[Hamdani Milas]

Once again, thanks Joe for the detailed response and most helpful suggestions.

In 6 years of working almost full-time with FCPX I’ve learned its few quirks and glitches and have successfully run the usual routines to fix any unexpected behaviour. I’ve always marvelled at FCPX’s ability to save the very last editing action prior to now rare crashes and have never lost work. But this issue has got me completely flummoxed.

Prior to the macOS system update to Mojave and FCPX 10.4.8 everything was running smoothly and reliably. Maybe I should have known better! ☹

[Joe Marler] “Unfortunately there is no documented way to delete those, but if you set library properties to store cache in a separate folder they will be placed in an .fcpcache bundle. You can safely delete the entire thing if needed.”
Useful tip, thanks. I’ll try this, see if it makes a difference.

[Joe Marler] “There are other scenarios where render files will not be used even if they exist and are valid. Details: https://www.fcp.co/forum/4-final-cut-pro-x-fcpx/31621-help-losing-renders-a...”
Interesting thread, I’ve observed some of what’s described here with regard to un-rendered clips / effects. The final post in that thread from Joema is notable.

[Joe Marler] “If you have another machine or can boot MacOS from a separate drive and do a clean provisional FCPX install without any plugins, that might be a path forward. I realize steps like that are aggravating and time consuming.”
Agree this is an essential troubleshooting step. Neither my ancient MacBook Pro or Mac Pro are Mojave compatible but I’ll try installing FCPX on a Mojave boot drive, at least it will eliminate a plugin issue. I’ll also try to locate a machine with Mojave / FCPX 10.4.8.

I’ll continue to investigate this and will report back with any useful findings.

Thanks!

Independent producer, director, cinematographer, writer, editor
Milas Film Productions, Hong Kong
http://www.milasfilm.com

[Hamdani Milas]

The red line issue gets weirder.

In another project timeline there are two lengthy clips from the same single source video, ProRes with 1920×873 dimensions for a widescreen appearance (used this workflow before with no issues). The first clip shows it’s rendered and there’s no red line above it. The second clip shows the red line above. (As does the animated title that follows) The second clip plays without issue.

If the second clip is selected and a Compound Clip is created from it the red line disappears and the clip renders.

If that Compound Clip is opened in its own timeline there is no red line above and the clip renders.

Oh! Maybe I spoke too soon. As I write this the first clip now has a red line above it. Right out of the blue! No action was carried out to trigger it. Random and unpredictable. And in this case the portion of the clip with the title above it stalls on playback while the audio continues to play. Following the title the remainder of the first clip plays okay.

Weirder and weirder.

Hamdani Milas

(Image has some clip names obscured for confidentiality.)

Independent producer, director, cinematographer, writer, editor
Milas Film Productions, Hong Kong
http://www.milasfilm.com

[Hamdani Milas]

Hi Joe

Thanks very much for taking the time to read my post and for providing such detailed and useful suggestions. Here are the results of further checking:

[Joe Marler] “Can you examine the characteristics of that clip and compare that to the timeline characteristics? Does the frame rate match? Is the clip or timeline interlaced? Has any retiming or optical flow been used on that clip? What are the clip attributes – IOW if you play it in Quicktime and do CMD+I, what does the movie inspector show?”
All the red line problem clip characteristics match the project settings; frame rate 25fps, dimensions 1080 etc. All clips concerned are 1080p and either ProRes 422 or ProRes 422HQ, there are no interlaced clips and the project is also set to progressive. QT’s movie Inspector confirms the above. There is 2x retiming on the clip shown in the screen grab but red lines do also occur above clips, titles or transitions, with no retiming. Interestingly, if the retiming is reset to normal on that clip the redline shows on half the original duration and white unrendered dots on the other half.

[Joe Marler] “What camera did the ProRes material come from? “
These are not camera files, they are either master files, output from Final Cut Pro (earlier version) or After Effects renders.

[Joe Marler] “If there are clips which sometimes cause the problem and other clips which never cause the problem it might be worth examining those side-by-side using Invisor’s comparison viewer:”
I tried this and the clips compared show similar metadata and with nothing unusual apparent.

[Joe Marler] “You can also verify you are on the latest version of Apple Pro Video Formats. “
Yes, latest – Pro Video Formats ver. 2.1.1. I also notice several previous versions are also installed. Presume this is usual?

[Joe Marler] “Re Disk Utility, it will only run in advisory or read-only mode on the system drive unless the Mac is booted in Recovery Mode:”
Yes, Disk First Aid was run in Recovery Mode. Also booted in Safe Mood to run those under the hood routines as well.

[Joe Marler] “After running that if you have never rebuilt Spotlight Indexes you can do this on each drive”
Rebuilt the Spotlight indexes for the external media drive concerned. The red line problem persists.

[Joe Marler] “It’s not a very stringent test but you could try Apple diagnostics: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202731“
Tried this too (wasn’t aware of this startup routine, thanks) and the result was No Issues Found.

[Joe Marler] “This is especially troubling and could indicate some external commonality. E.g, a plug in, system config issue or an incipient hardware problem”
I have well over a hundred plug-ins from FXFactory, Coremelt, motionVFX and others. FXFactory enables easy disabling of their plug-ins and I tried this but the problem remained. I didn’t dare venture through the hoop-jumping that disabling the other plug-ins would require!

[Joe Marler] “Is all media on locally attached HFS+ or APFS drives, nothing on NTFS, ExFAT or NAS drives?”
Yes, all attached media drives are HFS. The system drive is APFS.

[Joe Marler] “You might check if any 3rd-party kernel extensions are installed by typing this command in terminal: kextstat | grep -v com.apple”
This was interesting, it pulled up 14x 3rd-party kexts. 11 of them could be accounted for but 3 were unfamiliar. I shall research these later and if they’re not related to any current hardware or app I’ll delete them.

