[Mark Morache]

Ok… so this is breaking my brain a bit.

It’s possible to have an entire clip assigned to a keyword, and also smaller segments of that clip assigned to that keyword.

However, if you have assigned the entire clip to the keyword, you need to do some gymnastics in order to designate a subrange to that same keyword in order to add a note.

Once the entire clip was assigned to a keyword with the subjects name, I selected ranges, assigned them a temporary keyword, added a note then selected all the subranges in that second keyword collection then dragged all the subranges in the second keyword collection onto the original keyword collection icon with the subjects name as the keyword, then shift-deleted the temporary keyword collection in the browser. Now all the subranges with the notes are assigned.

I suppose I could also select the portion of the clip where the questions are asked, or a single frame and un-assign the keyword for that portion, in order to force a subrange that I can add a note to.

Does anyone actually use the notes on the sub ranges? Is this easier than say adding a marker to put a loose verbatim in as the marker name.

I’ve used markers, however, when I put the browser in list view in order to see the marker names, I also see every subrange and assigned keyword in the list, and I’d love to be able to filter that out, like you can in the timeline index.

I’m also a little afraid that since the keyword for the subranges and the keyword for the entire clip are the same, that the subranges might disappear, and the notes with them.

And of course if I search for a note or a marker, all it does is filter the browser view so I only see the clips with that search term, which means it’ll still show me the entire clip.

My brain hurts. This seems harder than it should be.

Ultimately, I’d like a way to loosely log clips in FCPX. If there was a way to print that marker list to get a hard copy of your notes, that’d be great.

———

Mark Morache
Evening Magazine, Seattle, WA

[Mark Morache]

High Sierra reformatted my boot drive, but I did not reformat any of my external drives.

I do the majority of my editing with a small 1tb SSD drive in a USB3 case. It’s been uber fast and I have had no complaints.

???????????????? For what it’s worth…. you can’t use Migration Assistant to go backwards. The Sierra assistant would not take any of my data from the High Sierra time machine. It recognized that I was trying to pull from a later OS but wouldn’t bite, so it’s been a day of manually installing everything on my computer.

The good news is that my timeline is running smooth as butter. No fans. No choking. No seizing up.

Many people don’t seem to be having any trouble with High Sierra, but I think it was deadly for me.

I’m running on a Late 2013 Retina MBP, maxed out with quad 2.6 intel i7, 16gb of memory.

I imagine the new FCP will run on the new OS. I also gotta wonder about the fact that they haven’t released it yet. Hopefully they won’t release it until it’s completely ready. Meanwhile I’m sticking with Sierra.

———

Mark Morache
Evening Magazine, Seattle, WA

[Mark Morache]

Thanks for the replies.

Final Cut has been weird lately. It doesn’t take much working in the timeline before things start getting slow. Sometimes just a few minutes of animating a title over a mask I made in photoshop over a still, and things start grinding to a halt. The entire system gets slow. I can’t even swap desktops without seeing the system hiccup and stutter.

Even once the clips are rendered, final cut will NOT play smoothly. I’ve even noticed that when I try a render and the progress indicator is barely moving, that simply rebooting the computer, and final cut is back to rendering quickly.

I don’t completely understand the inner workings of the computer, but obviously there are some threads or processes that are getting bound up making the whole system practically inoperable.

This was after doing a clean instal of High Sierra, manually installing all of my software and plugins. (Not a fun task)

That’s why I wanted to use Migration Assistant, rather than reinstalling all my plugins.

I think I’m going to try it anyway. Worst case scenario is that I end up manually installing everything again.

And as you know, just like when you lose an edit, it’s always faster the second time you do something.

-Mark

———

Mark Morache
Evening Magazine, Seattle, WA

[Mark Morache]

Yes that’s right. I’m constantly amazed how much work I can get done on a 2013 MBP without a lot of difficulty.
Generally, my video effects and composites render fairly quickly.

This changes significantly when I’m using large jpgs. These renders seem to chug quite slowly, even if I’m not applying any scaling or movement to the stills, the percents tick by super slowly.

