[Mitch Ives]

[Charlie Austin] “My guess is it’s something in the OS that needs fixing, and since it doesn’t affect how X works, they’re just sticking to the schedule.”

Maybe the upcoming 10.11.2?

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[Mitch Ives]

[Robin S. Kurz] “DV is DV is DV. And no version of it is 10bit. If that in fact made some sort of difference, then capturing ANY 8bit 4:2:0 codec as e.g. ProRes 422 would somehow magically breath new, improved life into it. It won’t. It’s purely subjective at best. (and you lose the TC in the process)”

Well, I, everyone who’s seen it and Sony disagree with you… but you’re probably smarter than all of us.

Why would I lose TC (he asks, since I don’t)…

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[Mitch Ives]

[Charlie Austin] “There’s a little UI glitch in the TC window, but it doesn’t affect performance. “

Which is why I wonder why there hasn’t been a quickie fix… just to avoid embarrassment. Wouldn’t seem to take more than 5 months, would you think?

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[Mitch Ives]

[Robin S. Kurz] “Wait… so you’re saying the quality of the 1’s and 0’s being moved was higher than the ones coming through Firewire? :-D”

Yep, and the guys at Sony said the same thing as you just did, until I asked them to run the same test on a DSR-1500 deck. I told them I didn’t know why, but it was observable. Maybe it was because you could go 10-bit or something? They were intrigued, because I showed them the same footage done each way.

They came back to me and said… yep, but we don’t know why. They said, component out looks better because the TBC was 10-bit and somehow involved, but didn’t know why the SDI did. They said that this was the source of a lot of amusement in the engineers over this.

Still don’t know why… the only explanation I could come up with must have been a codec difference?

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[Mitch Ives]

[Neil Goodman] “crazy how there’s not one NLE qualified for use yet and its been out about a month.
“

And not to pile on, but developers have had it since June. I think we can assume that the FCP X team at least knew about it since then?

I hope you didn’t buy the new wireless keyboard or mouse… they require El Capitan. I had to shuffle keyboards and mice around, since a lot of people didn’t know that… and it’s all that you can buy now…

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[Mitch Ives]

Just went through something similar. I found myself in a position of having to edit a four camera shoot, that was shot 12 years ago on DV tape… in letterbox, no less. That last part was actually an issue that created some challenges, but I digress.

I have a deck that will play DV, DVCAM, DVCPRO, that happens to have SDI out, which gives a better product than firewire. I really wanted to use FCP X to bring it in, but I wanted the timecode from the tapes to come through. Many of these inexpensive solutions that have been mentioned, don’t give us that. A high-end BlackMagic or AJA would certainly be a good choice.

In my case, some of this had been logged way back when in FCP. I used 7toX to bring the project over to X, to save some time, but it wasn’t necessary. In the end, for a variety of reasons, I ended up using FCP 7 to Capture all the footage and give me all the timecode. That was an important consideration for me. I then brought all the footage over to FCP X and did all the editing there. FCP X is definitely a lot faster, so I was glad I did that. Rendering quality is also higher.

Yes, as others have mentioned, FCP X does slow down on longer projects. The final length was right around 2 hours, but during editing it was around 3-1/2 hours in the beginning… and kept getting cut down as I went. I agree with Bill to a point, that you can do some things to avoid slowing down FCP X. Where I disagree is that it is a fact that FCP X slows down, even without composited graphics or giant stills. It just slows down as the project gets longer. Given the speed of the machine, we can rule that out. I’ll hazard a guess, and say that as the project gets longer, the database approaches some limit… or at least gets overwhelmed more. That’s not a criticism as much as an acknowledgement that this would certainly seem like a reasonable consequence to length and complication.

I also think complication is a factor. If you’re cutting a single track project with lots of cuts and some graphics, then it may not be as noticeable. Having four camera angles, grading, etc. certainly does haul it down. Still, the speed of X is so much higher than many of the alternatives can offset some of that to a point…

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[Mitch Ives]

[Ryan Holmes] “I’m unclear reading this how the PSB format is a CC related issue? The PSB format has been around for more than a decade dating back to at least Photoshop 8.0 (when they first introduced the original CS bundle in 2003) and is used for large file sizes that you need to retain Photoshop layering on.”

All I can say is that I go back to 1.0 of PS, and at no time have I ever seen a document that was created in PSD somehow managing to become a PSB in the workflow process. So this is something new for me, and since I’m in PS about every other day, I tend to see this as an aberration. I redid the same workflow in CS6 just to see, and it stayed in PSD all the way. Not sure what to make of that, other than something may be different in CC. Not a problem now that I know about it…

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[Mitch Ives]

[Ronny Courtens] “I feel your pain. PSB files should not be used in anything else than PS. Even Lightroom cannot open them.”

A tough lesson learned. One of the advantages (sarcasm intentional) to having been forced onto CC. These files started out as a single PSD, and then had several layers added to break the image apart into several pieces. Apparently, the file got rather large at some point, and the file switched from PSD to this here-to-fore unknown file format. My guess is that some kind of a dialog box popped up suggesting a change, which somebody agreed to.

Anyway, I have now enabled “show extensions” on every machine, so these files can’t skate around in stealth mode. In the meantime, given the destruction that this caused, Apple might want to consider protecting FCP X in some way.

I’ve also made sure no one drops files directly on the timeline anymore. Using the Import command will at least show these files as greyed out, so you’ll know that you shouldn’t select them. The thing is, you can still select them and cause all this carnage, as FCP X tries to import them. Eliminating them in the media folder doesn’t cure the problem because the pointers are still in the browser. I tried repeatedly to delete them quickly, but the program would crash too fast.

In the end, I did locate a backup and launch it. I had to re-link all the media, but it saved some time…

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[Mitch Ives]

[Bill Davis] “Sounds like your machine is bound and determined to load the corrupt code – and you’ve got to find a way to break that chain. “

Worth a try. I’ll try anything at this point…

The thing is, once I trashed the preferences so the program wouldn’t try to load that corrupted project. I can open all my other projects just fine. Just not the one where I mistakenly imported Photoshop .psb files.

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[Mitch Ives]

Thanks Ronny. The first one definitely won’t work… can’t keep the program open long enough to do anything. I had tried the second one to no avail. I could get the project to load without crashing, but it’s empty. The third one didn’t work either, same empty project.

To test a theory, I created a copy of the project and any attempt to bring in a Photoshop file in large format (.psb), crashes the program. After that, you’re in the same boat I’m in. Someone worked on a bunch of Photoshop files, and since I don’t show extensions on most of these machines, I didn’t catch that they weren’t PSDs, but PSBs. Converting the PSB files into PSD allows them to load just fine.

A word to the wise… you might want to watch out for PSB files…

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill