Joe Marler
22
Apple Final Cut Pro X Coins
39
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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[Tangier Clarke] “Essentially I have duplicates of now of the same content. The original structure on a hard drive and the rewrapped….is there an incentive to keep the originals or is it safe to use the rewrapped files as the new masters and back up those?”
Tangier, as always a good question. The problem is the original camera files cannot be relinked to your library because you imported from rewrapped files. The filenames differ. In some cases you can change the suffix and it will relink but that is tricky. If any other part of the filename is changed it won’t relink.
Obviously you can frame match each clip in the project by eye or maybe timecode offset into the clip but that is very tedious.
If the files were wrapped before import with something like EditReady, the mov files are probably OK long term. There is a small possibility some future change in how metadata is handled might require re-import from the camera files.
I think there’s probably a greater chance of a future request for some slight change in the project, then you need to reload it (plus media) and make that change. In that case having the camera files wouldn’t help since you can’t relink to those.
If the material isn’t that big you could keep both. However for archival storage you need at least two separate copies. Any single disk or tape can fail at any time. So the feasibility/risk calculation should include this 2x penalty, which would be 4x for both camera and re-wrapped files.
I would personally rewrap those using EditReady, rename the files according to our system, import then discard the camera files. If the material was of extreme value I might also keep the camera files.
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Sorry, I meant SHIFT+Z in the Event Browser to show one thumbnail per clip.
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[Sam Lee] “hundred of hours of edited materials…When importing into FCP 10.3.4 to 10.4.5, I noticed it can take half a day or more to finish the thumbnail and waveform generation.”
As already stated you need not wait for this to finish. The problem is it’s not “half a day” — it’s totally unpredictable based on how you scroll the Event Browser. IOW if you don’t scroll down through every page of thumbnails, it may never finish generating them.
This is apparently a UI and performance design issue. After import, Apple wants to show a populated screen in the Event Browser ASAP and provide good performance for marking ranges, ratings and keywords on that first page.
To achieve this they shut down thumbnail and waveform generation of subsequent pages. Only when you scroll down does the generation resume.
They could have provided a config option (like Lightroom) to go ahead and generate them all, whether displayed or not. They likely wanted to avoid an additional user preference and background processing mode. Most of the time you don’t need this, but for large imports of new media it can be frustrating.
You can expedite the process by putting the cache on a fast drive like an SSD, then minimizing the viewer, turning off Inspector, turning off the library sidebar (CMD + ~), pick one thumbnail per clip (CMD+Z) and reducing thumbnail size. This fits the most possible thumbnails on a single screen, reducing the number of page down steps to walk through all the thumbnails. Once generated you normally don’t have to do it again. However there are cases if the thumbnail size is changed sufficiently they will be regenerated.
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[Sam Lee] “Loop playback is OFF and it would not auto advance to next clip. “
Do you have “View>Browser>Continuous Playback” enabled?
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[Craig Seeman] “Apple was 4th in hardware sales. Apple sells computers, not the OS. While fairly far behind the top three Lenovo, HP, Dell they don’t sell any lower priced the others do. I suspect Apple does very well in its price bracket. “
As you said, it’s not about annual unit shipments but annual revenue. According to some data, Apple’s revenue from Mac sales isn’t that much less than Lenovo, HP or Dell’s annual revenue from PC sales.
This also explains why Apple doesn’t “kill off the Mac” in favor of iPhones. While Macs contribute a small % of Apple’s annual revenue, if the Mac division was a separate company it would still be larger (by annual revenue) than McDonald’s, Starbucks, or Qualcomm. Apple’s current Mac revenue is larger than Oracle’s total revenue was in 2010.
Apple trailing 12-month revenue from Mac sales: $26 billion (source: Statistica.com)
Lenovo 2017 revenue from PCs, tablets, games and smart devices: $30 billion (source: annual report)
HP quarterly revenue from PC division 1Q2018: $9.4 billion (vs Apple Mac revenue for 1Q2017: $7.2 billion)
Dell quarterly revenue from PC division 1Q2018: $10 billion (vs Apple Mac revenue for 1Q2017: $7.2 billion) -
[Nicco Quinto] ‘ it shows the last frame of the 1st Clip and the first frame of the 2nd Clip. You then slide the 1st Clip or 2nd Clip until you have a continuity in motion’
… Does anything like this exist in FCPX?
If the FCPX preference “show detailed trimming feedback” is enabled, it automatically shows the last frame of the 1st clip when trimming the 2nd clip.
There are various options about how to use it. E.g, if you select the Trim tool, then select the border of a clip and do a roll edit, it will show both sides of the edit as you roll the trim point back and forth. This avoids changing overall timeline length. In regular “Select” mode it shows statically the first/last frame of the clip adjacent to the trim point.
https://support.apple.com/kb/ph12554?locale=en_US
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[Ronny Courtens] “Option to easily relink proxies.
If you want this for remote editing with proxies, you never should have a need for relinking if your workflow is correct.”