I also tried logging in as another user with admin rights and the red line issue prevails.

The issue seems to be that FCPX is having a problem with clips rendered in Apple’s very own ProRes editing format in FCPX which is optimised for ProRes. It’s seemingly illogical. I shall try generating new lossless versions of problem clips and importing / optimising them into FCPX to see if this changes anything. But it’s not just imported clips that generate the red line, titles and transitions can also trigger it.

Another option in the process of elimination is to wipe the system drive, do a clean install of Mojave and migrate all apps etc from a CCC back-up. The random issues are just the best aren’t they!

I’ll report back with any new findings. Meanwhile, if you or anyone else have any other suggestions they are most welcome.

Thanks again!

Hamdani Milas

Independent producer, director, cinematographer, writer, editor
Milas Film Productions, Hong Kong
http://www.milasfilm.com

[Hamdani Milas]

As previously stated this is not currently possible. However if your wish is to have an empty timeline so as to open the project you are working on, rather than some random project version that FCPX chooses when a library is launched (how does that happen?!), I can offer the following (this applies to ver. 10.4.3, not sure about earlier versions):

Create a new library, name it Close Timelines or whatever. Create a project in that library and put a single title or clip in the project. I put a big title on screen saying Close Timelines.

Close that library.

Next time you want to clear unwanted open projects or compound clips from your timeline launch that Close Timelines library. It has only one project so that’s what will open. Then immediately close that library.

This clears all currently open timelines (open projects) and you can then open the project you wish from the library you were working with. I use this trick almost daily.

It would be great if FCPX timelines had some of the features of FCP7 timelines; proper visible tabs, the ability to lock tracks, the flexibility to open and close timelines at will…

I have submitted all this as feature requests but Apple seems to steadfastly ignore practical useability in some areas of FCPX. I very much enjoy working with it but some aspects of FCPX’s functionality are not very well thought out for the real world of editing and tight post-production schedules.

Hamdani Milas

Independent producer, director, cinematographer, writer, editor
Milas Film Productions, Hong Kong
http://www.milasfilm.com

[Hamdani Milas]

I contacted Izotope 10 days ago with a follow-up to their last service ticket response, received when the issue was first reported to customer support last Aug. Included a link to this thread but haven’t had a reply or acknowledgement.

The problems with Izotope’s plug-ins in FCPX persist so if there is audio to repair it’s a round-trip to the stand-alone RX5 Audio Editor where the same modules as the FCPX plug-ins all function as advertised.

Hamdani Milas

Independent producer, director, cinematographer, writer, editor
Milas Film Productions, Hong Kong
http://www.milasfilm.com

[Hamdani Milas]

Peter

Yes, I should have clarified, it’s the RX5 Advanced version I’m using. It’s odd that a similar issue manifests in different versions of both RX5 and FCPX and involving different Izotope plugins. Does this indicate an OSX issue? I gave up trying to figure it out. Seems the developer has too.

I am still on El Capitan 10.11.6

Hamdani

Independent producer, director, cinematographer, writer, editor
Milas Film Productions, Hong Kong
http://www.milasfilm.com

[Hamdani Milas]

I’m not sure this is a new issue. I’ve experienced the a similar audio dropout issue in FCPX 10.2.3 at the end of a clip with RX5 DeNoise plugin for FCPX for several months. (fully paid version) It only happened when the Adaptive setting was applied, usually the most effective, and the last 40 frames of a clip was muted.

Reported it to Izotope in August 2016 and they responded with a standard ‘we’ll report it to our development team” statement and followed that up with even less impressive feedback and I quote, “Development team has filed the report and it is under consideration for any future updates or patches.” Since then, nothing, no patches, no updates.

Not so impressive for a fairly costly set of great audio tools.

I did discover with video clips that included audio (Canon C300 XF 1080/25) the work-around was to Break Apart Clip and apply the De-Noise filter to the separated audio. It works fine like this.

Definitely a bug.

Hamdani Milas

Independent producer, director, cinematographer, writer, editor
Milas Film Productions, Hong Kong
http://www.milasfilm.com

[Hamdani Milas]

Try checking User/Movies/Final Cut Backups. In the folder named after the Library you’ve been working in you should find the automatic backups that FCPX generates. Work back until you find a version that includes the missing project. Hopefully.

Hamdani Milas
https://www.milasfilm.com

Independent producer, director, cinematographer, writer, editor
Milas Film Productions, Hong Kong
http://www.milasfilm.com
Mac Pro 3,1 16GB RAM, ATI Radeon 5770, 480GB Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD system drive, OSX ML and Mavericks, Caldigit VR 4TB e-SATA RAID, FCP 7.0.3, CS6 Production Premium Suite, FCPX 10.1.3

[Hamdani Milas]

Glad to hear it all worked out. 🙂

Independent producer, director, cinematographer, writer, editor
Milas Film Productions, Hong Kong
http://www.milasfilm.com
Mac Pro 3,1 16GB RAM, ATI Radeon 5770, 480GB Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD system drive, OSX ML and Mavericks, Caldigit VR 4TB e-SATA RAID, FCP 7.0.3, CS6 Production Premium Suite, FCPX 10.1.3

[Hamdani Milas]

That Contents folder might need to be all caps, not sure if it’s case sensitive.

Independent producer, director, cinematographer, writer, editor
Milas Film Productions, Hong Kong
http://www.milasfilm.com
Mac Pro 3,1 16GB RAM, ATI Radeon 5770, 480GB Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD system drive, OSX ML and Mavericks, Caldigit VR 4TB e-SATA RAID, FCP 7.0.3, CS6 Production Premium Suite, FCPX 10.1.3