fulcher]

Hey Mikey,

Just now reading this and your question… I posted a more comprehensive comment on the form-factor topic here:

https://vimeo.com/groups/ac160/forumthread:249526

I’ve also since uploaded two more test videos, with more to come… Glad you ordered one up! You’ll be thrilled with it, and I’d love to see your results and commentary on the vimeo group and here, as well.

1013media | produce. edit. enable.
San Francisco, CA | http://www.1013media.com

[Greg Fulcher]

I had the same “uh oh” moment…

1013media | produce. edit. enable.
San Francisco, CA | http://www.1013media.com

[Greg Fulcher]

Hey there Christopher…

Glad you found the footage useful. I’ll be posting more in the coming weeks & days (so feel free to check back or join the group and share your results, too).

I’ve not dabbled with 24p yet, only 1080i60 and 1080p30. Unless there’s a specific request to shoot with 24p, or a particular effect, I’ll likely stick with 1080p30, as it is versatile and playback is smooth. Also, VFR is enabled for non-60fps formats. I’ve only had opportunity to snag a couple of shots using VFR, at 60fps in 30p mode and have to say it looks damn fine. I’m uploading right now a clip to the group with those two shots (some crows flying around a radio tower at full-zoom and a jogger also at full optical zoom and then at 2x digital).

So, the flickering: I’ve found that when OIS is on, there are some issues with some types of shots. If it was indeed on, I would try turning it off and see if its a byproduct of that. I turn it off for any tripod shot, actually.

Also, out of the box, the auto/manual/infinity focus switch isn’t as it seems. When in manual mode, a few seconds after you focus, it would go and try to fine-tune, sometimes missing the mark entirely. You have to go into the menus and turn it off… Strange, but true. I forget the exact setting… don’t have the camera here in front of me.

Could you post the footage to the vimeo group?

Cheers,
-greg

1013media | produce. edit. enable.
San Francisco, CA | http://www.1013media.com

[Greg Fulcher]

Hi John,

I’m curious if you’ve found resolution to your question. I’m trying to see if FCP.X is a viable solution to an on-going, ever-growing project that requires monthly delivery of completed videos for 15 different automakers. Assets are of mixed size/type and cover each model in detail from 2005 to present-day and moving forward. Currently, for 2011-12 alone, there are over 8000 video clips.

I imported them into a new event, choosing to use references instead of copying the media to said event. They have been key-worded/tagged and organized by keyword lists in folders in the main event.

Editing with the reference files has worked fine for this initial delivery cycle, and I wanted to see if I could DUPLICATE the project to another drive so as to hand it off to one of my sub-contracted editors off-site.

Last night, I did just that, all 8000+ clips and 1.6TB of it.

1) it takes FCP.X a long time to open the project (5 minutes), and then it sits and spins for a bit before you can do anything.
[The drive the files reside on is an 8-drive Raid5 array with 8-channel eSATA. Throughput is 800MB/sec read, 720MB/sec write. Computer is a MacPro
3,1 with 16 GB of ECC Ram]

2) there are many ‘offline’ assets in the duplicated event, and each one seems to be a duplicate of itself. More specifically, there is an “Asset 123”, which is online, but without any metadata associated with it (no keywords or custom roles assigned) and an “Asset 123” which is offline, but has keywords/roles as-assigned. Some are JPEG images, most are video already transcoded to PR411 (LT).

Exploring the “original media” folder in this new, duplicated event reveals that each of the offline files in the event library also happen to have been appended with (fcp1).mov that you’ve asked about. Others are left un-touched. Of the 8000 or so total assets, 2400 of them are in this state.
The newly-created (fcp1).mov files are complete and playable, outside FCP.X.

I should add the clips in the event library within FCP.X have NOT been modified with the (fcp1), so I suspect there’s a mis-match between the event library and the clips copied (and renamed by FCP.X) to the duplicated event.

3) Try to delete one of the offline clips from the event library, and it takes FCP.X at least 5 minutes to do so and refresh, while deleting an online clip is a quick affair.

As an experiment, I isolated all of the (fcp1) files in the original media folder, and ran an automator script to remove the (fcp1), bringing the files back to their original names. Once done, I relaunched FCP.X and opened up the duplicated event. No change with the offline media, except now there is a second associated asset — a compound clip — bearing the same name that is also offline. (see image attached). There is also an “online” clip with the same name but with no contents (no duration, nothing), also seen in the attached image.

So very strange. I’ll continue to work with my referenced-asset event & projects, and might see if breaking the events apart by automaker, instead of having all of them in one event in folders, will help. I suspect this has to do with the number of clips I’m working with.

Thanks,
-greg

1013media | produce. edit. enable.
San Francisco, CA | http://www.1013media.com

[Greg Fulcher]

If you’re not on a full-size keyboard, Shift+Delete replaces the clip with a gap.

1013media | produce. edit. enable.
San Francisco, CA | http://www.1013media.com

[Greg Fulcher]

Hi Andy, thanks for your advice. I do have Motion 5 and have built many-a-template with it over the years, but wanted to see if it was possible to keep it within the FCP.X ecosystem entirely — some of the editors I hire aren’t proficient with Motion and are curious if they can use FCP.X for jobs I send their way.

The workaround you suggested, adding a new Compound Clip to the event browser, works intermittently as Tom discovered, too. I have found that it works right after relaunching the application (I’m still using a Trial version, mind you) but not after editing for a while. I’ve also found that every hour or so, the position bar becomes unresponsive / fails to update it’s position. After this occurs, much of the functionality diminishes, including the Make New Compound Clip.

Anyhow, where was I. Right. I created a new keyword collection in an “Elements” folder for the project event and was able to copy/paste the title clips into them one by each, tag ’em, assign roles and then drag ‘n drop them into the edit.

Thanks again for the tip…

Cheers to you all!

-greg

1013media | produce. edit. enable.
San Francisco, CA | http://www.1013media.com

[Greg Fulcher]

I agree with Carsten, as a user of CatDV Pro for several years now. At first, I wanted a tool that could reduce my digitizing time significantly, which it did beyond my wildest expectations. I now use it several times a week for a variety of media/asset management tasks (much of my media comes from clients and agencies electronically, devoid of any metadata, making it a nightmare to categorically locate).

I’ve wondered how Squarebox might approach the old FCP architecture and the new — thanks for the link, Carsten.

**to expand on one of my most time-saving workflows with CatDV, instead of logging (in this case, from betaSP) (yes, content is still widely distributed via betaSP) individual shots and manually applying a clip naming convention, I now load a “master” clip from tape, which includes all of the shots. I then run the “detect scenes” tool, which makes subclips that I can quickly batch-edit as like-shots, ratings… everything and anything.
-g

1013media | produce. edit. enable.
San Francisco, CA | http://www.1013media.com