[Joe Marler]

[Rob Postroz] “I did try the “show both fields selection in the viewer” that Brett suggested and this helped a lot, but I still noticed some subtle interlacing lines when compared to the raw footage viewed in Quicktime. Is there any other options I should try?”

If you can upload a (hopefully small) piece of the original material I’d be happy to look at it using various NLEs and methods. In the tape days, entire tapes were typically captured to a huge file so you may not have a small file, and uploading a rendered output doesn’t help, since the question is how the original captured material behaves. But if you have a piece that’s less than 1GB I’ll look at it.

Normal interlaced DV material is intended to be encoded as interlaced, and the playback chain will deinterlace. So if you play a captured DV file in VLC with deinterlacing turned off, it will show comb artifacts.

In the NLE era you have the option to hard deinterlace it or (for web providers like Youtube) let them deinterlace it during the post-upload encoding. The question is what does the XL1 “Frame Mode” do to the material and metadata, and how does Youtube, FCPX, Premiere Pro or Resolve (which weren’t invented when the XL1 was sold from 1997-2001) handle that material.

[Joe Marler]

[Gary Huff] “I would also render out a section and see if it still looks the same.”

This is an important point. Never trust solely what you’re looking at in the Viewer. Also with Quicktime Player you cannot control whether playback deinterlacing is applied. Sometimes it reads the metadata and applies it, sometimes not. If there is suspicion about “baked in” deinterlacing or metadata, you never know what the player is showing you.

With VLC you can at least manually turn interlacing on/off and apply different deinterlacing algorithms, then compare that to how FCPX shows it and to the metadata shown by various utilities.

The XL1 is a mini-DV camera so *something* previously captured the tape to a file. My old DVX100 files are AVI captured by Premiere CS4 and (for 4:3 29.97 interlaced material), and that metadata shows DVCPRO, interlaced, bottom field first.

I wonder how the XL1 material was originally captured and whether the media file is the captured file or some intermediate format.

[Joe Marler]

[Rob Postroz] “The camera I shot the footage on was a canon xl1.”

Your above FCPX dialog says Canon Vixia HV40. So it is actually XL1 material?

Just to verify the file characteristics, could you use MediaInfo or Invisor on your media file and state the following parameters, or just cut and paste. Note for MediaInfo you need to do View>Text to see these clearly. Invisor allows drag/drop of multiple files for a spreadsheet-like comparison, but we only need to see the parameters of this one file.

MediaInfo: https://itunes.apple.com/app/mediainfo/id510620098
Invisor: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/invisor-media-file-inspector/id442947586?mt=12

Format
Codec ID
Overall Bit Rate Mode
Overall Bit Rate
Format Profile
Format Settings
Format Settings, CABAC
Format Settings, GOP
Format Settings, ReFrames
Width
Height
Pixel Aspect Ratio
Scan Type
Scan Order
Scan Type, Store Method

[Joe Marler]

[Shawn Malone] “The reason I went with this MacPro is that the PCI slots were appealing, and my peers all said it will perform great compared to more recent Macs, with the added expandability being a plus…but I’d be willing to investigate more on newer systems for the future. If I go with an iMac or newer trash can MacPro, what is the GPU situation? Does the better CPU negate having to have a massive GPU? “

Unfortunately your peers were apparently unaware of the importance of Quick Sync or the cumulative difference in Instructions Per Clock of an 8-generation-old CPU vs a modern one. A 2017 i7 iMac 27 would be much faster on H264 material.

Re expandability I have had three 32-terabyte Thunderbolt RAID arrays plugged into my 2017 iMac simultaneously, and those work fine. Likewise when plugged into my 10-core iMac Pro. The Thunderbolt Macs have very good I/O expandability.

However the 2009 Mac Pro is still a capable machine but you will need to use proxies or optimized media to compensate for the CPU shortcomings.

The trash can Mac Pro isn’t vastly better — I had a 12-core D700 version and tested it extensively vs a 2017 iMac 27, and it was generally slower on H264 material, whether transcoding or scrubbing the timeline. It was very quiet.

GPU performance isn’t a magic wand which makes everything run faster. In general it is only usable on effects, and only those which are (1) GPU enabled and (2) GPU limited. E.g, some effects are very compute-intensive, yet use relatively little GPU. Good examples are Digital Anarchy’s Flicker Free and Imagenomic Portraiture. Neat Video noise reduction can use GPU but it’s still slow. It at least has a built-in sizing tool which allows selecting a mix of CPU cores and GPU or both, but in general using 100% GPU on Neat Video is not hugely faster than a modern 10 or 12-core CPU.

