[Joe Marler]

See below:

Ripple Training Warp Speed Organizing: https://youtu.be/FJVO7VzcwDM

Frame.io article on organizing media in FCPX: https://blog.frame.io/2018/01/31/fcpx-metadata/

One Smart Collection to Rule Them All: https://youtu.be/sjuCfJFhdo0

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[Joe Marler]

You can export a single range from the timeline by pressing the R key, dragging across the range and exporting. This can be within a clip, across clip borders, or multiple clips in a contiguous range. Both audio and video will be exported.

You can export multiple ranges from multiple clips in a single batch operation from the Event Browser by marking those with CMD+click+drag, then File>Share x clips. Example: https://larryjordan.com/articles/final-cut-pro-x-10-4-4-batch-export/

Using a free utility from frame.io you can export multiple clips from the timeline: https://www.provideocoalition.com/batch-export-clips-from-final-cut-pro-x-timelines/

Any clip in the timeline should normally already exist in the Event Browser. You can find those by selecting the timeline clip then doing SHIFT+F.

If the timeline was encoded externally then imported to FCPX you could blade the regions you want to save in the Event Browser, then File>New>Compound Clip.

If you want to save multiple clips from the timeline in the browser as a single clip without rendering, select those clips and do File>New>Compound Clip.

Note to change between select tool, range tool, trim tool, etc, you can just hold down the appropriate key and it will temporarily stay in that mode while you depress the key. The tool pop-up menu is in the top-left corner of the timeline: https://support.apple.com/kb/PH12532?locale=en_US

In general with FCPX it’s good to first start managing material in the Event Browser, mark favorites/rejects/keyword ranges, filter what you want, and only then proceed to the timeline. You can mark and navigate between multiple clip ranges in the Browser: https://support.apple.com/guide/final-cut-pro/set-multiple-ranges-in-the-browser-veradbf2dce/mac

[Joe Marler]

Where did the original clips come from? Was one layer generated with After Effects? Does that clip contain alpha channel information?

If you select each clip you want to composite, then do View>Show in Viewer>Color Channels>Alpha, is it all white? If so it contains no alpha channel info. This is just a guess, I am not familiar with this area.

I also don’t understand the term “color mask”. Normally you would use a shape mask, not a color mask to composite two layers. Example: https://youtu.be/dwnmUbyuJHA

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[Joe Marler]

[Dave Smith] “… I do not have background render turned off (assumed it was on for good reason)… but in my quick tests turning it off instantly has a positive effect. Will have to toggle that back and forth as I keep working to confirm.”

I suggest you leave it off, delete all cache files, then do a one-time render of the timeline via CMD+A to select, CTRL+R to render. They will gradually become unrendered as you edit. Then (only when needed) you can manually re-render. When background render is enabled, FCPX does not delete the old render files and they can build up, taking space and apparently causing some overhead.

[Dave Smith] …Does this mean there aren’t multiple builds per app version? ie. the next time the build changes we will move up a version to 10.4.8?

Yes in general there are not multiple builds for the same app version, at least once it’s released. If you were a beta tester maybe that’s different.

[Dave Smith] There was never any red or orange in the Memory Pressure readout so I don’t think it was a RAM issue now, but I’ll keep an eye one that.

That is a good thing to check. In general it implies there is no out-of-control memory leak.

[Dave Smith] “…The only plugin I have is the Coremelt Everything Bundle (SliceX/TrackX etc)… they sent me a dropbox link to an unreleased version 507 ‘a’ on Sept. 25, but I see now they have a new version out as of Oct 11. on their website 507 ‘n’…. wow, ‘a’ to ‘n’ sounds like lots of versions in a short time! Anyway, I’ll try this new version too..!”

It is very difficult if not impossible to easily and quickly verify what version of CoreMelt utilities you have. The version number listed within plugin UI can be different from the version number on their download page. Your only recourse is download the latest version. CoreMelt is trying to improve this.

This is a major issue since plugins run within the FCPX process context. Misbehaving plugin code can crash or destabilize FCPX, yet developers do not have the same testing resources Apple has. Ideally plugins should be sandboxed in another process but there are architectural and performance factors which make this difficult.

It is further difficult for developers because there are no Apple standards or UI guidelines for stating version numbers in a plugin. IOW there is no plugin equivalent of Help>About in macOS. In the real world this is significant problem but you don’t see things like this discussed at WWDC or listed on top 50 needed FCPX improvements.

