[Mathieu Ghekiere]

I think most of your examples work.

Aja has the T-Tap, which is about 180 dollars or something. It works, you just need to download their Control Panel software, and it appears under the FCPX preferences, we use it often for clients.

To be honest, with the new Mac Pro I *think* (but I”m not sure) you can use the HDMI output that’s on the machine itself, as an output in FCPX.
Again, I could be wrong. But could be you are limited to 8-bit then, while the Aja and Black Magic solutions work in 10bit.

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

Working with native 4K. RED Scarlet.
Distribution: corporate.

Format: R3D acquisition,, dimensions 3840×2160, finishing in Prores and H.264 4K.

How much did it cost us?

Well, we were working with very old (2006) Mac Pro’s and a system of SATA disks connected trough eSATA and enclosures.

We upgraded to Retina Macbook Pro’s and a Mac Mini Server with Pegasus Promise RAIDS. We had also transitioned to a completely FCPX workflow.
Most of our work is HD, but our company is doing a couple of tests in 4K, and also finishing some promo’s and stuff that we shot with the RED in 4K.
We had to do the upgrade anyway, 4K didn’t change anything. For us it was a transition to new hardware (those 2006 Mac Pro’s were getting too old), a server-system instead of local disks (sometimes we connect the Pegasus Promise raids locally trough Thunderbolt though, but mostly trough a Mac Mini Server and 10GB Ethernet card) and upgrading to new software (FCPX).

To be honest, working with R3D and finishing in 4K is really easy if you have FCPX, a retina Macbook Pro and a quick raid.
We often make Proxies inside FCPX just for quick editing, and being able to quickly skim trough material, but even working with the native R3D’s is not difficult.
Doing color correction inside FCPX and rendering out in 4K, it’s not *difficult* at all. That being said, until now – this will change in the future – we just use our Scarlet and 4K for quick promo material, so no long form material in 4K as of yet.
I don’t have any experience with 5K either.

We have a 4K Philips 65″ screen. When we view our 4K Prores or H.264 on it, really sometimes seems like looking trough a window.

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

Hi Charlie,

I know you are talking about performance here, and it’s impressive just as a demo.

What I am getting bad deja vu’s about is, how much more fluid FCPX seems in making all these changes. How you can just drag a clip out to get it to play slower, making text changes in the viewer instead of a separate window opening up, etc. etc.
The whole business of the interface in Premiere Pro vs X.

I worked with Premiere, and I worked for 7 years on FCP7. after a year, a year and a half of almost working completely on X, it surprises me more then I thought it would.

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

As David said:

everything is okay, as long as you have audio and/or timecode on both cameras. This is normal practice, so I suppose that isn’t a problem?

What you do is, you select the long clip and go into the inspector, in to the INFO – SETTINGS tab, and you put Angle: 1. (or wide, or whatever you want to call it).

You then select all the other clips from the close-up camera, and in the INFO-SETTINGS tab you put under Angle: 2 (or close, or again, whatever suits you).

You can select all these clips from both cameras together, and let it make a multicam clip automatically. Shouldn’t be a problem.

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

Hi Dennis,

I didn’t say the first to edit DSRL footage. I also didn’t talk about 64bit. I know Premiere was first. You were also the first with a RAW R3D workflow.
I’m talking about re-imagining the whole editing process (organization of footage, how a timeline works, etc. …)

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

Are your render tests based on the same updated projects, or have you tried making a new Library on both Macs and a new project with a new test, and look for those results?

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

I think I would still prefer FCPX, although Adobe has a strong suite (especially when considering features, they aren’t big masters of user experience when USING those features)

First, I like the timeline. It really allows you to work faster in 90 percent of the cases. The moments you don’t want magnetism, you can work around it (although it’s not completely gone) by working with connected clips.

Like a couple of others here, I think tracks are a workaround for not having a magnetic timeline. Or at least I think that is as much a viable opinion as the opposite.

Yes, I do think Roles, and visual organization in the timeline can be better. Yes, FCPX is a young NLE, and you notice it every day in some bugs (which every NLE has), in some big foundational changes still happening (the Library model in 10.1) and in missing features.

But, although I had my moments of doubting Apple when FCPX just launched, and the Mac Pro was not being updates, I don’t doubt them anymore. I would doubt the other NLE’s much more. In the end Apple rewrote FCP completely from the ground up, WHEN NOBODY WAS PUSHING THEM. Adobe only really pushed with Premiere development when the FCPX debacle broke out. Avid has – from what I’ve heard, I haven’t got personal experience – a very stable working solution that caters to certain demanding workflows, but they haven’t really innovated a lot in years or are behind in new code and/or features.
It must have cost Apple millions of dollars rewriting FCP and re-inventing a new Mac Pro, but they did it. They innovated, with both good and bad consequences (a botched launch of FCPX due to missing features, the PCI to Thunderbolt transition on the Mac Pro) but they INNOVATED.

I do respect them for that. And since FCPX, although it’s been an admittedly bumpy ride (we all have our grieves ;-)), it’s fun and exciting development. It has us the users, thinking about concepts of editing again, re-evaluating them. See what and how it can be better, with some faults along the line.
At this point, I follow the FCPX path, because it does what it needs to do for me at this point, and I can’t wait to see how they develop these new concepts of a magnetic timeline and roles and keywords. The thing that needs the most development is Roles (and mixing) in my opinion but I already like it a lot more than tracks.
It’s a meta-tag based on content, and not on a random number-system.

I have a wish list of about 50 bullet points for FCPX. You could see that as a negative, but at the same time, FCPX forced me to open up thinking in what I want from a modern editing system, much more then older systems did. Older systems didn’t challenge me to think about making big wish-lists because I mostly accepted the things like they are. With FCPX changing a lot of editing paradigms, suddenly you start thinking about all the things that could be better.

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

Craig,

when Compressor 4.1 was released, we had a lot of problems.

We had Matrox Utilities installed (for using a Matrox MXO2 with MAX technology for making H.264’s quickly) and with that installed the new Compressor would just crash.

Since 4.1.1 we haven’t had any problems anymore (maybe doing a Compressor Repair with the Digital Rebellion Tools once), and the new interface really is much better. I really like it. We even got it to work with the Matrox.

The only problem is that if we want to add a new Destination in the FCPX Share Menu, adding a Compressor setting, we get an FCPX crash. I guess it’s maybe related to the Matrox as well, I’m not sure.

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

FYI this bug has dissapeared in FCPX 10.1.

OW and Another bug that has dissapeared is that if you change the scale of a clip in the viewer trough the transform tools, it now immediately updates in the inspector.

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

Check out mObject if you want 3D text.