[Joe Marler]

[Eric Santiago] “For me, its Synced clips after original were used in a lengthy fight scene. Basically, it was assembled with no audio and a different frame rate to boot.”

To my knowledge there is no easy solution. I suggest (1) Using multicam clips not synced clips, which permits the timeline MC ranges to inherit changes made in the parent MC clip, and (2) Do not allow editors to use original “parent” single-cam clips.

One way to achieve that is whoever preps the data and makes the multicams, flag all constituent parent clips as rejected, and tell the editor to always run the browser in “hide rejected”.

If that doesn’t work, arrange a screen sharing session and let the editor sit in for an approx 4 hr non-stop session of frame-matching and clip replacement.

Another issue is changed frame rate. You cannot reliably change frame rate of an already-edited project without risking re-editing the entire timeline.

You can copy/paste the timeline to a new timeline with a different frame rate but due to per-clip rate conforming issues, gaps and overlaps may appear at clip boundaries. This requires meticulously going through the entire timeline and closely inspecting each edit, and likely adjusting some edit points.

This is more likely if the original clips have mixed frame rates, e.g, 23.98 and 29.97, and if a complex timeline with many connected clips. However the mere possibility means no matter what the timeline composition, it must be stringently inspected by someone with knowledge of the original intent of each edit point.

[Joe Marler]

[Greg Ball] “How would I check the bitrate of an exported video file? Is there a way to do that on a Mac?”

I suggest you get Invisor. It is inexpensive and allows spreadsheet-like side-by-side viewing of video file metadata. In Finder you can right-click the file or files, then pick Services>Analyze with Invisor. You can also drag/drop additional files from Finder to the Invisor comparison window.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/invisor-media-file-inspector/id442947586?mt=12

If you don’t mind a command line utility, ExifTool gives the most detailed metadata info: https://exiftool.org

[Joe Marler]

[Oliver Peters] “Weird. I’m generally found FCPX and Compressor to be much faster renderers. “

Same here, and I have the latest versions of Premiere, FCPX and Resolve Studio installed on the same iMac Pro. Quite recently Premiere on Mac has gotten slightly faster than FCPX for certain narrow export parameters, but in general it’s still quite slow.

Premiere has historically been very slow at playback decoding and export decoding of 4k H264, esp. on Mac hardware. Part of this was due to not supporting QuickSync until fairly recently. Initially the support was for encoding not playback. Supposedly in the very latest version they use it for playback but it still feels slow on both my 2017 iMac and 10-core Vega 64 iMac Pro.

The iMac Pro doesn’t have Quick Sync but Premiere manages to use either the T2 or AMD’s VCE (Video Coding Engine) for 10-bit HEVC, since that is much faster than FCPX on an iMac Pro. This implies they should be able to use hardware acceleration for H.264 playback, but Premiere is very sluggish on 4k H.264.

So there is a lot more to performance than export/encode. Having just finished a job where I was simultaneously running FCPX 10.4.7, Premiere 14.0.0 and Resolve Studio 16.1.1.005, the overall responsiveness is FCPX is fastest with lowest lag, Resolve is a close 2nd, and Premiere is a distant 3rd.

Last month I used a high-speed camera to measure the viewer update rate of those NLEs when playing back UHD 4k/29.97 10-bit 4:2:2 H.264 all-intra material from a GH5 at 4x playback speed. This was on a 10-core Vega 64 iMac Pro running Mojave 10.14.6. FCPX viewer was set to best quality, and Premiere set to 1/4 resolution and Metal playback.

Premiere was especially sluggish at JKL command input when going from 4x fast forward to reverse. Viewer/Program Monitor update rate:

Resolve Studio 16.1.0.055: 28 frames/sec
FCPX 10.4.7: 20 frames/sec
FCPX 10.4.6: 14 frames/sec (but uneven)
Premiere 13.1.5: 2 frames/sec

[Joe Marler]

There is no difference in image quality for FCPX editing. This is because the MPEG4 media files themselves are not re-written – IOW there is no “generational loss” since FCPX records all edits as metadata in a SQL database. For the final export that must be encoded in the preferred codec, but that would often be required even if you pre-converted the material to ProRes.