My doc team uses a proxy-only distributed workflow extensively but it is a hassle. The proxy system is very fragile and clips can easily go off line permanently, which shuts down production. Here’s one way it can happen. The current proxy system requires the volume name remain unchanged. In a distributed workflow, the AE preps proxy-only data and ships a portable drive to the lead editor. Then another set of data flows in, proxies generated, and *that* drive is shipped to the editor. But both drives (by necessity) have the same name. If they are both plugged in, Finder shows two drives with the same name. Internally macOS appends a “uniquifier”. If the computer is rebooted and the drives come on line in a different sequence the proxies will fail, sometimes permanently.
Internally FCPX is apparently storing within the library the volume name when the proxies were made. Within the SQL tables ZCOLLECTION and ZCOLLECTIONMD this name is associated with each row set corresponding to a proxy file.
If the volume name differs, the proxies will be off line. In some cases renaming the drive to the original name will *not* restore the proxies — IOW they can become permanently off line. In this case even the “proxy cheat” method of recreating the symlinks by copying in Finder aliases won’t fix it.
FCPX proxy management differs starkly from regular media management, which is superb. Regular media management (within a given volume) is so resilient you can shut down FCPX, rename every media file, move each media file to a different collection, go inside the library and manually delete all symlinks, start FCPX and it will find each file and rebuild each symlink to the new location. FCPX apparently stores the inode of each file and uses that as a backup location method to rebuild the symlinks. Unfortunately this doesn’t work for proxies.
Inodes are only unique within a volume, so it’s understandable why media must be relinked when moving to a different volume name. However there is no relink provided for proxies.
Proxies have inodes like regular files, so it’s unclear why that functionality was not provided. Possible reason: When user-specified external storage locations were added in 10.1.2, this also included proxies. Up to that time the assumption was proxies were always inside the library, and the SQL table schema was probably designed around that. IOW the original design did not envision ever having to relink proxies, so it’s possible the SQL schema did not store proxy inodes or other info required for a relink. To avoid a schema redesign (which has various implementation and test issues), they just didn’t implement inode lookup or relink for proxies.
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[Mauricio Lleras] ” finding the playhead in filmstrip mode can be a nightmare. When you matchframe to an event full of clips it sometimes is nearly impossible to tell which clip you’ve matchframed to and where the playhead sits…”
Just enable Skimmer Info (CTRL+Y), then nudge the skimmer one frame with K+J or K+L. You’ll immediately see where it is. I always have Skimmer Info enabled, so this makes it easy to visually acquire it in the browser after matching frames.
Another tip: How to find your place when scrolling through a long list of thumbnails. Say you were looking at a clip, then did something else, then want to go back to your previous thumbnail in the browser. You don’t want to scroll up and down looking for it. You don’t want to do a filtered search which only shows the query results. You want a bookmark that jumps to your clip’s spatial location amid an ocean of clip thumbnails.
The easy solution: use markers. They not only work on the timeline, they can also act as a positional bookmark for clips in the browser. You can apply them to clips, do something else, then jump back to the marker you left. The marked clip will be shown in context in the browser with the adjacent clips before/after it. You can also step forward and backward to the prev/next markers, which could be on other clips.
Keyboard commands for markers:
M: create marker at current skimmer location on current clip in the browser
CTRL+M: delete marker at current skimmer location
CTRL+’ (apostrophe): Jump to next marker in browser
CTRL+; (semicolon): Jump to previous marker in browser
SHFT+M: Modify current marker. You can name it or make it a red “to do” marker -
[Mark Suszko] “but how exactly do I go about this?
“The initial import folder will be whatever was previously selected. It is the folder that appears when you select File>Import. Whatever that folder is, inspect the contents and temporarily remove all files to another location. Then restart FCPX and try File>Import again. There should be no files listed (since you removed them). Then point it to another folder. This might not fix it but it’s easy to try.
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[Mark Suszko] “….I create a new library, and when I hit “import”, poof, it crashes. “
In rare cases 10.3.x FCPX might immediately crash upon raising the file import dialog box if a certain file was in the import folder. In my case it was an .M4A audio file from iTunes. This was difficult to perceive because there was a small but variable delay in the crash. You could sometimes click on a video file, then it would crash, which gave the impression it was that file. In actuality was was the .M4A file in the import folder. That file was not apparently corrupt or damaged.
Since the import dialog remembers the last folder location, every subsequent import attempt would crash upon launching the dialog or almost immediately thereafter. You couldn’t navigate to a different folder — it would usually crash when enumerating the files in the import folder. In my case the solution was to identify and remove that iTunes .M4A file. I vaguely recollect other people had this with different files, not just .M4A.
I haven’t seen this recently, but on the outside chance your case is related, try removing all files from the import folder, then start FCPX and point the import dialog at another folder, preferably an empty one. It will remember that and you can proceed with import tests. Then move all your files back to the original import folder.
It also wouldn’t hurt to run Disk Utility First Aid on all volumes, also build Spotlight indexes on all volumes:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201716