If you got a pre-owned 2017 i7 iMac 27 with Radeon Pro 580 GPU it would probably be much faster on your H264 material. Just don’t get one with a 1TB Fusion Drive. It can be a bit noisy when transcoding, but if you have stacks of RAID arrays you’ll never have a totally silent workplace.

Another option and fairly inexpensive if on sale is the base model 8-core iMac Pro. It doesn’t have Quick Sync but uses AMD’s similar UVD/VCE hardware. It is much quieter than the i7 iMac.

However it seems likely that Apple will upgrade the iMac fairly soon so it might be best to wait for that.

[Joe Marler]

Brett mentioned an important point re Quick Sync. Besides using optimized media you could consider using proxy only which gives similar performance improvement but without the 6x size increase of optimized media. Optimized media will reduce the CPU problem but can create an I/O bottleneck due to the large file sizes. By contrast proxies reduce I/O overhead since they are typically about 60% the size of the original H.264.

If most of your content is 1080p then proxy of that is 1/2 the linear and 1/4 the pixel resolution or 960×540, but that’s usually enough for editing decisions. Proxy of 4k is 1080p. The only thing proxy doesn’t support is alpha channel transparency. If you have mixed proxy and non-proxy material, proxy mode is a global setting so you can only see one or the other.

Given the age of your machine using proxy or optimized media may be your best option.

Your Xeon CPU is Bloomfield (a variant of Nehalem) which was Intel’s 1st generation in the “Core” series. Current generation is 8th (Coffee Lake), so there are 7 generational gaps between your CPU and current ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i7_microprocessors

Each generation slightly improves IPC (Instructions Per Clock) so after many generations there can be a significant cumulative performance improvement at the same clock speed, such as maybe 50%. Note this varies with specific workload.

Nehalem to Broadwell IPC differences: https://us.hardware.info/reviews/6215/2/intel-five-generation-ipc-test-broadwell-haswell-ivy-bridge-sandy-bridge-and-nehalem-results

Broadwell to Coffee Lake IPC differences: https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/Intel-Core-i7-7700K-Review-Kaby-Lake-and-14nm/Clock-Clock-Kaby-Lake-Skylake-Broad

In general I would suggest considering a newer machine, especially one with an Intel CPU supporting Quick Sync. FCPX on the Xeon-powered iMac Pro uses AMD’s similar UVD/VCE hardware.

[Joe Marler]

[Ty Ford] “Does anyone have an opinion as to how better or worse the FCP X ability to sync clips is to Plural Eyes?”

I described some PE limitations in this post: https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/344/52614

In general FCPX sync works very well — assuming the material is properly prepped. PE does have better matching algorithms that in *some* cases might work when FCPX sync fails, but most of the time that isn’t needed.

There are edge cases where PE is invaluable — say your sound technician did not set recorder time of day and the files were accidentally not put in corresponding folders with the video content. In that case PE can search across hundreds or thousands of files for a waveform match, thereby determining what audio file belongs with a given A/V file. PE can also do continuous drift correction which FCPX cannot.

However PE is designed for multiple NLEs, not just FCPX. In all the other NLEs the timeline is the center of the universe. By contrast in FCPX you do most of your prep and sync work in the Event Browser. PE does not support that, as described in the above thread.

In theory with the new workflow extensions in 10.4.4, PE could be better integrated with FCPX. I’m not sure if Red Giant is interested in that.

[Joe Marler]

[Kyrina Bluerose] “…I haven’t yet put the library on another hard drive on another machine. I ran it on Wednesday from my 6tb. Since, I’ve put the library on my 2TB drive and ran it from there (on my machine). A friend offered to load it on his drive and try it on his computer, but nobody in my area is going out unless necessary because of the fires….

My gut feel is there’s something wrong with your machine — hardware, configuration or system software. If you don’t have everything backed up, please do that. You can back up the system drive using Time Machine or clone it using Carbon Copy, etc.

The best and fastest sanity check is take your data and library on a portable hard drive and try it on a different machine. I have even done that at Apple Stores. I understand the fire situation may impede this.

[Kyrina Bluerose] “….I started using the Canon Digital Professional 4 software recently, possible coincidentally, possibly related to issues. Any problem inherent in media coming out of that? I didn’t load everything straight from SD card – some was wireless. It’s probably just coincidental since the worst of it was after a few days of using it…”

I tend to doubt that as a cause, but anything is possible. As above, the fastest way to prove/disprove this is try your data and library on another machine.

[Kyrina Bluerose] “…..I’m not sure why the behavior is happening suddenly across different libraries, or why it will be somewhat inconsistent, running a group of frames fine sometimes….”

