[Jeff Kirkland]

That sounds about right to me.

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

[Jeff Kirkland]

I’ve had this happen a few times on my 2013 Mac Pro – maybe a couple of times a year. Can’t offer much in the way of a solution though as when the time I’m losing thanks to the beach ball hits critical mass, I take the elephant gun approach and do a clean install.

I’ll be all ears if you do figure out something specific though.

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

[Jeff Kirkland]

Good luck with it. Nothing worse than software that’s mysteriously not working.

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

[Jeff Kirkland]

I think that would greatly depend on how prominent it is in the image.

Realistically though, it’s probably going to be a shot by shot thing that for something simple I might tackle inside FCPX with a plugin like Slice-X using the object removal tool, or maybe even just simple masking, but I’d more likely export the shot to After Effects to have access to a wider variety of tools.

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

[Jeff Kirkland]

when it comes to creating libraries vs events, I don’t really have a set system but usually there’s a top level group that makes sense. I guess I still think of libraries as projects so i tend to create a library for a specific project usually based around a specific shoot, and events for however many parts there may be to that project.

So for a series of interviews, there’s a library for the interview series and each interview is an event, but if I shoot more interviews later in the year, then that’s a new library with events for each of the interviews in that shoot. For something like a documentary, it’s a library for the film, then a new event as footage comes in.

I keep all my media stored externally and fairly well organised in sensibly named folders so I’m not duplicating media if two libraries have the same footage, and I find the act of importing old footage again to a new library, helps me get better organised, plus I prefer to only see the things I need right now, to having a huge list of events and footage and projects that aren’t relevant to what I’m currently working on.

Hope that makes some sort of sense…

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 rest FCPX preferences by holding down the command + alt keys as you launch FCPX. I’d also try going to the file menu and deleting the library render files, both used and unused. A corrupt cache can sometime be the cause of the sorts of things you’re describing.

To reinstall FCPX just drag it to the trash, empty the trash, reboot, then download it from the App Store again. Effects can be a bit tricker as they can be as simple as just a folder in the users movies directory or scattered over several locations, so If they don’t include an uninstaller, I’d check with the specific effects support pages for an uninstall procedure. Possibly just installing the effect again will reset the install.

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

[Jeff Kirkland]

Unless something changed that I don’t know about FCPX isn’t an OFX host so, no the plugin would be Resolve, Fusion, etc.

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

[Jeff Kirkland]

I’m an avid follower of Bill’s sage advice but adding a gap clippers the start and a secondary storyline with the audio track is, to me at least, a faulty clunky way of doing things and a bit of a throwback to the tracks of fcp7 days. It’s also the approach the friend I mentioned took that left him struggling with the magnetic timeline.

It’s definitely a good approach for music in a corporate edit though.

For a music video you really want visuals locked to a certain beat, not shifting around – so by making the music track the primary storyline, your connected clips stay where you put ’em, and jump out of the way as new material you add collides with what’s there. If you have two or more clips that belong together, use a secondary storyline to group them so the can be edited and moved as one unit.

I find it an incredibly fast way to work on a music video but your mileage may vary, as they say.

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

[Jeff Kirkland]

Hey Adam,

Just replied to another post of yours and mentioned I’d worked with another editor who was really being slowed down by trying to work in FCPX as if it were fcp7. His mistake was not thinking of the actual music track as the primary story and therefore the thing that belonged in the primary storyline that everything else was connected to.

Think of the primary storyline as the main narrative of the edit, which could be the music in a music video, or a voice over for a tvc, or a talking head interview that you’re going to put b-roll over. Once you start from that, the magnetic timeline is your friend and the rest of X just falls into place.

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

[Jeff Kirkland]

As Bret says, there are no tracks in FCPX, just the primary storyline and any secondary ones you might need to create. And storylines can contain audio or video.

If you have a clip on the timeline and you delete it’s audio, you can attach the new audio above or below that clip, it makes no difference to X. Or you drop the audio right onto the primary storyline and put the video clip above or below that.

Having said that, I’m something of a traditionalist and I tend to have video above and audio below so I’ll often ad a gap clip to the primary storyline, then connect the audio clip below that and replace the gap clip with vision when I, ready.

I recently had to work with another editor who insisted on trying to tackle his edit the same way he would have in fcp7. It was frustrating to watch as his edit got messier and messier and he was constantly fighting with the magnetic timeline. I was working on an alternate cut of the same thing but by embracing trackless editing and the magnetic storyline, I got to the same point in 90 minutes that he’d reached after four hours of frustration.

It’s really worth checking out some of the excellent fundamental training available from Ripple Training and others. You really do have to approach FCPX differently from other NLEs. But once you get it, there’s no going back.

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