[John Chen]

VO track averages around -6db, the music track is set to -23db

[John Chen]

I’m running a Macbook Pro Retina 2.6 GHz Intel Core i7 with 16GB Ram, and a 256 Flash HD. I wish I had upgraded my HD, so I can work off the internal drive. However, I’ve quickly gotten use to carrying around my Western Digital Passport 2TB with USB 3.0. I run the Adobe CS 5 Master Suite (usually photoshop and illustrator) while running FCP X in addition to various apps (Adium, Tweetdeck, Chrome, Safari, Word) and I can probably count the number of times on one hand the system has crashed in the last 9 months. I don’t use Protocol 10. In terms of Ram, I think the closes I’ve ever gotten to maxing out is around 10/12 GB.

In terms of the monitor, I couldn’t bring myself to spend 1K on the Apple Display (although I do love them). Instead, I purchased a Samsung SyncMaster that has a lot of controls over the display and use a Spyder device to calibrate the two.

My only issue is sometimes the audio wave timeline lags a bit when I move around a lot and have to zoom out and then back in to get the wave forms to update.

[John Chen]

When I was setting up FCP X, I deleted “Final Cut Events” and “Final Cut Projects” from my HD and made sure those folders only existed on my external drive. That seems to kick all the render files to my external. I do have to be careful to create new projects specifically on the external. If you create new projects on the HD it will re-create those two folders and begin rendering everything on the internal HD.

[John Chen]

I made a similar switch last August. I was running FCP 6 on a MacBook Pro 2007 Intel Core 2 Duo with 8GB RAM. I’m now running FCP X on a Macbook Pro 2.6 Ghz Intel Core i7 Retina and it’s much faster. Running off the Flash hard drive is a significant improvement over my old laptop. I usually run my media from a 2TB Western Digital 3.0 5400 RPM external drive, it’s still pretty fast (but not as fast as running from the flash HD). Though really, it’s not a huge difference.

Switching from FCP 6 to FCPX has been a huge change there. There were a lot of options and controls removed, so depending on how much control you are use to having you may find it a bit frustrating.

[John Chen]

Thanks for the suggestion. I checked the audio settings with QT7 and the audio tracks are set to stereo (Channel 1: Left, Channel 2: Right). The only other thing I wonder is if AAC format might be an issue (thought I don’t think it should be.

However, I’m still having VO issues when I play it on the iPhone Youtube App (but not the iPad app). I thought I saw somewhere that this was a known but in the iPhone Youtube App, but can’t find any documentation of that anymore.