[Joe Marler]

[Ian Dore] “I have a dilemma. I’ve got loads of old AVI clips that I wish to convert to edit in Final Cut Pro…..What is the best format to go for in conversion though. MOV or MP4?…I am currently using handbrake but want to ensure that as much resolution and quality is kept in the conversion.”

Why do you need to convert them at all? Why not just import directly to FCPX? You can’t improve quality by transcoding before importing, this just takes a lot of time and disk space. FCPX essentially edits in ProRes anyway, using a ProRes buffer. This is why the default render file format is ProRes 422, which can be seen by clicking on the project and then in inspector clicking Modify.

AVI will typically be interlaced, and modern distribution is often in 16:9 progressive, so it may be best to import to a 720p or 1080p project, then manually deinterlace by setting that property in the inspector using the “settings” option at the bottom.

If you import the AVI to an NTSC interlaced project it cannot be deinterlaced since by definition NTSC material is interlaced and deinterlacing is handled by the playback chain.

I have a lot of old AVI content captured from a Panasonic AG-DVX100, and I usually import to a 720p or 1080p project then manually deinterlace it before export.

[Joe Marler]

[Greg Ball] ” best way of saving the library, events, and projects…I have all of my footage loaded on an external hard drive.Can I set this up so the library is saved on my mac, along with the events and projects, but all footage and render files are still saved on my external drive?”

Before longer-term archiving, it is commonly recommended to consolidate your media inside the library. This avoids any possibility of offline media in the future. However this can take a lot of time and space, so I usually don’t do that. You can leave your external media in place, back up that media and the library. However if that media is later restored to a drive with a different name or folder structure, you may need to relink the media. FCPX can search all folders on an entire volume to do this, but it can take a while if the volume is huge.

First I’d suggest deleting all your cache, render, optimized and proxy files since those can be easily recreated. To do this, in FCPX select the library then File>Delete Generated Library files.

Even though you can do this with FCPX itself, the inexpensive tool Final Cut Library Manager provides an easy-to-use interface and expedites finding and safely deleting non-essential render and temp files: https://www.arcticwhiteness.com/finalcutlibrarymanager/

Make sure under FCPX preferences that background rendering is turned off, otherwise it will start generating render files again.

If your project uses only a subset of the content in your library and if that’s all you want backed up, you can filter on Used Media, copy only those clips to a separate transfer library, then back up only that. If you have very long clips and you only want to back up used *ranges* within those clips, that requires the 3rd party utility Works4 X. There are some limitations to this utility, so make sure you understand these before using it: https://marquisbroadcast.com/worx4-x.html

Within FCPX, click on the library and examine the Inspector. See if it shows any media on unexpected drives. Make sure you know where all that media is so you can back it up along with the library. This includes graphics and audio files.

If you have custom Motion content (ie 3rd party titles, effects, transitions, and generators), you will probably want to save this within the library. That is done by clicking “Modify Settings” in the library inspector and for Motion Content select “In Library”, the click Consolidate for Motion content.

There may be other steps, but that’s all I can think of right now. It is probably a good idea to do a test restore on a different machine to ensure you have everything backed up.

Note that effects plugins themselves are not saved. So if you use a particular 3rd party commercial effect such as Color Finale or Neat Video, then two years from now restore your library and media to another machine, if that Mac does not have those effects installed, then any clips with those effects will show up with missing components.

For more detailed info on FCPX 10.3.x media management Ripple Training has a good video tutorial on this.

[Joe Marler]

There is not a hard limit but a soft limit that depends on machine, IO bandwidth, codec, and whether you are using proxy. I have used about 7,000 clips of H264 1080p and 4k material comprising about 5 terabytes in a single event of one library and it worked mostly OK. Hardware was a top-spec 2015 iMac 27 and 16 TB OWC Thunderbay 4 RAID array. It worked better on an 8TB SSD RAID-0, and the 2017 iMac also helped since it transcodes H264 to proxy about 2x faster than the 2015.

AVCHD can cause significant IO performance problems if the files are copied outside the folder tree and imported “in place”.

I can’t explain your exact symptoms based strictly on library size. However, make sure you have plenty of free space on all volumes.

[Joe Marler]

Your 4k material is probably H264 which is compressed and requires a fairly low IO rate, say around 12 megabytes per sec for 1x playback. In general with 4k H264 the main factor in editing smoothness (excluding effects) is CPU not IO. If you want smoother editing you can transcode to proxy.

How much IO goes to the library vs media files depends on whether you are using internal managed media, unmanaged media or combination, and whether you’re using proxy. The proxy files by default are inside the library.

There are many types and speeds of USB hard drives ranging from very fast AC-powered RAID arrays to much slower 5400 rpm bus-powered portable drives.

A good tool to find and safely delete non-essential FCPX files is Final Cut Library Manager: https://www.arcticwhiteness.com/finalcutlibrarymanager/

At the file level OmniDiskSweeper is good: https://www.omnigroup.com/more

[Joe Marler]

[Ted Cox] “Now we’re on to something! I exported the Compound Clip prior to adding it to SimpleTracker and… it HAS banding. I’m not sure why the viewer shows a higher quality imagine than I get on a final export (I’m sharing as a Master File -> ProRes 422LT in this case). But that’s helpful to know.

So that eliminates CoreMelt, or my misusage of CoreMelt as the source of the problem. I can totally accept that the trouble is the source footage breaking down. You suggested adding some noise to try to dither the banding. Any other suggestions? Any neat tricks to get what I’m seeing in the viewer to actually export?”

As I suspected it is probably the blur that’s causing the problem when combined with the flat exposure being on the left side of the histogram. Re the viewer, if it’s set for “best performance” that by itself might be adding noise that prevents the banding. If it’s set for “best quality”, that when combined with a scaled display might be preventing it. The key point is the viewer isn’t doing a better job, it’s actually doing a worse job and those imperfections (whether scaling or noise) are by happenstance suppressing the banding.

