[Jeff Kirkland]

More importantly, an iPad is not a control surface. A control surface needs to be tactile and offer real buttons, knobs and faders so i don’t have to look away from the screen to use it.

Gesture based stuff is ok but if I have to learn gestures, why not just learn the keyboard shortcuts?

It’s one thing I really miss about my days editing in Sony Vegas. Vegas supported MIDI control so between a cheap MIDI keyboard and a Contour Shuttle I had faders, buttons, jog wheels, and more that I could use to control anything inside the app.

Hmmm… I wonder if there’s anything for the Mac that can turn MIDI messages into key presses?

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Jeff Kirkland]

It sounds like way more than an FCPX issue. I’d lean towards something hardware related but you never know. A friend recently had mysterious crashes with FCPX that locked up the entire machine and it turned out to be a corrupt font.

Anyway, if reinstalling X didn’t make a difference then it’s probably time to go the whole hog and do a clean install. There are just so many things that could be off kilter OS wise that just nuking the whole thing is usually the fastest option.

If that doesn’t work, then it’s a hardware issue and I’d put money on the GPU although I’ve seen some severe OS lockups when a drive intensive app (that’s definitely FCPX) is accessing a physically failing hard drive.

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Jeff Kirkland]

What he said 🙂

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Jeff Kirkland]

The simplest is to duplicate the project, change it’s properties to be a PAL SD DVD compatible format, then share as a DVD.

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Jeff Kirkland]

Just to keep a sort-of apples and apples comparison, I downloaded AJA System Test and ran it again…

Volume: Thunderbolt (LaCie 2big 4tb RAID 0 about 50% full)
Video Frame Size: 1920×1080 (8bit)
File Size: 1.0 GB
Write: 258.4 MB/s
Read: 260.9 MB/s

Volume: Sparse Bundle (1tb / 24gb in use)
Video Frame Size: 1920×1080
File Size: 1.0 GB
Write: 252.1 MB/s
Read: 282.7 MB/s

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Jeff Kirkland]

Thanks Andreas… I’ve not really looked at time machine because it doesn’t have the control that Chronosync does.

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Jeff Kirkland]

In the time I was using sparse bundles I didn’t really notice any great speed difference. Just ran a test with Blackmagic’s test app and the speed difference if any was negligible. This was on a 50% full Thunderbolt RAID drive. Write was 3mb/s slower and read was actually 10mb/s faster than the non-sparsebundle test.

i get similar feedback from other FCPX editors I know so while I have no doubt sparsebundles may be slightly slower sometimes, I think in general there’s no great difference.

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Jeff Kirkland]

Thanks everyone – but surely there must be a way of automating the backup?

This year I have lost disks in my RAID0 primary work drive twice – both times with absolutely no warning. With that in mind I want at least a daily complete clone of my work drive, preferably with deletions archived for a few days just in case.

The notion that I have to completely stop work and wait for a backup to finish is exactly why I’ve stopped using sparse images. Chronosync has the odd issue with the actual FCPX project and event files but warns me if there was a problem so I can quickly do a manual backup of just those two files. Only happens very occasionally though.

Looks like sparse images are still a no-go for me at least… i was hoping maybe there was something that could recognise a sparse image was open and skip backing it up until next time. A 48 hour old copy would be far preferable to a completely corrupt copy.

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Jeff Kirkland]

Sometimes keeping it simple is the best 🙂

Experience tells me that it might not be wise to trust myself with a manual solution though :-/

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Jeff Kirkland]

You can make the sparse image as large as you like, it will only take the space actually used. I tend to make them a terabyte or more just to be safe.

I think your approach to bringing in the media is pretty much the same one I used until recently. I stopped using sparse images though because I have some issues with backing them up. (essentially, copying a sparse image while it’s open and in use can lead to corrupt copies… and a corrupt copy isn’t a backup.)

I think it’s fair to say that while FCPX can work with a lot of media ‘natively’, letting it optimise the media to ProRes makes everything work much more smoothly.

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland