[John Moffat]

This is a bit of a gotcha as keywords are not searchable in the same way text is. As Tom pointed out keywords are only searchable via the tick boxes in the advance filter window which will become a very inefficient way of quickly looking for shots when you start having 20 or 50 or 100 different keyword.

I think keywords are great for loose grouping of shots (Interview, B-roll, Scene, ‘Rooms’ etc – similar to the coloured labels in FCP7) but nothing beats adding a little text in the note field. Then you can properly use the filter in dialogue box. Smart collects are also a very powerfully tool to organise footage,

[John Moffat]

To be fair I do think some great TV comes out of Hollywood. HBO in particular. And Luther was the BBC stepping up to compete with HBO. I was just playing devil’s advocate as this forum is too hollywood centric especially when talking about the products of global companies like Adobe, Apple and Avid.

Although… Iron Man 3. It is a slippery slop for Hollywood.

[John Moffat]

And in the meantime the ‘Hollywood Editors’ jobs have been outsourced India, Avid has went bust and we’re all counting down the days until the broadcast transmission signal get switched off 😉

Seriously… It is a big planet. If anything Hollywood is synonyms with mass produced formulaic film & TV production and is in need of a serious shake up. So maybe the ‘Hollywood Editor’ needs to ‘Think Different’ regardless of what software they use.

[John Moffat]

iMac with a matte screen… iMac Pro 🙂

BTW… Didn’t apple change the internals of the current iMac making it possible to change the graphics card? i.e. it is no longer soldered onto the motherboard.

[John Moffat]

Also try sparse disk images.

https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/fcp_x_managing_disk_image_martin.html

You can load them and the event & projects they contain as and when you need them. Unfortunately once they are mounted you need to quit FCPX to unmount them.

[John Moffat]

I agree with Oliver. Over all i’ve found that:

1) The Projects Library easily becomes bloated and unusable with large projects. I tried the following test. Imported 3 different 60min projects and duplicated them 10 times each. Each Project took between 1-3 min to open each and the Project library as a whole became slow and sluggish. I tested using the latest iMac with 16GB ram.

2) The use of screen real-estate is terrible. A Project uses three line of horizontal text. In the same space one FCPX project takes up on screen you could have 3 FCP7 sequences. If you’re organising 50+ Projects FCPX’s Project Library has an inefficient use of space no mater how many sub folders you create. Equally frustrating is the fact the Project library can only be displayed in the bottom portion of the screen. Which can only only stretch to about 2/3rds if the screen. In FCP7 I could display my “sequence bins” on a full monitor if I wished. I think visually the Project Library is a bad inflexible design.

3) Personally, I also don’t like that you can’t scan a list of sequences/Projects and have an open timeline at the same time. I see to see things and it annoys me that the Project library list disappears when you open a timeline. But that’s trivial a concern, points 1&2 are the main problems.

John

[John Moffat]

I’ve not tried any serious long form yet but I agree that the project library is not viable. It is just too chunky and clunky. I used CatDv to import some old long form timelines (52min) into FCPX just to see what happens and everything slows to a crawl. It takes minutes to switch between each timeline. Constant beach balling.

I’m guessing that Events will suffer the same problem. One possible strategy is to have one Event to hold media and a separate Event for compound clip sequences. That way you can always unmount the Event holding the compound clip sequences if it slows down. It would be interesting to hear from anyone who has used FCPX for long form.

[John Moffat]

I’m not sure how stable Premiere will be with a 60min+ timeline of h.264 files. Premiere is great for short form but I would not switch until I spoke to someone with real world experience. You could just be switching from one bag of hurt to another. Ask at the premiere forum 1st.

Also, I would worry if someone is grading in AE. It’s the wrong application for the job.

[John Moffat]

As a work around try using a trackpad instead of a mouse if you can. I’ve found the pointer causes FCPX to freak out if it is left over parts of the timeline and you try to use the keyboard. If you use a tackpad the pointer only becomes active when your figures touch the pad. With a mouse, the pointer is active all the time. Make sure you unplug your mouse if you use a tackpad.

Also, if you hold down “alt” it will deactivated the playhead when you want to select something in the timeline.

[John Moffat]

Hey Craig,

Hope Adstream is keeping you busy

From what I’ve read FCPX doesn’t use the QuickTime. It uses a new architecture called ‘AV Foundation’. They’ve just kept the name QuickTime, but is actually not.

Hope this helps

john