[Joe Marler]

[Oliver Peters] [managed libraries] “The reason that it’s good is solid media relinking.”

Everyone may know this, but current versions of FCP X will scan the entire hard drive to relink media. IOW when encountering the red “Missing File” icons, you can select Files>Relink Files>Locate All, and select the hard drive, not a folder. It will scan the entire hard drive and relink every file, even if the folders are all different between source and destination.

[Joe Marler]

[Jason Ferris] “upgrading to a new iMac in order to run FCPX 10.2.

I’m looking for the best power/cost ratio and want to avoid items that I won’t use. (Like a 4K monitor.)

I shoot/edit minidocs that are distributed exclusively on the web. I shoot 1080p, not 4K, and don’t foresee going to 4K for the next 3 years,”

Virtually anything can edit modest amounts of 1080p. I do that on my 2013 MacBook Air. However even at “only” 1080p, certain FCP X effects are very slow and computationally-intensive, e.g, stabilization, noise reduction, etc.

You don’t need a retina screen for 1080 or even 4k editing. However retina screens are much nicer — even text is far more crisp and clear.

FCP X can usually edit camera-native H264 fairly well. GoPro video can be a bit laggy. If you will ever be editing multicam material that stresses the hardware a lot more. You can transcode to proxy or optimized media in FCP X but that uses more space, maybe 8x the space for optimized material vs H264 camera native.

My group distributes only in 720 or 1080 but we now shoot exclusively in 4k because of the advantages it provides: shot reframing in post, zoom/pans in post, more cropping margin for digital stabilization, each frame is an 8 megapixel still usable separately, etc. The tradeoff is editing 4k takes the highest end hardware you can possibly obtain. OTOH a top-spec iMac 27 is quite expensive and if you positively will not be editing 4k (meaning no 4k cell phone video) and only modest amounts of 1080p for three years, a lower-end iMac might be more cost effective.

Here is a good summary of 4k benefits for lower-res distribution:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4FDn8YX4Ao

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[Joe Marler]

[James Ewart] “s there any way if finding out which project in the browser is the most recently modified as opposed to on what date it was created.
“

In Finder if you right click on the library and select “show package contents”, then drill down to the projects, does the Finder modified date reflect the last modified date?

[Joe Marler]

[Craig Alan] “Any chance you could do a screen capture tutorial of those steps? I knew the skin looked too red-yellow and I know that blue-cyan/red-yellow are complementary opposites; but what a difference.”

Larry Jordan covers the procedure in this video at about 25:00: https://youtu.be/jX45Yi1spY4?t=1446

For those interested he has an updated version of this video on his web site.

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[Joe Marler]

The difficulty of stabilizing a compound or multicam clip or retiming it with optical flow is a long-standing deficiency of FCP X. Considering how well FCP X otherwise does multicam, it is a glaring issue.

A workaround (developed by others) which works for both multicam and compound clips:

1. On your timeline, select clip then Shift+F to locate the clip in the event browser – this will highlight your clip
2. Cmd+1 – go to event browser window, use skimmer to check starting/ending time codes of highlighted clip & write them down. If needed first do View>Show Skimmer Info to display timecode above skimmer. Zoom browser in/out if needed to see clearly the start/end points of the highlighted clip.
3. Double click the multicam clip in the event browser to open it in Angle Editor.
4. Once in Angle Editor, press Control+P to type in the remembered time codes. Don’t enter colons, just the numbers, e.g: for 12:52:19 just enter 125219, then Enter.
5. Blade that section of the clip, then apply stabilization or retime with optical flow.
6. Press the “go back” timeline history arrow (upper left of timeline) to return to multicam/composite clip

Complex as the above procedure seems, once you’ve done it numerous times it becomes pretty fast. However it is a sad situation to be forced through such gymnastics on an editor which emphasizes ease of use.

[Joe Marler]

[chris king] “If you want to have a smooth 4K video and FCP X workflow, you are advised to convert 4K video to ProRes in proper settings(1080p) for further editing in FCPX.”

Commercial conversion utilities like the one you referenced from Brorsoft are not needed to convert 4k video for editing in FCP X. My group has many different 4k cameras and FCP X 10.2.2 is capable of importing those and transcoding as needed — all by itself.

[Joe Marler]

Here is my attempt. All I did was:

(1) Crop on her face to isolate that
(2) Use the waveform scope to increase her skin luminance to about 40%
(3) Use vector scope and color board to place the cropped skin region on the skin tone line

Oftentimes when there’s no good white object to balance on, using the vector scope on a cropped skin region works pretty well.

[Joe Marler]

Can the clips be played using Quicktime on the Mac? How about from VLC?

Although normally not a good idea, if you open the AVCHD package and copy out a couple of clips, can they be imported to FCP X?

If you have ClipWrap, it would be interesting to see if the problem clips are visible and can be transcoded. All these tests will help to determine is it an issue with FCP X or the files themselves.

[Joe Marler]

[Bret Williams] ” It’s a 27″ i7, 3.4ghz with 2gig 680mx, 32gigs RAM and fusion drive…In fact the current machines aren’t really that much better.”

That is an Ivy Bridge CPU, so it’s three generations back from the currently shipping Skylake. Each generation slightly improves IPC (Instructions Per Clock), so overall at the same clock rate Skylake might be 15% faster. Then you pick up 17.6% from the 4Ghz clock rate, so your overall CPU improvement might be about 30% faster (depending on workload).

Although most of your media is probably external, doing from FD to SSD would also pick up some performance. The GTX-680MX is well-regarded for its performance in that class, but the M395X is probably somewhat faster — haven’t seen any benchmarks yet.

As we move toward H.265 and VP9 codecs, the improved Quick Sync in Skylake supports this so that will be important in the future. You have a great machine and fortunately we FCP X users have integrated proxy workflow (unlike Premiere) but the demands of 4k are so great it might be time to start thinking about an upgrade.

[Joe Marler]

On my top-spec 2013 iMac 27 with media on a Pegasus R4 array, I can edit a single stream of native 4k H.264 fairly well, but multicam requires using proxies (for me).

Certain computationally-intensive effects are agonizingly slow on 4k, such as stabilization (either FCP X or Coremelt’s Lock & Load), Digital Anarchy’s De-Flicker, etc. This is no surprise — it’s 4x the data so it’s like using a computer several years old. It’s actually amazing FCP X handles it as well as it does.