If you are working collaboratively with others in a post production pipeline and handing off files, in that case using ProRes can avoid generational loss. Or if you are doing “round trips” to other software, e.g, Resolve, then use ProRes for the same reason.

[Joe Marler]

[Ray Sherman] “is there any good way/procedure to reformat this video to a 16.9 ratio without stretching it?”

If it is 4:3 and will be displayed on 16:9 screens, once choice (short of pan/scan, crop, etc) is “pillar box” it by putting the 4:3 material in a 16:9 project, deinterlace and export as (say) 720p 16:9. Another choice is export as a hard-deinterlaced 720×480 29.97p 4:3 file, and defer the aspect ratio issue to the next editor.

It is likely that archival material will be used in future projects which combine 16:9 material, so eventually someone will have to handle that. Options at that point include just accepting pillar box presentation for the old stuff, or selectively crop it , or a splitscreen or PiP presentation that minimizes the lower quality, or a blurred background similar to cell phone vertical video. Maybe others have better ideas.

[Joe Marler]

[cybil lake] “I’m trying to export or ‘share’ a feature film – some footage is 4k some 1080. It’s 80 minutes. “

First render the entire timeline to segregate the render phase vs the encode phase. Select all timeline clips with CMD+A then render with CTRL+R.

If that finishes OK, then export directly from FCPX using these options:

File>Share>Master File>Settings>Format>Computer, Video Codec: H.264 Faster Encode, Resolution: (your choice, probably 1080p).

This will produce a high-bit-rate H.264 file which is good quality (double Youtube’s bitrate standards), yet which exports quickly. I cannot see any visual difference between “Faster Encode” and “Better Quality”.

This will be playable on most systems whether Windows, Mac or dedicated hardware. Theoretically exporting ProRes is better but some older systems cannot handle that and the associated data rate. In general if you don’t know the exact specs of the playback system, the above is a good choice. I always do a 720p export as well, since some venue playback systems are really old and clunky.

[Joe Marler]

OPT+CMD+click on the connected clip or the grey border of a connected storyline to change the connection point. See this article under “Adjust the connection point of a connected clip”: https://support.apple.com/guide/final-cut-pro/connect-clips-ver7a77ef9e/mac

[Joe Marler]

[Eric Santiago] “Never had issues with that and at times its the only fast option to get out of that workflow.”

There are severe problems if doing “leave files in place” import of bare MTS files from an AVCHD package. You may not notice it at first, but the I/O load can be incredibly high, which can bog down many operations.

Unfortunately macOS no longer permits use of command-line dtrace utilities, but this is an I/O histogram from FCPX when simply scrolling through a library that contains .MTS files imported in place. As you can see it produces a very high number of small I/Os. This is absolutely unique to bare MTS files imported in place: https://joema.smugmug.com/Computers/FCPX-Event-Browser-Perf-Data/n-M7bG7L/i-bCH2XFX/A

The same behavior still exists on FCPX 10.4.7 and Mojave. If already imported one solution is create optimized media. If not yet imported, the best practice is either import only from the AVCHD package, or else externally re-wrap using EditReady.

[Joe Marler]

[Noam Osband] “What is the advantage of doing that with EditReady? Is that software good for other things? Can it do thing Handbrake can’t?”

EditReady can re-wrap AVCHD vs just transcoding it. This is vastly faster. It can also transcode. It is well-supported commercial software and isn’t very expensive.

[Joe Marler]

[Noam Osband] “I have saved AVCHD cards on a hard drive. I completely copied the card. I am trying to copy files to my library. “

Importing them to the library should work, although people sometimes encounter problems with interrupted import which keeps referencing the card. This produces the error “referencing media on the camera”. Ben Halsall discusses that in the below video.

For AVCHD I recommend externally re-wrapping with EditReady then importing using “leave files in place”. That is very fast and reliable: https://www.divergentmedia.com/editready

Under no conditions open the AVCHD package, copy out MTS files then import those. It can cause severe I/O performance problems.

https://youtu.be/NRNoReJbVoA

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