[Jeff Kirkland]

You haven’t mentioned what computer you’re trying to play the animation codec back on. What happens when you render the clip back out of FCPX? Sounds to me like your mac just isn’t up to playing the clip in real-time rather than any major issue.

Why not render the clip back out of whatever app you did your keying and roto as ProRes and see how that goes?

Cheers
Jeff K

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

[Jeff Kirkland]

Personally, I’d have processed all the clips before they came into Final Cut. Davinci Resolve Lite is becoming my favourite tool for batch conforming clips pre-import.

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

[Jeff Kirkland]

While I’ll always recommend a 7200 RPM drive and FireWire 800, I’ve done my fair share of editing on 5400 RPM drives connected via USB 2. Not ideal but useable if your projects aren’t too complex.

My advice would be get something really good (which means probably not cheap) as a main editing drive and shuffle projects on and off to other drives as needed. I’d recommend something like the Western Digital MyBook Studio series.

The reason I’d stretch to something higher end is that this week I’ve been hunting for a USB 3 drive to use with my new 27″ iMac and have discovered that there are huge variations in speed in lower cost drives. Three USB 3 Seagate drives I bought a month or so ago for a different project, same model, all purchased at the same time, have as much as a 50% variation in speed. The slowest doing 80MB/s the fastest doing 160MB/s.

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

[Jeff Kirkland]

You could just leave it 24p. I don’t know any DVD player that won’t play a 24p movie. As to the motion blur… I would try shooting 60i then creating the PAL & NTSC DVDs from that. If you normally shoot 60i you should already have some footage to test with.

I do a handful of dance recitals each year and shoot them 50i (because I’m in Australia) and master the DvDS from that – 50i converted to 25p is way better for faster motion.

The other thing your client may consider is that it’s been decades since PAL DVD players and TVs didn’t natively support NTSC playback. Even major movie studios have released their films here in NTSC rather than PAL. There may be no need to have more than one master.

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

[Jeff Kirkland]

I edit regularly with almost that system, although its an i3 processor rather than an i5.. I’d say you need an external drive as soon as you can get hold of ,one but everything else should be fine.

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

[Jeff Kirkland]

FCPX 10.0.7 was supposed to fix some issues with fitting a DVD to a single layer disc but I guess it may still be a bit hit or miss. I have a friend who couldn’t get a 70 minute video to fit using share to DVD while just yesterday I managed to fit 96 minutes with no issue.

For what it’s worth though, Compressor still has all the same controls over bitrate and encoding that previous versions did. It should only take a few minutes to recreate any presets you used in FCP7 as share targets in FCPX.

The Retina Macbook shouldn’t have too many issues in terms of hardware but render times can depend on the effects applied, whether you’re doing any resizing etc, the bandwidth available to your hard drives, and whether you’ve let FCPX background render or not.

In my experience you will get a faster output and a better downscale if your project is already the target resolution. I.e an SD project will tend to render to SD better and faster than a HD project exported to SD. If my final deliverable is DVD I usually set my project to SD from the start. The advantage of that is (I assume) that the results of your background renders are already SD to match the project so there’s not as much work for FCPX to do at export time.

Hope that helps a little.

Cheers
Jeff K

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

[Jeff Kirkland]

As far as I know the camera archives a one-shot deal. They’re really meant to be the equivalent of cloning your media. You can always create a new archive with just the b-roll. And of course, you can import all the archives into a single event once you start editing with the added advantage that the archive name become the reel name in the clip’s metadata.

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

[Jeff Kirkland]

Apple have always strongly recommended not having legacy FCP installed on the same machine as FCPX. I think it’s one of those things that some people get away with and some don’t. I know the only time I had any can’t-get work-done issues with FCPX was when I decided to install DVD Studio Pro and Soundtrack Pro on my FCPX system.

The QuickTime issue thing is purely my theory but I suspect there are conflicts between ‘real QuickTime’ as installed and used by legacy FCP and the ‘pretend it’s QuickTime for backwards compatibility’ version that’s part of AV Foundation that FCPX uses. And somewhere inside the interrelated labrynth of OS X internal APIs, FCPX ends up accessing libraries that call the wrong bit of code, that messes with its stability. Just a theory though.

I do know that nothing short of a clean install got FCPX back on track after my legacy FCP fiasco.

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

[Jeff Kirkland]

I’ll assume you’ve tried a reinstall? Both final cut and OS X? And do you have FCP studio or any part thereof installed? The only time I’ve come across green frames was a friend who had legacy FCP installed on the same machine. A complete reinstall (minus any legacy FCP apps) fixed the issue for him.

For what it’s worth, I’ve done twenty something projects in FCPX and have yet to see a green frame myself. Earlier this week I had two projects exporting, footage from a CF card importing, and was making some minor tweaks to titles in a third project ready for export – all at the same time, no issue whatsoever (other than speed because I really was trying to do too much at once).

I always put my lack of any issues down to following Apple’s install recommendations to the letter and never having any legacy apps installed on the same computer.

It really sounds like you’ve got some sort of QuickTime issue – hopefully someone has a fix for you that’s slightly more refined that “nuke everything”..

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

[Jeff Kirkland]

I can’t remember exactly where the file goes but Apple say on their about Compressor page that you can share Compressor settings with another FCPX user, even if they don’t have compressor installed.

“Whether you customise an existing Compressor setting in Final Cut Pro or create an entirely new setting, you can share the results with other Final Cut Pro editors — even if they don’t have Compressor installed on their workstations. Just send them a small settings file and have them copy it to the appropriate folder.”

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