Joe Marler
22
Apple Final Cut Pro X Coins
39
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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[Brett Sherman] “I’ve been having problems with complicated, graphical timelines being unable to playback. I’m using some relatively complicated Motion templates. I get why it won’t playback even remotely close to real time when not rendered. But what I don’t get is why after it is rendered it still won’t play back”
If the timeline is fully rendered you’d normally expect it to play back smoothly. All effects and codecs are rendered to a set of cached render frames, by default ProRes 422.
However — there are some cases where FCPX does not properly use the cached render files. These involve some built-in and 3rd party effects, and combinations of them in the stack. Many effects are internally implemented as Motion templates so that might be a common element.
In my testing there are “well behaved” and “poorly behaved” effects regarding the impact on re-use of cached render files. In an extreme case certain built-in effects can prevent cached re-use of render files from highly compute-intensive effects such as Neat Video. This can have an extremely severe performance impact. In some situations the render dots do not properly indicate whether valid render files exist or will be used.
There are different states with varying behavior. In some cases just rebooting FCPX will change the behavior. In other cases, re-rendering the timeline will help, but in other cases not. The entire system of tracking and using render files and the relationship to various effects needs to be examined by Apple and either fixed or documented.
I don’t know the internals of the Motion run-time engine. It might be that due to run time processing, not all templates can be pre-computed and cached. However to my knowledge none of that has been documented.
The simplest thing to try is disable background rendering, delete all render files, do a one-time render of the timeline with CMD+A and CTRL+R, re-launch FCPX, render the timeline again if any ranges require this, THEN try your edit action or export.
In some cases this procedure will help. In other cases the slow performance will be persistent. In that case you need to examine the effects stack for the clip in the slow timeline region. As an experiment remove any known “poorly behaved” effects. In the below post I list some of these but it’s not comprehensive.
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[Varun Trikha] “I have been editing a film for almost 2 months and suddenly the whole timeline has turned all red. This is really scary.
I am using iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2014, High Sierra) and FCP X 10.3.4”
First, save on external storage all FCPX auto-backup libraries, which by default are in /Movies/Final Cut Backups. These are quite small because they don’t contain cache or media.
Next make a file backup of your currently library – if possible. If it contains cache and media it might be too large for this. If it uses only external media the cache can be deleted with File>Delete Generated Library Files>Delete Render Files>All. That might make it small enough to backup using Finder. This gives a file-level restore point after any subsequent troubleshooting.
As Eric said, if you’re using proxies, switch the viewer back to orig. media. If still red, see if the media files are still visible in Finder. It could be something simple like a drive off line.
If timeline clips are red but they are not red in the Event Browser, that could imply a project issue. What is the history? Have you ever copied any projects or clips between libraries? There is a scenario with cross-library copy where optimized/proxy media exist and you answer “no” to the checkboxes, the clips in the destination library can be read or black.
Is all media and library on HFS+ or APFS volumes? If any are on ExFAT or NAS volumes, please indicate.
In general I’d recommend running a precautionary Disk Utility First Aid on all volumes. To run properly on the system volume requires you be in Recovery Mode, else it’s read only: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201314
If that works without error and you have a file-level backup of your current library, the easiest solution might be loading the next-most-recent backup library which is automatically backed up by FCPX. That can be done in FCPX from File>Open Library>From Backup, or you can navigate to that folder in Finder and double-click on the library bundle.
If that backup is recent and right before you did the retiming operation, that may fix it. If not try successively older backups.
In general (after the current situation is resolved) I suggest running a later version of FCPX and MacOS. There have been many fixes and upgrades since High Sierra and FCPX 10.3.4. If you have any issues with Catalina such as no 32-bit support, just upgrade to Mojave and FCPX 10.4.8. Save file-level backups old libraries and save a copy of Final Cut Pro.app in /Applications. This will allow rollback in case the upgrade doesn’t work right.
You can get Mojave here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210190
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[Greg Ball] “I thought I saw a something about a built-in Audio noise reduction in FCPX. I have FCPX 10.4.5. Does that exist? Or do I need to purchase Crumplepop’s noise reduction?
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As Brad said the built-in FCPX NR is better than nothing. I have Crumplepop ver 1; it’s a little better than FCPX and easy to use. I haven’t tried ver. 2.iZotope RX7 Advanced is the best but expensive. RX7 Standard is only $99, the same as Crumplepop. RX7 is not a one-button fix; it requires some experience. However there are many on-line tutorials available. But it’s a time-consuming, iterative process.
