[John Smith]

Yes… my problem was solved.. there is a comment above somewhere that does state the reason.. assuming you are having this problem for the same reasoning that is. Apple removed some of the buttons and changed the way you select those options in later releases, so if your looking at help videos that were created on older versions of FCPX then buttons will show up that are no longer present.

You’ll notice there is a little arrow on the single left-hand button on the less buttoned newer fcpx version, if you click on that you can select options that give you the same functionality. Play around with that for awhile and I am sure you’ll work it all out.

Hopefully you’ll find that solves the problem for you also… it’s definitely a strange development as it makes the process longer and slightly less simple, but there we have it, Apple has become more about hiding buttons and trying to appear less complex, whilst in reality becoming much less user friendly and requiring the user to develop higher levels of proficiency with the software in order to perform the simplest of tasks.. complexity for the sake of appearing sleeker and simpler. so many contradictions :s

2.4ghz 12 core Mac Pro 2012, 32GB DDR3 DIMM Registered ECC, Mavericks OS X 10.9

[John Smith]

OK… well I have got around this issue by creating a Null object and parenting the layers to that instead, but the bug/error still stands, and in other situations simply using a Null will probably not be a sufficient work around..

2.4ghz 12 core Mac Pro 2012, 32GB DDR3 DIMM Registered ECC, Mavericks OS X 10.9

[John Smith]

ok this has to be a longtime coming this response… original post was made 8 years ago!

But have the same issue with creative cloud After Effects, I have created a 3d “object” using 4 .png files. Using classic 3d, but whenever I try to parent 3 of the images/layers to the the 4th, all the layers change orientation and scale values and basically no longer line-up correctly. If I paste the pre-parented values back onto the layers then they change again, but not back to their original state.

I am far from an expert with After Effects, but I am pretty sure when you parent objects they should stay exactly as they are and then be locked to the layer which they are parented to. I have recreated the object in CS5.5 and it works normally/as-expected, but Creative Cloud is just screwing it up big time, and it is so altered that it’s pretty much impossible to adjust the data of the layers so as to bring them back to where they should be. I find it pretty hard navigating 3D space in After Effects, I can’t get it to work like in Blender and other 3D applications where you can just rotate the object and tweak it from any angle.

I have heard there is a difference when you press shift as you pick-whip the objects, but this makes no difference.

Any ideas? I have been stuck on this for days now, I can’t advance on this project until I sort this, I need to add more objects to the composition, adding any more without parenting the objects is just going to make everything messy and complicated to manipulate.

Thanks

2.4ghz 12 core Mac Pro 2012, 32GB DDR3 DIMM Registered ECC, Mavericks OS X 10.9

[John Smith]

hmmmmmm…. seems a lot of these issues are solved by making sure App Nap is disabled (if your using Mavericks), there’s a check-box in the file information window for the FCPX application (“cmd I” when application icon is selected (in finder)) that by default is checked. Since unchecking the box I seem to be able to edit and stuff without causing the frame error… well so far anyway, usually when you change something the problem briefly goes a way just to wind you up some more. Though it does appear to have solved it.

Hopefully that will also solve the export queue issue…

[John Smith]

Though the export issue with queued items may have been affected by the App Nap feature that I have only just disabled, so that may turn out to have been the source of that problem, time will tell…

2.4ghz 12 core Mac Pro 2012, 32GB DDR3 DIMM Registered ECC, Mavericks OS X 10.9

[John Smith]

Yeah agreed… I just couldn’t take Mountain Lion, it was problematic enough on my Laptop which really has the most bog standard setup and is not normally used for anything too taxing, Lion was somewhat sluggish in performance, but highly reliable and I felt my Desktop Mac Pro was significantly under performing on Lion. I definitely notice the general improvement on Mavericks, but as with new operating systems, there are always downsides to an early transfer. This unfortunately and also surprisingly has been the only real big downside…

For now I have exported in two parts and then placed them back into FCPX and sent them to compressor, as they need to be uploaded. Will see later if it will export the entire project in one haul now I have removed the plugin. Compressor is definitely better at using the CPU, I am now using a whopping 26% of it. A memory upgrade to 96GB would probably help a bit, though I wouldn’t be surprised if that got clogged up in not much more time than 32GB’s does presently.

