[Joe Marler]

Yes that would help a lot. Optimized media is original resolution ProRes and is about 5x or 6x the file size of H264. Proxies of 4k are ProRes 422 at 1080p. Those are about 60% the file size of 4k H264.

[Joe Marler]

Here is about two min. of work using color wheels and vector scope to place a cropped facial region roughly on the skin tone line. I also used a static shape mask to reduce the IRE level of his face to the recommended 45-65 level and increase contrast, then used the mask “outside” setting to bring down the background to match that.

Here is a Larry Jordan video that discusses cropping to a skin region for color correction:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jX45Yi1spY4

[Joe Marler]

I’ve edited some XC15 4k MXF material in FCPX and it worked very well. However I think this was “all intraframe” (not Long GOP), and the bit rate was about 300 mbps. The XC15 has several available codecs. I no longer have that material on line and unfortunately don’t have time to retrieve it from archives.

What the B&H rep told you is generally correct. It is difficult to edit smoothly 4k Long GOP (e.g, H264) on almost any Mac, including an iMac Pro.

The 2011 iMac had a “Sandy Bridge” CPU, which was the first generation of Quick Sync. That feature is vital for smoothly processing H264 material. Later Intel CPUs improved this, in particular the Kaby Lake version in the 2017 iMac was about 2x faster than the Skylake version in the 2015 iMac (as used by FCPX).

1080p is 1/4 the pixels of UHD 4k so is a lot easier to process. My gut feel is your 2011 iMac would handle this OK. It won’t be a speed demon but it will handle it. That said a 2011 iMac is getting pretty old so it would be a good idea to consider a newer machine, especially if you ever consider 4k.

[Joe Marler]

When you upgrade, also make sure you upgrade to the latest version of Apple Pro Video Formats. Starting with Mojave this is done from System Preferences>Software Update.

At any time you can check what version you are running by doing About This Mac>System Report>Installations, then scrolling down to Pro Video Formats.

As always, make sure you have good backups before upgrading.

Mojave will sometimes display a 32-bit incompatibility warning for various software. This is advisory only, it doesn’t cause any problems. This is to remind people the macOS version after Mojave will not support 32-bit apps or codecs.

Separately, FCPX 10.4.6 will indicate if any video files are encoded with a 32-bit codec that won’t be supported in future versions. It will also give the option of transcoding those to a supported format.

None of this is related to your problem but you might see this after upgrading.

[Joe Marler]

Rob, I did “save current frame” if your D810 file to PNG and it looks OK: https://joema.smugmug.com/FCPX-D810-Save-Frame-Test/n-5WqLxH/

I am running FCPX 10.4.6 on Mojave 10.14.4, also Apple Pro Video Formats 2.1.

You are running FCPX 10.4 on Sierra 10.12.6. I wonder if that is the cause? Is there any way you could upgrade your software versions?

[Joe Marler]

Thanks for the info. If you can upload to DropBox, etc. a short unedited out-of-camera clip I will investigate it. The D810 produces 1080p H264 material so the file shouldn’t be that big.

[Joe Marler]

[Rob Postroz] “…trying to export still images of HD footage from a FCP X project using the ‘save current frame’ function, but the exported stills are a much lower quality than what i’m seeing in my FCP X viewer… “

I usually use TIFF for exports but even using PNG I have not seen this before. Your exported image shows color banding, as if translated from a different color space using 8-bit processing.

What color space are you using, as shown in FCPX Inspector?

Are you using a camera LUT, as shown in FCPX Inspector in the Settings option? Are there any effects whatsoever on the clip within FCPX?

Can you tell us more about your camera and codec? Also what version of FCPX and macOS?

[Joe Marler]

[Sam Lee] “how to remove the extra 1 frame on a 25 fps broadcast master converted from a 24 fps edited master. Is it at all possible in FCP X or Compressor? “

In FCPX when you add 24 fps material to a 25 fps timeline, the frame count will be the same but the 25 fps version will have less “wall clock” running time. IOW the default conform algorithm is run the 24 fps material slightly faster.

In Adobe Premiere and maybe other NLEs, when you do that, it duplicates each 24th frame to maintain the original running time. This manifests as a motion cadence “hitch” about once per second and (in your case) is causing the material to fail QC.

Apple Motion won’t let you do reverse telecine in this situation — that option is greyed out.

It is theoretically possible to delete the extra frames in FCPX using a similar procedure to that mentioned here. I played around with it and it seems like it might work but I don’t have time to complete the R&D:

https://www.lafcpug.org/phorum/read.php?1,288135,288142

[Joe Marler]

That is the best approach if they will relink. However there are lots of factors that may preclude that. FCPX is very picky about what it will relink.

[Joe Marler]

[Julie Turner] “…have a clip on which I have already marked a high number of favorites. I have now found a higher resolution version of that same clip. Is it possible to copy the favorites data over?”

You can export the clip XML for your rated/keyworded clip, delete the original clip from FCPX, rename the high-res clip to the same name, import it then load the clip XML. That should put all the metadata on that new high-res clip. It need not have the same file extension (.mov or .mp4) but I think the filename must match.

When loading the clip XML it gives you two options, replace or keep both. Either one will work.

If the clip is already used in a project you will probably have to replace that.

This is not a well-tested procedure and I only mention it FYI. Your library should be backed up on a file level before doing experiments like this.