I use RX7 Advanced but always export a .wav and process it using the external app, then re-import. I’m not highly skilled so our post-production audio tech does the hard jobs.
If you think a $1,200 software tool is expensive, this is incentive to capture it right in the first place. However when shooting documentary interviews that is sometimes just not possible or would require a location change and loss of opportunity.
You can avoid much of this by using the best possible mics & recorder and an experienced field audio technician. If the material was recorded by someone else, the producer can educated by billing the project 10 hrs of highly skilled time for repair work by a post production audio engineer. If the producer thinks anyone can fix it in 30 min, please let me know when that person is located.
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[Terry Flaxton] “I can buy either a 16 core 2020 mac with some internal extras such as a vega card and/or an apple after burner
Or I can buy a 24 core 2020 mac plus a little extra ram but no internal vega nor after burner”
The only thing the afterburner currently does is *decode* ProRes and ProRes RAW. It does not help encode of ProRes or decode/encode of any other codec. ProRes and ProRes RAW are already fairly easy to decode, esp. regular ProRes. Yes if you will be using multiple layers of 6k or 8k ProRes RAW that can get CPU-intensive and the afterburner card would help – but only in such cases.
It seems an upgraded GPU would have broader benefit.
Your current 5,1 MP does not have hardware acceleration for Long GOP formats. If all your acquisition is ProRes and all your exports are ProRes this is a non-issue. But if you ever must handle more compressed formats, a newer machine would likely help.
That said, FCPX on any current Mac is sluggish on certain formats such as Panasonic’s 400 mbps 10-bit all-intra, decode of Fuji’s 10-bit HEVC 400 mbps, and encode of 10-bit HEVC. It is not super fast on Sony XAVC-S either. The latest version of Resolve Studio on MacOS is a lot faster on some of these, so that proves it’s not a hardware issue.
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[Brian Thomas] “I’d like to use FCPX to cut off a few seconds/minutes from the start and the end along with odd bits here and there and maybe add a couple of titles.”
Except for adding titles, you can do this with Quicktime Player, and it does not re-encode. This (1) Is vastly faster and (2) Avoids generational loss from re-encoding.
It can both trim head/tail plus delete any number of sparse intervening ranges, all in a single editing operation.
See the MacMost tutorial “Easily Trimming Video Files with Quicktime Player”: https://youtu.be/W7NrlhZin4M
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[Greg Ball] “My problem is that I’ve been editing for years on E-sata drives. So all of my projects are on those drives. How would I be able to access those drives on a new Mac or iMac?
I really don’t want to spend $6K on a new mac. “
If your physical drives are over 5 yrs old they should probably be replaced. Some studies show a 20% annual failure rate if the HDD is 5 yrs old.
If you mean you’ve been using eSATA drives (in general) for years but the HDDs themselves are newer, you could put them in a 2-bay or 4-bay Thunderbolt or USB-C chassis like one of these: https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-drives/External-Enclosures/3.5-Inch-Drives
I have several 4-drive and 2-drive OWC Thunderbolt enclosures which generally work well. However I just got the Mercury Elite Pro Dock. I really don’t like it because the fan is so loud, and I am not sensitive to noise: https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/owc-mercury-elite-pro-dock
I’d personally consider a top-spec 8-core iMac 27. I have a 2017 iMac 27 and a 10-core iMac Pro. The iMP is great, very quiet and has 4 Thunderbolt 3/USB-C and 4 USB-A ports, also 10-gig ethernet.
The regular iMac 27 only has two Thunderbolt 3/USB-C ports and 4 USB-A ports, but with daisy-chained Thunderbolt drives you generally don’t need as many ports.
If you need to replace a bunch of older 4TB drives, several of those will fit on a single 2-drive enclosure with 12TB drives. However the 4-drive enclosures aren’t much more expensive and are a lot faster.
The iMac Pro is very quiet but supposedly the new 8-core iMac 27 is also significantly improved acoustically, just not equal to the iMP.
The regular iMac is a little smoother on some 4k H264 codecs, maybe due to Quick Sync vs the iMP’s T2 chip. However your old Mac Pro has no hardware transcode acceleration whatsoever, so anything would be an improvement over that.
If Apple would just update the iMac Pro that could be a nice option. But even the top-spec regular iMac 27 is much faster than your current machine.