Thanks for help..

2.4ghz 12 core Mac Pro 2012, 32GB DDR3 DIMM Registered ECC, Mavericks OS X 10.9

[John Smith]

My card is an ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024MB

I’ve previously found exporting directly to Compressor to be problematic and to take ages… My CPU is only being used at about 8-10% whilst exporting currently.

I never had this problem with exporting in Lion OS X, whatever the project length or complexity

On the last point, that is nothing to do with a corrupt render, it will do it on every export I do if I use the computer in anyway. It will only render/export out if I do not touch anything. Loading another application will just cause the error, and seriously I mean it will do it every-time, and will state a different frame every-time. But if the computer is not touched during the export then it never happens. So it is absolutely nothing to do with the error it reports. I use to occasionally get this error on LION OS X, but it was very occasional. Now unless the computer is left by itself it will happen for sure. To further emphasise the point, when I created a queue of exports the second export would always fail, and I realised that the process of FCPX loading the first completed export into Quicktime was causing the problem. Since I changed the option in FCPX to “do nothing” after the render/export it now doesn’t report any errors on the following exports. They complete without problem. Well until this particular one at the moment, which is larger than any others I have done recently.

A larger GPU would be good, but vastly too much money, I couldn’t find anything that seemed to rate significant improvements over my current one for much less than £1000.00, so that is not an option I am willing to take presently. Though a lot of the statistics and advice was highly subjective and contradictory and platform dependant, so without trying them out it seems very hard to be sure without knowing someone who has done the same thing with a similar setup.

2.4ghz 12 core Mac Pro 2012, 32GB DDR3 DIMM Registered ECC, Mavericks OS X 10.9

[John Smith]

Well I removed the plugin from the process and am testing an export of just the last 20% of the project first of all… if that shows no errors then I’ll try the whole project again.

App Nap my well have been what has been causing the problem with my export queues then, I could get the render/export queues to operate, I just couldn’t run any other application or use the computer in any way whilst in the process as it would pretty quickly causes an error telling me that export had failed at frame blah blah blah… which is basic nonsense, it just screws up wherever it happens to be when some other external issue interferes with the process. Be interesting to see if that problem now goes away.

2.4ghz 12 core Mac Pro 2012, 32GB DDR3 DIMM Registered ECC, Mavericks OS X 10.9

[John Smith]

Thanks for that, that wasn’t disabled, though I can’t think why such a thing would exist when I am using a Mac Pro desktop that obviously doesn’t have a battery! Surely it wouldn’t have the facility or option installed in such circumstances, seems strange I even have the option for disabling it when not necessary in the first place.

I was using Caffeine to keep the computer awake, would that by default have rendered App Nap ineffective?

Thanks

[John Smith]

Not using any 3rd party plugins, I have some installed into FCPX but I am not using them in this project… only plugin I am using is the Radial blur that is part of the FCPX software… though interestingly enough the problem arises around 82% to 86% in, the latest export has just failed at 86%. The plugin does sit about that far into the project. Though I can’t see why it will not process it… would it work better if it was rendered prior to export? I haven’t rendered the project as I was told it renders much faster on export and was not necessary prior to export. Also rendering this entire project would take forever, it’s not complex, just 1 hour 10 minutes long.

I will try exporting the section with the effect on separately and then import it as a clip back into the project, then export the whole project without the need to have the effect present. It’s only on a 20 second clip.

Activity Monitor shows red and wide area of memory pressure… not that I am entirely sure what memory pressure means, but I have a sort of loose interpretation floating in my mind that may or may not be accurate.

2.4ghz 12 core Mac Pro 2012, 32GB DDR3 DIMM Registered ECC, Mavericks OS X 10.9