[Joe Marler]

Re working with camera phone footage without rendering, FCPX can generally do that. Re new price for FCPX, there’s a 90-day full-featured free evaluation, why not try that: https://www.apple.com/final-cut-pro/trial/

Yes media can be stored on an external hard drive.

Re non-starter for professional editing, it is widely used for this today:

https://lumaforge.com/faster-together/watch/editing-the-oscar-winning-film-skin-in-final-cut-pro-x

This TV documentary was edited with FCPX and won an Emmy: https://www.fcp.co/final-cut-pro/articles/1764-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-final-cut-pro-x

FCPX is vastly faster than FCP7. For comparison to Avid, see these tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZEWB-9BQ2DW-gwBlJJaWNg

[Joe Marler]

“Bouncing” is an audio editing term. In multitrack analog recording, it originally meant mixing several tracks and moving that mixdown to an available track to free up other tracks for additional recording. In the digital era “bouncing” came to mean rendering audio metadata to intermediate files (analogous to FCPX cache files) to avoid CPU overhead, or to output files. I’ve never heard it applied to video editing.

[Joe Marler]

“Analyze and fix” fixes color and audio problems, not clip or cache corruption issues. It may have “fixed” it the same way kicking a TV clears up the picture — IOW it’s coincidental or indirect.

If 3rd party plugins are used, “analyze and fix” essentially adds an additional effect which might jiggle the software code path to temporarily bypass the problem. Multithreaded code often contains timing and race conditions whereby tiny windows of time momentarily overlap to produce a bug, then it seems to fade away, sometimes after making an apparently unrelated change. Then it later comes back because the underlying problem was not fixed.

It would be useful to know what 3rd party Fx are in use and what camera codec.

[Joe Marler]

Yes, timeline playback stops if you click in the Event Browser. The default and original design of FCPX was a single-viewer display, not separate source and program monitors. The intention was avoid pulling clip after clip into a source monitor to examine them for inclusion on the timeline program monitor. The idea was if the code path is fast enough and the skimmer responsive enough, a single viewer is sufficient. The workflow was skim the material using the single viewer, mark favorites, rejects and keyword ranges, then query/filter that data and add to the timeline. In this scheme you obviously can’t have both timeline and event viewer playing concurrently because there’s only one display.

After the initial FCPX release they added a 2nd viewer, accessible via Window>Show in Workspace>Event Viewer, or CTRL+CMD+3. That gives separate viewers but only one is active at a time.

[Joe Marler]

FCPX playback will continue non-stop while you trim, reposition clips or adjust audio on different clips, add transitions, or add/adjust certain effects (e.g. sharpening). Adjusting a built-in color effect will stop playback.

Transitioning to FCPX from another NLE can be difficult. It’s not a matter of cheatsheets and hotkeys. It is understanding the paradigm change from a track-based NLE, and working with the strengths of FCPX. Not focusing on these conceptual differences may doom any transitioning editor to frustration.

FCPX is the convergence of several concepts:

(1) Pervasive database-driven media organization. IOW you don’t pancake clips on a timeline as if that’s your only organizational tool. You spend time in the Event Browser rating and keywording material before you touch a timeline. See “Warp Speed Keywording”: https://youtu.be/azJ4J41JaZk

(2) Curating material in the Event Browser is facilitated by an extremely high performance media skimmer. Compare the update rate and latency of the FCPX skimmer to Premiere’s “Hover Scrub”. The skimmer is full screen and much faster.

(3) Organization in FCPX is *range* based not clip based. You can have multiple keyworded ranges within a single clip. You can navigate between marked ranges in the Event Browser: https://support.apple.com/guide/final-cut-pro/set-multiple-ranges-in-the-browser-veradbf2dce/mac

(4) Due to the high performance and database organization, it’s not necessary to sift through material outside the NLE and import only the “keepers”. With FCPX you can import everything using “leave files in place” and do the initial assessment and selects there.

(5) After curation use the database tools to query the material. Use keyword collections, smart collections, filter on favorites/rejects. See “One Smart Collection To Rule Them All”: https://youtu.be/sjuCfJFhdo0

(6) Magnetic timeline, which includes an object-oriented encapsulated approach. In general audio and video are not detached entities, which helps maintain sync. Instead of tracks, audio often has embedded “components” visible in the Inspector. Audio is assigned roles which helps further classify and organize it. Use the Timeline Index for this: https://youtu.be/0dqcuBUVXjc

(7) Magnetic timeline, part 2: beyond the “magnetism” the goal is put most material on the primary storyline and supporting material on connected clips or a secondary storyline. For a music video the primary storyline might be audio.

