[John Davidson]

[Oliver Peters] “The interface has latency when you try to do things quickly.
Playback quality is erratic and unpredictable.
Audio picks up artifacts.
Export may be out of sync.
Rendering/exporting with a number of third party filters causes corrupt frames.
The longer you work on the app, the slower it becomes requiring occasional relaunches.
Frequent “mini beach balls”.
Skimming frequently freezes momentarily as the app gets confused about which mode it’s in.
“

The only ones of these I can corroborate are the interface latency and mini beach balls. Here’s some other fun ones to add to your list.

-Sometimes playing back from the beginning of a sequence you’ll hear audio but only see black instead of video
-recording audio for scratch VO, there’s a 50/50 chance it’ll autoselect and go into the wrong event causing headaches later
-sometimes it crashes
-sometimes exports take an insanely long time
-When I’m in an event playing back media inside a clip, I ALWAYS hit the home key thinking I’ll go to the beginning like when I’m in a project, but instead I go to the first clip in an event (I know, my fault, but it’s inconsistent behavior)
-you get a timeline set up with clip height and everything just the way you like it. CLose the app, open it again, and it’s all back to the default (lack of stickiness)
-you make a new project or compound clip, there’s no default sequence setting so you better double check that it’s what you want it to be. 30% chance it won’t be what you want.
-when you preview media in the media browser, if you are working with lowered audio in a comp or project, the media browser audio is locked at full volume, resulting in a marty mcfly guitar test experience

I think you should choose another NLE. Seems like you’ve given X your best and are not happy. Perhaps your experience with Premiere or Avid will be better, or at least if you have problems they’ll be problems you’re more comfortable with.

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

[John Davidson]

Really? That’s awesome!

Actual physical time editing was probably 3 hours. The graphics took a bit longer than the edit. In the middle of the cut I rewrote the spot, so that took a little extra time. I was also going slower initially because I was talking, and then about halfway through the cut I got the idea that I would speed up the playback of the edit in the tute. At that point I quit talking and it started going much faster. Seeing the edit sped up turned out to be my favorite part.

That’s pretty cool that you’re showing it to your class.

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

[John Davidson]

Unless they’re ALL on macs, I’d say teach them premiere. It’s platform independent and open to the widest audience, be they PC or mac. I can’t tell you to teach them X because X is changing and evolving heavily. What you teach today likely wont be usable in 3 months, 6 months, or a year.

It’s not a question of which program I think is better but more about what’s most easily accessible to each student, especially after the class is over. Considering a creative cloud account is a monthly 50 buck purchase, that makes it the easiest program for all the kids to get.

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

[John Davidson]

[Darren Roark] “John’s technique works, it’s the only way at this point until Apple installs the “trust me, I know what I am doing button”. John’s very informative video on shared storage convinced me to start using sparse disk images. Since doing that, I have had no new problems whatsoever.”

Aw, shucks. Thanks. I was thinking of making a new tute just walking through little hiccups (which aren’t so little with 100+ clips to fix!) like this one. I’m hoping X developers create the ability to manage sparse disks within the app, but perhaps call them ‘vaults’ like in Aperture.

One of the weird things about this relinking issue I’ve found with old projects is that I’ve had clips pretend they don’t have 4 channel audio and relinking is blocked. The clip isn’t offline, but 4 channel audio is relegated to only 1 channel. That’s how we came up with this process.

Anytime I get annoyed with the program as it is now, I just remember my old friend “General Error”, and I feel a little better. 🙂

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

[John Davidson]

Does setting it to Better Playback not fix it? I

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

[John Davidson]

I think that the update to 10.0.7 actually ‘fixed’ this relinking problem. You can still have it though in events/projects that were created prior to 10.0.7.

When I have relinking issues with clips, the best solution I’ve found is to:
1. re-import the media as a new clip.
2. In each clip thats offline in a project sequence, go to the first frame of the missing clip
3. match frame (Shift + F) that first frame and you’ll be at the first frame of use in the offline clip
4. copy the timecode of the clip in the event that you’ve match framed to
5. select the newly re-imported clip, if you sort by name it’ll be immediately above or below the offline clip in the event
6. Type in the time code from #4
7. hit ‘i’ to set an inpoint
8. drag the inpoint selected clip onto the missing clip in your project sequence
9. select ‘replace from start’ in the pop up, and your clip is replaced.

It ain’t perfect but the reality is you’ll cry about it for more time than you’ll actually spend doing it (I did). Once you’ve done it for a few clips though, you’ll feel better about it. A hundred clips will suck to fix, but it is fixable and hopefully you won’t have to deal with it ever again.

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

[John Davidson]

I would say that that’s a pretty massive amount of high resolution images to have in an event so I’m not terribly surprised. You would ‘probably’ be better served keeping your images in iPhoto, Aperture, or even dragging a folder containing all images into the pictures media browser. I just pulled up 776 images in a folder and it took about 30 seconds to pull up preview images in the media browser, so assume it would take 5 times as long for your system to do the same thing. Definitely make sure your photos are located on your fastest drive.

In regards to your previous keywords, you may find managing your photos in Aperture or iPhoto as iPhoto Events will accomplish the same task as your keywords. I don’t think you’ll be able to save the metadata tagging you’ve already done, but perhaps someone smarter than me will weigh in.

I would say that media browser access is one of my favorite features of X, but also an area that needs much greater attention from Apple. it needs volume control and the ability to skim clips in the browser. Nothing worse than working with audio in a project at -10, then jump to the browser to preview a whoosh sfx and getting knocked across the edit suite from the uncontrolled volume of the browser.

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

[John Davidson]

Watch this:
https://blogs.creativecow.net/blog/12313/4-exporting-fcpx-on-air

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

[John Davidson]

Rich, you should watch those FCPX On-Air videos we made in the Techniques forum two weeks ago. I’m not a fan of 3rd party headaches regardless of the NLE, and I demonstrate how we manage our home brewed Motion transitions, effects, title generators, etc in a shared system environment.

And if you have six systems, you should consider pointing all downloads to the same folder on your server. Makes life a lot easier when people download things everyone needs. I think that’s in Chapter 1 of the vlog.

Here’s a shortcut

https://blogs.creativecow.net/blog/12309/1-setup-fcpx-on-air

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

[John Davidson]

Thanks. I can’t imagine there’s much of a future with Apple.

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