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[Oliver Peters] “seems to be based on the codec from the Lumix DSLR. This is a tough codec to work with. And yes, Resolve handles it well – for that matter, better than FCPX. But that tends to be a limited use case.”
Exactly correct. The codec is Panasonic’s 4k 10-bit 4:2:2 All-Intra H264 at 400 mbps. It has always been a difficult codec on any NLE I’ve used.
I compared a clip on the latest versions of FCPX 10.4.8, Premiere 14.2.0 and Resolve Studio on a 10-core Vega 64 iMac Pro and FCPX and Resolve on a top-spec 2019 MacBook Pro 16, both running Catalina 10.15.4.
Playback performance on iMac Pro: Re viewer update rate and lag time to JKL input, Premiere was by far the worst, even at 1/4 res. However FCPX was also somewhat sluggish, even with viewer at “better performance”. The latest version of Resolve 16.2.2.012 was much smoother and more responsive, and seems improved over Resolve 16.1.
Playback performance on MacBook Pro 16: FCPX was better on this hardware than the iMP, maybe due to using Quick Sync. But the codec itself is all-intra, which normally would not benefit from hardware optimized for Long GOP acceleration. So I don’t understand that. I didn’t test Premiere on this machine, but Resolve 16.2.2.012 was still much smoother than FCPX.
I’ve tested the similar high-bitrate all-intra 4k codec from a Canon XC15, and it was very fast on FCPX. I don’t know why the Panasonic codec is so slow but it has always been this way.
The fact that Resolve handles it smoothly on the exact same Mac hardware proves the problem is not unsolvable. The Engadget reviewer was using Windows so that shows it’s not Mac vs PC or MacOS vs Windows. It is an application software issue.
DaVinci did a good job on this and both Apple and Adobe have work to do. It is even worse for Apple because FCPX is single-platform and that presumed benefit didn’t help in this case. If you stand still long enough even the slowest competitors will eventually pass you and Blackmagic is not slow.
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[Hamdani Milas] ” I tried your suggestion about opening the Red Line Edit 08 library in FCPX 10.4.6 via XML export / import with the original project timecode offset and can confirm there was no red line issue (running on macOS Mojave).
“That is good, but if you can run 10.4.8 there are definitely performance improvements. Long term, you don’t want to get stuck on 10.4.6 as the new versions roll out. When I tested 10.4.8 using Doug’s suggestion of resetting the project timecode to 00:00, it seemed to work.
However you have a project to complete so do whatever you think is necessary for now.
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[Doug Metz] “When I changed the start TC from 23:59:54:12 to 00:00:00:00, everything functioned properly and all red bars disappeared. I was unable to make them return after this change.”
Doug, thanks for this. I confirm this on my machine and copy of the library.
However there is apparently a separate problem whereby certain timeline ranges will not render or keep showing render dots. I see this on clip “Galaxy cam1_ProRes 422 HQ”. This might be the overlayed Motion title, which shows the “missing” yellow exclamation point.
As you suggested, Hamdani could try resetting the project timecode to zero via project inspector>modify>starting timecode, then evaluate. If that fixes the red line issues but there are remaining problems, then state what those are.
There are a few render tracking issues whereby the render dots won’t go away if the clip has certain effects or titles, but it’s unclear if this is that problem.
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“Recently updated a 2015 27″ iMac to Mojave 10.14.6 and also updated all Pro Apps including FCPX10.4.8”
I believe this is the key. I just tested FCPX 10.4.6 on Catalina and the “red line” problem doesn’t seem to happen. This could indicate it’s a side-effect unique to your media format which possibly began with the Metal-optimized version of FCPX, 10.4.7.
To test this you’d need to run 10.4.6 and load your data. You could possibly export a library XML using the prior XML version which is 1.7, create a new library when running 10.4.6, then load that XML.
You don’t need to re-install FCPX to switch between versions, just double-click on the 10.4.6 .app file to launch it. Of course any libraries already upgraded to later versions won’t work, but importing the library XML will re-create all projects and should connect all media, although those clips may not appear in the Browser until you reference them.
You could possibly recover the 10.4.6 .app file using Time Machine. If you don’t have this, email me at joema4 at gmail dot com.
If you verify it doesn’t happen on 10.4.6, that might be an interim workaround while we further pursue the behavior on 10.4.8.