This implies a lower-level common cause, such as the machine or system drive. If the system drive is unnaturally slow or intermittently doing lots of retries it will affect apps which make great demands on it.

What if you create a test library and import *one* clip. Does that show the halting, laggy behavior?

If yes, do you have iMovie on your system or can you download it? If you import one clip into iMovie does it also show the laggy behavior?

If you had an available external drive and cloning software like Carbon Copy you could clone your system drive then boot from the external drive. This would help rule in/out the system drive. Procedure: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202796

[Kyrina Bluerose] “….Little dots are not going away, nothing is rendering – perhaps because i deleted all render files?…”

Yes, but don’t worry about that. Whether the timeline is rendered or not rendered is likely unrelated to this problem.

[Kyrina Bluerose] “….It also is taking a lot longer to reboot now. No problems using Word, Logic, or Chrome…”

The progressively slower boot time is a bit suspicious and the Blackmagic results of 84 MB/sec write, 65 MB/sec read seem slow (even for a 5400 rpm drive). I see other people have reported about 95 MB/sec read and write, so the 1TB mini HDD is not a speed demon in any case. As any HDD fills up it will slow down, and your system drive is nearly 70% full.

OTOH if your media and library are on the external drive it shouldn’t take much system I/O. You have 16GB RAM so it shouldn’t be under memory pressure causing paging I/O. Your 6TB external drive is likely an AC-powered 7200 rpm unit.

You could make a Genius Bar appointment and have them inspect your console log for I/O errors or other incriminating errors.

[Joe Marler]

[Kyrina Bluerose] ”
Mac Mini Late 2012
High Sierra 10.13.6
Processor 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5
Memory 16 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
Startup Disk Macintosh HD
Graphics Intel HD Graphics 4000 1536 MB
….
Playback isn’t showing black frames – holding on one every 16 frames, skipping ahead to the next one, holding that – and the clock/counter reflects that. Once in a while, here and there it runs smoothly- but it is increasingly rare…yes, normal playback – using space bar or L….

OK you have a 2012 Mac Mini with a dual-core 2.5Ghz “Ivy Bridge” i5-3210M CPU. Graphics is integrated HD Graphics 4000, which has no dedicated VRAM but shares about 1.5GB with main memory. Hard disk is a 5400 rpm 500GB SATA drive. That is a pretty limited machine but it shouldn’t be causing the behavior you’re seeing on H264 1080p, especially since you tried proxies. The Ivy Bridge CPU does have Quick Sync acceleration for H264, so at least that’s favorable.

Note when you generate proxies it won’t use them unless you switch the viewer to proxy mode. In the upper right corner of the viewer, click View>Proxy. Just trying to cover every base.

It appears you have extremely laggy, sluggish playback behavior on H264 — like Premiere Pro except much worse ☺

If it’s something in the machine, macOS or hard drive, I don’t understand why taking a library to another machine and putting it on another hard drive shows similar behavior.

[Kyrina Bluerose] …
…The same problem is in every project in every library now.
There are little dots spanning the entire length of all projects.

The little dots are normal for a non-rendered timeline. Your machine should not need a rendered timeline for smooth 1x playback of 1080p H264. Having background rendering enabled adds more complexity when we are trying to simplify things during troubleshooting. The fact it’s happening in every project of every library implies a lower-level common cause, we just have to figure out what that is.

[Kyrina Bluerose]
I did remove effects on the snapshot yesterday and it did nothing. I was very careful.
I deleted that snapshot at the end of the night.
Created another today, but now, delete effects is greyed out.

This was caused by lack of clarity on my part. Remove Effects will only remove effects on selected clips in the timeline. You must open the timeline, then do CTRL+A to select all clips in the timeline, then do Remove Effects. If no clip is selected or the playhead is “moving ball” is not on any clip the option will be greyed out. Sorry about that. Please try this again on the snapshot of your project, then test playback behavior.

[Kyrina Bluerose] …Are all these problems due to having the student version?…
I don’t think so — I think all FCPX versions use the same code and are fully functional and equally performant.

[Kyrina Bluerose] …Trying to do BMD on “system drive” but a) i don’t know exactly what that is, which in the list to choose from, and the ones I choose (Mac mini, Mac hard drive, folder labeled System) flash a message “disk speed test cannot be run on the selected location because it is read only.”

It won’t let you run it in the root of the hard drive. In Blackmagic under File>Target Drive, simply navigate to your documents folder and run it there.

[Joe Marler]

Thanks for doing all this, please don’t give up. My comments below.

