[Mark Dobson]

[Craig Seeman] “My 2008 Octo feels old. Yet beyond the ATI 5770 to be FCPX compatible I’m not sure it’s worth throwing more money into. 128GB SSD would be too small for a system drive. My apps would overwhelm it.”

128Gb is too small for me so I am being very selective as to what I put on it. My current lion boot drive is 330 GB and already I’m clearing stuff out.

I very much see the SSD 128 Gb as an experimental test drive and on first impressions definitely a direction I want to go in.

If I were to go for Retina MBP I would see it as a temporary step until a new Mac Pro was released and the more I think about it, the more it seems a positive and affordable move to make towards the thunderbolt and SSD world.

[Craig Seeman] “My biggest concern is that peripheral purchases are guided by computer expandability and silence on that creates the hardest economic decisions.”

You are right. It makes decision making a bit like gazing into a crystal ball. However any thunderbolt peripherals should be good for at least 5 years.

I think the design work that has gone into the Retina MBP is a very strong indication of the direction Apple is going in. Very much an ‘out with the old’ philosophy which I don’t mind as long as I can keep up with it.

I think the Retina Display is a bit of a distraction – its that actual computer design that is more interesting.

[Mark Dobson]

[Oliver Peters] “If they were aware they didn’t mention it. “

I guess that as always what the client wants to see is the finished programme and is hiring a professional editor to get the best job done to the highest technical standard.

What a client is paying for is the end product, not the preparation, filming or editing. From their point of view these are just a means to an end.

And interpersonal skills rank as highly as technical skills.

[Oliver Peters] “Mac Pro 12 core 2.93Ghz, 12GB RAM, ATI 5870 card, OS 10.7.3, FCP X 10.0.4, Fibre Channel SAN, BMD Decklink card”

Well that’s a pretty beefy set up.

Thanks again for a positive and informative report.

From your blog it seems the complicated parts of the job were involved in getting the material in and out of FCPX in a way that other systems could also work on the material, color correction etc.

And that the actual edit itself went pretty smoothly apart from the SAN issues.

I don’t need to go out of house for anything now so these issues don’t crop up for me.

[Mark Dobson]

Thanks Oliver,

Great description of how you tackled the job.

You mention that you had the client with you for some of the time and I’m wondering what their impressions of working with FCPX were.

I would also be interested to know the specification of the Mac you worked on as you seem to have had a relatively smooth edit in terms of crashes and performance issues.

[Mark Dobson]

Hi T,

Well it seems a bit like using a sledgehammer to open a nut but having backed everything up I’m going to give it a go.

I’m a big fan of the App store as it makes jobs like this so much easier.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Incidentally do you have any thoughts about the advantages of installing SSDrives on a Mac Pro. With the MacPro replacement probably at least a year away it would be great to have a more responsive machine.

Well it would be great to have FCPX working faster!

Thanks

[Mark Dobson]

[T. Payton] “Try creating a new user account in Lion. See if it still has a problem with the new user account.”

Yup – still got the problem with new user account – so it’s a bit of mystery.

Fortunately I can use the Digital Color Meter to get my RGB values and manually insert them.

[Mark Dobson]

[T. Payton] “If disk permissions doesn’t work, create a new user account and then see if the problem persists in the new user account. Then let me know the results. Also what version of the OS are you on?”

Hi – thanks.

Resetting disk permissions didn’t work. I also booted up on my old drive to try and run disk warrior on my current drive but couldn’t run it because it needed upgrading which required the original disk which I can’t find right now. Incidently color picker works on that drive ( Snow leopard)

My current operating system is 10.7.4 on a 2008 2×2.8 GHz Quad-Core – 22 GB memory

[Mark Dobson]

[T. Payton] “Is your color picker only broken in FCP? Did you try it in something like TextEdit?

That sounds like something on the OS level.”

Well I took your advice and checked out the color picker in TextEdit and you are right it’s not working there either.

I guess I’ll run the few checks I know how to do such as repairing disk permissions although I seem to remember doing this already.

Any suggestions as to how I might resolve this problem would be welcome.

And Brett forgive me but what do you mean by ‘I usually just copy the hex when I have to copy RGB colours.’

Thanks

[Mark Dobson]

Very very minor fixes.

Stability might be better but it will take a concentrated work session to find that out.

Annoyingly my color picker is still broken.

I just get a black centre to the ‘magnify glass’ picker.

The workaround as pointed out in a previous thread is to use the DigitalColor Meter and copy the RGB settings manually. Efficient but cumbersome.

[Mark Dobson]

[Bret Williams] “But those are small companies. Probably exceptions to the rule. :)”

Ha – thanks for pointing that out Bret I really should have been more specific about the fact that I was talking about my own experience.

But then I would have missed your fabulous witty reply.

[Mark Dobson]

[Tim Wilson] “(You realize that we’re still TEN DAYS away from the first anniversary of FCPX? Amazing.)”

Hey kids – You realise that we are ELEVEN days away from my 60th anniversary of my birth?

So who gets to hear the big mac news first – us here in the UK?