I think the last time I encountered this I added some noise or film grain to the smooth region and it lessened the problem. I don’t remember which. There is a built-in “add noise” effect and I also have the 3rd-party FilmConvert plugin; I used one of those, I think in a mask. You will have to experiment.

Another possibility is you could export it as 1080p. If you have not cropped the 4k, in theory 4k 8-bit 4:2:0 can be transcoded to 1080p 10-bit 4:4:4. It would be interesting if a 1080p ProRes export looked any better: https://www.provideocoalition.com/can-4k-4-2-0-8-bit-become-1080p-4-4-4-10-bit-does-it-matter/

In general these are common problems when shooting 8-bit color with a flat profile which is not exposed to the right on the histogram.

[Joe Marler]

OK that’s interesting. What if you export the compound clip as 4k ProRes, then re-import that, then apply the SimpleTracker plugin?

Unfortunately I’m leaving for a field assignment and won’t be able to follow up on this for a week.

[Joe Marler]

Thanks. The first frames you posted were in a flat or log profile. The exposure had been “de-flattened” and the histogram stretched. This was done by something besides simple tracker. Do you know for certain that if this was exported without simple tracker it would look OK, or would it also have banding? E.g, what if you experimentally added the same blur to the entire frame? This would help decide if it’s the Coremelt tool or simply the combination of color correction and blur step which triggers the banding.

Another test would be leaving the Coremelt tool in but taking out the color correction and exporting in in the original flat exposure.

BTW while FCPX is pretty good at showing in the viewer a representation of the final export for difficult cases like this I always recommend exporting the clip and examining it, often with more than one tool. E.g, VLC and Quicktime.

Simple tracker might be degrading the image by itself, but it’s suspicious that I’ve seen similar things happen without that plugin.

E.g, an underexposed 8-bit image in log format is often on the threshold of banding when color corrected. Performing normally innocuous steps such as video noise reduction, smoothing (or maybe even blur) can precipitate the banding. Those steps are essentially suppressing the normal grain or noise, thereby creating a smoother gradient. That smoother gradient requires more tonal steps to smoothly represent, and with log-format underexposed 8-bit color, you don’t have those steps.

[Joe Marler]

It’s not aliasing, it’s posterization or gradient banding, which is visible if you double-click on the 2nd image. My first guess is it’s caused by shooting underexposed 8-bit material with a flat profile then trying to pull it in post. For a flat or log profile to work well on 8-bit material it needs to be “exposed to the right” on the histogram.

OTOH when I take a screen cap of this and process it in Photoshop it looks mostly OK. This might indicate Core Melt is degrading it somehow. However I don’t have the full resolution to work with so I can’t be sure.

What codec are you editing in, and how was it exported? As an experiment you could try exporting it as ProRes. If that doesn’t change anything, transcode the clip to optimized media, it to a test project, apply your effects then export as ProRes. Make sure you are not using proxy for the export. If this is 4k use a 4k project not a 1080p project.

In general it’s easy to run out of tonal steps when processing 8-bit color. This is exacerbated when shooting with a flat profile and furthermore when exporting to H264.

As an contingency workaround sometimes you can add some dithering or noise in a mask over the affected region. That sometimes breaks up the banding.

[Joe Marler]

[Ray Sherman] “all I need to know if there is anybody else that has a noisy Promise Technology Pegasus raid array. All six drives seem to be quite noisy during the FCPX archiving.”

If fed a certain pattern of IOs, a normally quiet drive (or RAID array) can become louder. For RAID this might be due to the IO size adversely interacting with the stripe size or segment size. Or if the IOs are random vs sequential it could cause lots of seeking or cache misses which translate into more physical IO. It is impossible to say which of those (if any) might be a factor in what you observe.

Examination with the terminal dtrace utilities shows the FCPX archiving process mostly does 2 and 4 megabyte reads from the media tree and 1 megabyte writes to the archive bundle. The block addresses indicate both are mostly sequential in nature.

When I create a large camera archive on my 32TB Thunderbay 4 RAID-0 array, it doesn’t make much noise. If you are using RAID-6, that has a dramatic write penalty vs RAID-0 or even RAID-5. Maybe it’s that combined with conflicting read and write streams on the same device.

[Joe Marler]

[cybil lake] “I’m importing all the audio tracks that go with one take, and syncing it with the video – and FCPX makes one video track with one audio track – with all the mics in there .

This sounds like a polyphonic wav file from a multichannel recorder. It looks like one track but the individual components are visible in the inspector. If the recorder supports iXML, you can import the track names into FCPX and those can be passed on to an audio finisher.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7tcrNlnsQU

If the files were not properly labeled during production, you can assign roles to each channel to obtain similar results: https://larryjordan.com/articles/fcp-x-using-and-importing-ixml-audio-names/

Those audio roles can be exported as separate files for downstream use, or as a multitrack file:
https://support.apple.com/kb/PH12653?locale=en_US

https://finalcutproxediting.wordpress.com/2016/04/01/exporting-audio-from-fcpx-to-pro-tools-without-xml-or-aff/

[cybil lake] “….If I sync them all together like this – will an audio person be able to later separate them? I’m trying to decide if I should sync each individual mic track w the video separately”

If it’s a polyphonic file you just sync once; normally the other contained tracks are mutually sync’d. If it is discrete files from multiple recorders, then you’ll have to sync them just like any multi-camera situation with separate audio sources.

For a single video and single audio or multiple audio sources, it’s often better to use a multicam clip not a sync clip: https://www.fcpworks.com/sync-or-multicam-clips/

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