[John Rofrano]

[Ray Sherman] “1) Does anyone know if EditReady can be downloaded to more than one computer?”

Yes, I have it running on my Mac Pro and MacBook Pro without any issues.

[Ray Sherman] “2) Are there free updates?”

So far, minor updates (e.g., 1.3 to 1.4) have been free. I assume that a major update (say from 1.x to 2.x) would be paid for just like any other software but they have been very good at keeping 1.x up to date.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

Hmmm… it’s interesting that Movies is not on that list. I wonder if it’s grouping video files under System by mistake. I would move a few GB of videos onto an external drive and delete them from your internal drive and see if the System calculation goes down by the same amount. (worth a try)

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

Click the Manage… button on the right and it will give you a complete breakdown which may our may not agree with the status bar. I have found the status bar to change to something more “accurate” after pressing the Manage… button and letting the system dig into the details.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

I don’t believe that FCP X is capable of this but there is a web site that will generate a SMTPE Linear TimeCode file for you at a given length for a given start time. You could generate the file to match your projects timecode and include it in your project. Then anything you export will have the correct audio timecode.

https://elteesee.pehrhovey.net/

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[Ross Harrison] “Yes, I do always have backups. I’ve just never worked with XDCAM footage before, so files have always come straight as .mov from a camera and then those are saved plus backed up.”

What I do is have a separate drive for all of my Camera Archives. Usually these are 1TB USB 3.0 drives and as soon as I finish shooting I plug the card into my MacBook Pro, plug the USB 3.0 drive in and use Create Camera Archive to archive the entire card to the external drive. Now I have a drive will all of my camera cards. (this also gets backed up btw so that I have 2 copies of all of the cards before I start working).

Then when I’m ready to start work on a project, I attached the camera card archive drive and have the files copied into my Library on my working drive. This ensures that I am always working on a copy of the original media and that I always have all of the metadata that was recorded on the camera card. It is NEVER a good idea to take raw files out of the camera card structure any more than it was a good idea to take DV tape out of it’s cartridge! ???? The camera card structure is the cartridge.

I like the fact that FCP X keeps me honest and requires me to work on copies of the original camera card media. I also don’t import the whole card or even the whole clip. I use in and out points to just take the sections of the media that I need which is also why it needs to be copied. That leaves me with smaller Libraries.

[Ross Harrison] “So if I save the MXF files separate to the card file structure, then import with ‘leave in place’, what happens to the levels? It ends up with levels shifted overexposed as in the following: “

I cannot reproduce this. I downloaded one of the XDROOT HD Log files from the link earlier in this post and I copied one of the files and placed it outside the camera card structure and renamed it. When I import media, both the file inside the camera card structure and external to it come in looking exactly the same (flat as you would expect).

Something is not right on your end. Are you using the latest FCP X 10.3.2? I’m not seeing this behavior and cannot reproduce it.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[Scott Thomas] “I have a 4 port hub on my desk. Doesn’t look too bad. It comes with a cable, but I got a longer one to get it where I needed it.”

Awesome! Just bought one. It will be better that the cable that I just have hanging about now. THANKS! 😀

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[Simon Ubsdell] “Reading the specs for the Inatek PCI-E to USB 3.0 card, it says: Operating System Compatibility: Mac OS 10.8.2 to 10.9.5. What version of OS are you running?”

I’m running macOS Sierra 10.12.3 on my 2010 Mac Pro and OS X El Capitan 10.11.6 on my 2008 Mac Pro 8-Core, both of which have this card and I’m not having any issues with either of them. I assume 10.9.5 was the latest version when that card came out. I bought two of them back in 2014 and they’ve been solid since even with several OS upgrades. USB 3.0 is a well defined standard so I don’t expect any troubles in the future either. I bought an extension USB cable from Amazon and I routed it under my Mac Pro to the front of my desk so that I have one front facing USB 3.0 port.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

One way is to keep your Libraries on an external drive that you simply plug into your iMac or MacBook Pro. This is what I do between my Mac Pro and MacBook Pro. I use USB 3.0 drives because my 2010 Mac Pro doesn’t have Thunderbolt but if both your iMac and MacBook Pro have Thunderbolt, that would be the way to go.

You can also create a new Library on an external drive and just drag and drop the projects that you want to work on remotely to it, and FCP X will automatically copy the media into that new Library. It’s also a good idea to Consolidate Media in that Library before removing the disk to be sure that there are no pointers to media remaining on your internal hard drive. Then just move the external drive to the other computer and optionally copy the Library back to your internal drive and work on it, or just work on it on the external drive.