[Joe Marler]

[Noam Osband] “I have some 29.97i footage I need to use in a 23.98fps project. To be specific, it’s PF24 footage shot with a Canon camera.”

I have had good results adding 29.97i material to a 23.98p project, and in Inspector under “i” tab, pick “Settings”, then enable the Deinterlace check box for that clip.

Also, since you are combining a non-multiple frame rate it is generally smoother if you also pick Rate Conform>Frame Sampling>Optical Flow for that clip. That is under the Inspector video tab. This is slower to render but it avoids motion artifacts.

[Joe Marler]

BTW build 354449 is just the regular release version of 10.4.7. It can be seen inside version.plist inside Final Cut Pro.app. I am running that on Mojave 10.14.6 on a 10-core Vega 64 iMac Pro, and so far it runs fine. Certain aspects are considerably faster than 10.14.6, esp GPU-related items.

Are you running Chrome? That can negatively impact FCPX behavior, causing extreme slowdowns and crashes.

The Activity Monitor, the parameters “Memory Used”, “Cached Files”, etc are global, not per process. To see how much memory FCPX is using, double click on Final Cut Pro in Activity Monitor. That will show real, virtual, shared and private memory.

Another possibility is you have a plugin which is misbehaving and causing a memory leak.

You mentioned you exported three projects with no problem but the 4th one caused it. What if you duplicate the project, open it, select all timeline clips with CMD+A then strip out all effects by doing Edit>Remove Effects. If you then try to export that project without effects does it work?

[Joe Marler]

Thanks for that correction. The QT7 Pro “Open Image Sequence” command included the ability to save it as a reference movie, so I wrongly assumed that restoring this feature in Catalina QT10 also included that. But it appears to only include the ability to encode an image sequence as a regular video file.

The QT7 reference movie feature was nice and fast on the creation side, but without transcoding it was generally quite slow within FCPX. So I would often end up transcoding it anyway.

Here is an old link that supposedly has PHP code to produce a Quicktime reference file: https://www.phpclasses.org/package/1946-PHP-Generate-Quicktime-Reference-Movie-files.html

The original Quicktime format specification included a provision for reference movies consisting mostly of pointers to external sources. I assume that was implemented via the Quicktime framework which has now been taken over by AV Foundation: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/QuickTime/QTFF/QTFFChap1/qtff1.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40000939-CH203-BBCGDDDF

See “Reference Movies” on page 81 of the ver. 1 Quicktime File Format Spec:
https://developer.apple.com/standards/qtff-2001.pdf

Using reference movies via AV Foundation was mentioned in this 2015 WWDC talk, so it must still be possible (in some fashion) from an API standpoint: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2015/506/

[Joe Marler]

I think it’s possible to do this using a somewhat convoluted procedure. I think you must add and then sync the transcoded material to your existing multicam clip, then translate the clip timecode of the existing clip in the timeline to the equivalent timeline timecode of the full-res clip in the multicam.

Note you can open an existing multicam clip, at the left of the timeline click the down arrow and pick “add angle”. Then drag/drop the new angle (which in this case is the low-res transcoded clip), then select that, click the down arrow at left of that lane and pick “Sync selection to monitoring angle”.

After that the procedure is something like this:

1. Use skimmer to get starting timecode of parent clip of low-res clip in timeline.
2. Observe clip length in yellow numbers below viewer
3. Open multicam (MC) and skim to timecode for clip obtained in step #1. Note: it won’t show the clip timecode if that’s the monitoring angle, so select a different monitoring angle before skimming the clip.
4. Place marker; playhead jumps there
5. Move skimmer up so timecode from start of MC container clip displays (vs clip timecode).
6. Go back to timeline
7. In Browser, skim in MC clip to timecode obtained from step #5.
8. Mark range with length obtained from step #2. Expand view as needed using CMD + and CMD -. Use skimmer for rough position then JKL and IO keys to mark the range.
9. Select parent clip in timeline
10. Do OPT+R for replace edit of timeline clip with marked range of MC clip which contains other angles and good audio.

[Joe Marler]

I may have misinterpreted it but this article said “A classic QuickTime feature makes its return in Catalina with the Open Image Sequence command, which lets you open a collection of still images and convert them into a video file.”

https://www.macworld.com/article/3444585/8-hidden-features-of-macos-catalina.html

[Joe Marler]

Thanks, not necessary. Glad to help.