[John Davidson]

Maybe you should copy and paste all your work into a new project or comp, depending on which workflow you’re using and see if that helps.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

That’s a good strategy, Bill. Generally speaking, we prefer to do any graphical and compositing work outside of X other than basic titles. That said, we’re not running into sluggishness when using After Effects rendered graphics with alpha channels as Generators in X. In fact, that is turning into an awesome trick that we’ll be showing off at some point in my little blog here.

Example: You have a sponsor logo that needs to be incorporated with a networks graphic package that normally would be done in After Effects.
Now though, we apply an effect or generator to the raw jpg or psd of the sponsor logo in a timeline and it builds it correctly into the network graphic. The guys at work showed this to me Friday (God bless them for experimenting with it when I had two days off) and it is awesome.

I talked a little bit about it in the presentation for Melrose Mac a few weeks ago. Hopefully we should have that online in a day or two.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Well, the areas I’d look at are the third party plugins and also confirm that the buffalo drives are working correctly. Some reviewers on Amazon haven’t had the best of luck with it, drives have died, etc.

Generally I avoid all 3rd party plugins in FCPX unless they are absolutely necessary. The variables involved in maintaining them can be annoying. For example, you may have an older version of the plugin that doesn’t work well with 10.0.7, or perhaps your plugin is newer than the version of X you’re running.

You can make a starfield in Motion – just digging on youtube I found this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s-GdT0ZaU8

Try working without the starfield plugin. Disable the layer or just delete it entirely. Apple doesn’t make that plugin so they can’t QC it.

Good luck and let us know if that was the problem.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Are you doing any footage processing in the background, like optimizing or creating proxy? Are you working at a frame rate or resolution different from your source media? USB 3 should be pretty speedy, but which USB 3 drive are you using? Are you using any 3rd party plugins aside from the build in title? Which title exactly are you using?

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Yeah, I ended up getting it. It’s pretty good – autofocus could be better but for a lens so tiny I’ve been super pleased at the depth of field.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Hi, just saw this. This firmware update only provides function for the zoom control, right? Any other little fun things we should look forward to?

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

I love them. I use them at home and at work in my offices and it’s been great. Happier with them than our Adam’s, but go give them a listen at your local best buy, who will match Amazon prices now, FYI.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

[Oliver Peters] “The bottom line is that if you want fast-running filters, stick to those that are purely Motion templates. If you want advanced filters that give you a lot more control – use After Effects and buy the filters for that.”

Yep. Totally agree. I find that when most Apple products have issues it’s with 3rd party products or software. I feel like we avoid so many problems by building our own filters, generators, and transitions. I love my red giant products, but not having to maintain a database of 3rd party plugins and keeping them all up to date is a big time saver.

My dream in life is for all 3rd party plugins to be sold over the App store and auto-update with Apple’s software update. I’d like for Adobe to do that too, but I don’t think that will ever happen.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Thanks guys. I suppose the benefit is just having a pluggable analogue option for monitoring audio from additional devices. We may keep one mixer for a suite used for digitizing, or perhaps just putting it in the server/tape room on a server system would suffice. Unless the Magic Feather gang can convince me of a reason to keep them, they will probably be removed from of the suites. Another FCPX disrupted industry!

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

I have the new iMac 27 with everything maxed out and the 3TB fusion drive. Since getting it in early Jan I’ve been pretty pleased with it. So much so that I ordered a second one yesterday. There are little things about it that won’t occur to you until actual use that will make you happy later.

Pros:
*USB 3 drives are significantly faster – you will hate any non USB 3 external drives you have.
*The screen reflections over older iMac and Cinema Displays are dramatically less.
*The iMacs are not, in fact, disposable. We have 3 (4 with the next one coming in a few days). Our 2009 iMac isn’t good for editing, but is excellent for web/email/general office use.

Cons:
There is no firewire and optical disk drive, so any blue ray burning you want to do will have to be done with a usb 3 external burner. I don’t know about purchasing one of those but they probably exist.

If I had my way, our Mac Pros would be for server use only and all editing and designing would be done on new iMacs. That’s the goal for us now – simplicity and power. It’s pretty awesome that you can buy a new computer that’s this powerful for 3k. Thunderbolt is pretty fantastic with a TTap or Mini Monitor tethered to a RAID.

If you get an iMac, check out the Satechi 10 port USB 3 hub (or something similar).

Good luck with whatever you end up getting!

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.