This is why I think I need to rescale selective stills in Photoshop, to make the rendering go more quickly, even though I may not know which stills I’ll want to zoom into, which means I may need two versions of most of my stills… a 1080 version that will fill the frame and render quickly, or a 3000 pixel version that I can Ken Burns to my hearts content.

———

Mark Morache
Evening Magazine, Seattle, WA

[Mark Morache]

Thanks Noah…. great tip about Preview. I didn’t know it could batch conform my pictures to 1920×1080.

Feels like there’s no easy answer to the workflow. I like to make realtime decisions while I edit, and I don’t necessarily want to decide in advance if I want a 1080 version of a photo, or a full res. I’ll need to decide in the future if I want to have both sizes available, or wait until I’m ready to render to go through my timeline and make one by one decisions about which stills to resize based on how I’m using it in my timeline.

I wish FCPX had a smarter way to deal with oversized stills. Seems like it could have it’s own version of a smart proxy.

-Mark

———

Mark Morache
Evening Magazine, Seattle, WA

[Mark Morache]

Oh my gosh Duncan, that seems to work.

I shut off the skimmer info, and it’s not jumping around. How did you figure that out?!?

Yes, it was only jumping when I skimmed up, not down. I’m just going to keep my skimmer info off, but memorize the keystroke to turn it back on when I need it.

Thanks for the tip!

-Mark

———

Mark Morache
Evening Magazine, Seattle, WA

[Mark Morache]

Yes! It’s not just me.
Maybe other people aren’t using long clips in the browser, but my clips can be 45 minutes or more, and my skimmer is always jumping uncontrolled as I try to skim in the browser.

The only way I’ve found to get around it is as I’m skimming, once I’ve started skimming a section, before I move the skimmer vertically I click on the clip to move the playhead. The browser wants to jump to the playhead as you’re skimming vertically across the same clip.

I love the skimmer, however this makes it extremely difficult to take advantage of it’s functionality.

-Mark

———

Mark Morache
Evening Magazine, Seattle, WA

[Mark Morache]

You may be better off setting up a multiclip for this. Then the one clip will have all the various angles embedded, and as you copy sections of the multiclip all the angles will follow. It also makes it incredibly easy to select the angle.

If you want to copy the range, and try to include all of the connected clips, you’ll need to use the blade command to slice them all in the same spot, then you can use the select tool (not the range tool) to select the clip with all of its connected clips and copy them to paste somewhere else.

You could also try making a compound clip of your sequence, then break it back apart in your timeline, but now you’ll have that compound clip in your browser, and you can edit parts of it in back into your timeline, and break it apart and you’ll have all the connected clips with it.

If it were me, I’d use the multiclip.

———

Mark Morache
Evening Magazine, Seattle, WA

[Mark Morache]

Thanks Joe. I downloaded your clip. I feel like I’m getting the same results. Your clip played with a slightly lower cpu than mine because your clip is 24p and mine is 30.

I did a clean install of FCP, and I feel like my clips are playing a bit better now, but they’re still up around 150% CPU, compared with 8-12% when playing directly in QT. Activity monitor showed my cpu running about 130% with your clip in the browser, and 8-12% in quicktime.

I downloaded one of your 4k clips. They ran the cpu up to about 250%

If you’re getting lower CPU usage on your MBP, I wonder if the processor or the video card has changed significantly since I got my mac. Is your cpu about the same when playing your clip in FCP vs QT? Just curious.

Thanks again for the feedback.

Mark

My mac:

MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013)
2.6 GHz Intel Core i7
16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 2048 MB
Intel Iris Pro 1536 MB

———

Mark Morache
Evening Magazine, Seattle, WA

[Mark Morache]

Thanks Noah.

I’m still curious about why QT plays the files with little or no effort.

QT plays my xavc-l footage with about the same effort as it plays xdcam.

In FCPX I stacked three xdcam clips, gave them each a crop and the three streams only got my cpu up to about 150%. Still less than a single XAVC-L.

Anyone else using XAVC-L on a MBP??

And if I’m going to transcode everything anyway, I think I’d just as soon create proxies so I can delete them later, and archive the smaller original files. Meanwhile I’m going to push through using the original files and keep an eye on my cpu heat.

———

Mark Morache
Evening Magazine, Seattle, WA