General: you apparently have a 2011 21.5″ iMac, 2.5Ghz quad core “Sandy Bridge” quad-core i5 with a 500GB hard drive. It might have an AMD Radeon HD 6750M GPU with 512MB VRAM. Let me know if wrong. This isn’t a speed demon but you are “only” editing 1080p H264 from a Canon 80D, almost anything can edit a single stream of that — normally without requiring proxies or optimized media.

[Kyrina Bluerose] “…Created optimized and proxy on import…

More layers is harder but in proxy mode nearly any machine should be able to rapidly edit 1080p material.

[Kyrina Bluerose] “…May have “left files in place” since media was in same folder as library, thought extra copies would slow it down…

In proxy mode it’s not even touching the original media files. The proxy files are ProRes 422 at 1/4 the pixel resolution but the less dense coding makes them about 60% of the original H264 file size. It should be super fast on that.

[Kyrina Bluerose] …
-OK, downloaded Apple Pro Video Formats. (Do I do something with it?)

That was just part of a blanket list. Based on your codec I don’t think it’s needed but it shouldn’t do any harm to install it.

[Kyrina Bluerose] …-Deleted render files and proxies…

You apparently also have optimized media. Normally that helps but all your media is on one drive and optimized media (while easier to decode) is about 6x the data rate of H264. For 1080p that’s about 22 MB/sec per layer. Nonetheless the drive should be able to handle that. It shouldn’t be showing 90% black frames.

[Kyrina Bluerose] …-Closed, opened, playback still is still skipping by 16 frames on average.

This is at normal 1x playback speed? You mean the playhead isn’t just skipping but 15 out of 16 frames are black?

[Kyrina Bluerose] …-I noticed there is a line of dots across the top of the timeline. I am new at this, but i don’t remember them being there this whole time…

Those are render dots which means that region is not rendered. Normally that’s no problem if using either proxies or optimized media. You deleted proxies but you still have optimized media, I think. Even without that most older machines can edit 1080p H264 without much problem.

[Kyrina Bluerose] …-Created snapshot, removed effects. same skipping, still about every 16 frames. Water pane was still there, isn’t that an effect? Placing playhead still has slow/no response.

If the water pane effect is still there, the effects were not removed for some reason. Please check this again. Make sure the snapshot is the current project (name is at top of timeline), then do Edit/Remove Effects again. All effects should be gone after doing that step. We need to verify whether the behavior exists on a project with zero effects.

[Kyrina Bluerose] ….-brought my entire external HD (couldn’t bounce/share project) to someone else’s mac and had the same issues so think it might be a bug in the library?

Very interesting. They were running a different installation of FCPX, different plugin history, etc. Yes this might imply it’s the hard drive itself, or something in the library.

[Kyrina Bluerose] …-Opened a different library; similar problems…

This might imply a hard disk problem; a different library is a stand-alone entity.

[Kyrina Bluerose] -BM disc test – selected exHD and both meters run, but after the first cycle one of each, nothing below is changing, and the speedometers keep alternating. Is it finished?…

It keeps running — that’s normal. We need to know what the read and write performance is — approximately the peak of each dial. Also if possible in BM select File/Target Drive and select your system drive. We also need to know the performance of that.

We still need to verify whether your project (minus effects) shows this behavior. You can create a new test library, then within FCPX drag/drop the project icon on that new library. By default that should be a “managed” library with all media internal.

It will ask “copy proxies or optimized media”. You say no. When the copy is finished click the library in the left side bar, then in the inspector at right click “consolidate media”. This verifies the media for the project is copied to the new library. This is only what’s necessary for the project, not all the unused clips.

After that close the original library, restart FCPX, go to your new test library containing only the project and related files, then examine the behavior. If there are any effects on the timeline remove those via Edit/Remove Effects.

If there’s no problem, the issue is caused by some effect. If the problem is still there, take that library to another machine, copy it to another hard drive on that machine, open it in FCPX and examine the behavior. You only need the library file itself because all media will be internal to it. This is an attempt to eliminate problems from the original library, effects, external hard drive, or anything else on your machine.

Again, sorry about the problems, normally FCPX is very reliable. These cases are rare. If anyone else has any ideas, please speak up.

[Joe Marler]

I formerly used Hawaiki Automatch, which worked pretty well. You pick several match points of different colors, and it has lots of tuning controls. I haven’t used it in a long time because I just match shots manually now.

It was harder to use for multicam due to some UI issues; that’s the main reason I quit using it.

https://hawaiki.co/automatch.html

Just using FCPX you can have two side-by-side clips and waveforms, however one must be in the Event Viewer. This tutorial demonstrates how:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhsmDh29xk4

In this video Larry Jordan shows how to crop to a patch of skin and use the vector scope to adjust skin tone. You can use this technique to match skin tone between two clips:

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

Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!

This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Google Youtube” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.