There are other methods of sharing data that are outlined in detail in Ripple Trainings: Media Management in Final Cut Pro 10.3 which I can highly recommend. It really helped me understand my options. There are a few free sneak peek videos on that page:

Also search YouTube for RippleTraining and you’ll find lots of great videos. I’ve bough a lot of their stuff and it’s really helped me come up to speed quickly.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[Ross Harrison] “Anyone know why I’m unable to choose ‘leave files in place’?”

Because FCP X is seeing the complete card structure and so it assumes that it is a memory card. It has no way of know that its not.

[Ross Harrison] “Curiously, when I take the ‘clip’ folder with the mxf files out of the original card directory, the ‘leave files in place’ option becomes available on FCP import”

As you have seen, if you drag the MXF files out of the Clip folder it will just see loose files on the filesystem and let you leave them in place.

I’m not sure why this is a problem. Are you saying that you work without any backups of your original media? Because most editors have some sort of camera archives as a backup and we are always working on a copy of our media and if you are not working this way, you should think long and hard about what would happen if one of your original media files got deleted or corrupt and you could not get it back!

What you really want to do is have a backup drive with your original camera media in the original folder structure and then have another drive that you work on your active project media. If one goes bad, you always have the other. You are playing with fire if you are working without any backups. This is why FCP X will not allow you to edit your original camera media and forces you to make a backup. It’s just enforcing best practice.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

I upgraded my 2010 Mac Pro 2.93Ghz 12-Core, 24GB memory with the following:

Slot 1: Sapphire HD 7950 Mac Edition (from OWC)
Slot 2: Inateck 4 Ports PCI-E to USB 3.0 Expansion Card for Mac Pro (from Amazon)
Slot 3: OWC 480GB Mercury Accelsior E2 PCI Express Solid State Drive (from OWC)
Slot 4: Apple RAID Card w/6TB RAID 5 (existing OEM not an upgrade)
Optical Bay: Pioneer SATA Blu-ray Burner BDR-2209 (from Newegg)

Interesting to note is that the 2010 Mac Pro (maybe the 2009 as well) uses Triple Channel memory. That means the memory runs faster at 24GB than at 32GB! I’ve proven this will my Geekbench Score. I had 32GB originally in 4 pairs of 4GB each and it only ran in Dual Channel mode. I removed 1 pair of 2x 4GB modules and it switched to Triple Channel mode for the 3 remaining pairs and memory throughput was faster.

The biggest upgrade impact was the OWC 480GB Mercury Accelsior E2 PCI Express. I’m getting 651 MB/s Read and 582 MB/s Write access. That really made everything perform faster. You don’t realize how I/O bound your Mac is until you add an SSD and the Mercury Accelsior is pretty fast. The other advantage is that it adds an eSATA port on the back so I can connect my external RAIDs with eSATA and be just as fast as if they were internal.

The next biggest upgrade impact was adding the Inateck 4 Ports PCI-E to USB 3.0 Expansion Card. USB 3.0 is 10x faster than USB 2.0 and it makes a huge difference when working with external media. I have a RAID enclosure that supports both eSATA and USB 3.0 and I’ve connected it both ways and the performance is about the same. The same cannot be said for the original USB 2.0 ports. They seem unbearably slow now by comparison.

The Sapphire HD 7950 Mac Edition was an upgrade from the Apple ATI Radeon HD 5870 which was already twice as fast as the stock Radeon HD 5770 so it wasn’t that much if an improvement over the 5870 but I wanted the fastest Apple approved card I could get so the 7950 was as good as it gets. Recent Geekbench OpenCL scores puts just under the performance of a single D700.

The Apple RAID card was original equipment from Apple so it wasn’t an upgrade. I wanted to point out what was in Slot 4. Not the best card by today’s standards but it still works so why fix it.

Overall adding an fast SSD, eSATA, USB 3.0 and GPU breathed new life into the old box. I have a Geekbench 3 32-bit score of 25,028 and a Geekbench 4 64-bit score of 19,178 which comes in right under the Mac Pro 8-Core (Late 2013) score of 20,564. Considering that my score of 19,178 was well above the 16,524 score of a Mac Pro 6-Core (Late 2013) which cost $3999, I’d say I got my money’s worth out of my ~$1,000 in upgrades. When you consider that I bought my 2010 Mac Pro used on eBay for $2475, adding $1000 in upgrades, I still have a more powerful Mac at $3475 than I would have had I bought a new Mac Pro 6-Core for $3999.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com