Learn to think in these terms and use the product accordingly or there will be problems. Experience indicates a “hot key” approach for transitioning editors will not be successful.

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[Joe Marler]

Is the original material like that if you select the clip in the Event Browser, right-click, reveal in Finder and play it in Quicktime Player?

If not select the clip in the Browser, then in Inspector at bottom pick “Settings” and see if a LUT was automatically applied during import.

If the white tiles are really white, you could try Modify>Balance Color, then in the Inspector change from automatic to white balance and use the dropper on the tile. That is not perfect but might be OK.

That said, your RGB parade shows typical values for a brownish tint. You could also just use the color board or color wheels and adjust it so they are more even: https://www.rapidtables.com/web/color/brown-color.html

For any “difficult” lighting condition, it’s often a good idea to shoot a few seconds of a color checker card, which allows faster and better correction in post: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0173FP6P8/

You don’t need special software for this, it can be done manually as shown in this tutorial:

https://youtu.be/i8DuPM-CtCk

[Joe Marler]

Quicktime Player 10 can trim, split and re-arrange sections of a video without re-encoding. There is no generational loss of quality, and it’s very fast. Trim is CMD+T and Split is CMD+Y. Split does not literally split the file but marks a range in the clip which you can delete or reposition. In a single pass you can cut out sections, re-arrange sections, trim head/tail, then export the result without re-encoding.

Of course that requires you do it before you ingest to FCPX. See this Macmost tutorial: https://youtu.be/W7NrlhZin4M

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[Joe Marler]

I just re-tested it on 10.4.9 on Catalina 10.15.6, and it seemed to retain custom list mode column layout after re-launching FCPX and after re-booting the entire machine, also after opening/closing multiple libraries, and after switching between filmstrip and list mode multiple times.

However I’ve definitely seen cases where it did not retain them.

Since it retains them between libraries, that implies it’s stored in a plist or somewhere associated with FCPX preferences.

[Joe Marler]

You just right-click the column heading, turn them on/off, and drag/resize them left/right to the position you want. Click column heading to change sort order. The changes should be persistent even after re-launching FCPX or after opening/closing libraries.

There is a new column in 10.4.9, “Last Modified”. If you have a bunch of projects it’s easier to find the last ones you used by sorting on that, not just creation date.

[Joe Marler]

[Ty Ford] “a list of clips, all of which need a TOD Source time code burn.
After assembling them and dropping in the timecode window, I coudn’t export the session until all of the timecome windows were burned. The total length of clips was over an hour, so it took some time. A friend who uses Premiere, said he doesn’t have to wait for that render. Should I have background render enabled?”

On my machine I can drop the built-in FCPX timecode *effect* on the first clip in the timeline, adjust position and other timecode parameters, then do CTRL+C to copy those attributes, select all other clips in the timeline and do SHIFT+CMD+V to paste that attribute to them all. After that I can immediately export without rendering, and I have background rendering off.

On FCPX you don’t have to render before exporting. As part of the export process it will automatically render a few frames, encode those, write to the output file, then move down the timeline until it’s finished. This is transparent and invisible.

The other approach is render all or part of the timeline which is written to cache files, then export. That rendering can be manual, by selecting clips (or all clips with CMD+A) and rendering them with CTRL+R, or it can be background rendering — they do the same thing. If rendered cache files exist, FCPX will ideally use those to expedite the export, doing just the encoding portion.

One reason some people don’t use background rendering is there’s no built-in file cleanup. As each batch of render files are marked invalid, they just pile up, taking up space. In older versions there were some issues with background rendering and lots of people became accustomed to turning it off.

The reason why I mentioned manually rendering is you described an export hang which can happen either during the render phase or encode phase. The first investigative procedure is disable background rendering, delete all render files, reboot the machine, then manually render the timeline with CMD+A and CTRL+R, then export using the above-listed H264 “fast” preset. You don’t normally have to do this, it’s an investigative procedure.

I don’t understand what you mean by “coudn’t export the session until all of the timecode windows were burned”. Can you provide more details?