Nicholas Kleczewski
Forum Replies Created
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I personally have found that once you get used to how powerful FCPX can skim through footage of any size in a particular clip, the harder it is to ever consider going back to double clicking through single clicks. So while Keywords can work for things like interview, B-Roll, etc you can also take say one interview has 15 clips where the camera stopped and started. Highlight them all Opt-G and make a single Compound Clip of the entire interview, then make markers on it, not the individual clips and tag it with a Int keyword. Or say B-Roll for a particular day shoot, or event. Truncate the potential hundreds of clips into a single or few Compound Clips and fly through it. So much faster… obviously depends on the needs of the project, but hopefully that makes some sense.
Director, Editor, Colorist
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I’m currently editing a feature doc on FCPX, shot over 2 years with a couple hundred 5D multicam shoots. Over 10,000 clips, will take a year or more to post. If this was my first rodeo I think I’d be too daunted by the challenges FCPX presents on a project this big, but luckly its far from my first and I’m a glutton for punishment.
FCPX def struggles with performance when you get into a project this size, with this many addressable objects, hundreds of keywords, etc. But I’ve found very specific ways to make it work.
Initial start up, and initial clip selection gives me 10 sec spinning beach balls with every move, but I find that once the project gets fully “dumped” into RAM, and its using about 10GB, even when idle, performance gets mostly back to normal.
Couple words of advice if your interested to hear them from my trials and tribulations… Stay away from “Favorites” as a substitution for Subclips, they are too delicate and bad things can happen to them far too easily and there is no going back when it happens. Stick with Markers, Keywords and get your like footage into Compound Clips quick, much like you would have in Avid and using sequences. Once you play with the power of combining compound clips into the rest of your logging workflow, you’ll wonder how you ever had the patience to continuously double click individual clips in your previous life.
If you have anything to sync, or multicam that is massive multicamera shoots that last hours and hours in a day, do yourself a favor and pay for Plural Eyes. FCPX syncing is rock solid, but it takes Plural Eyes seconds to do what FCPX can take an hour or more to do if its too big.
Good luck!
Director, Editor, Colorist
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I’m a little lost on whats going on here, but I did a couple tests along the lines of what you are doing. And this was assuming your using clips with no timecode, not sure it would do the same thing if it was hunting for real timecodes.
But if you basically make Clip B’s look like Clip A’s in length, make them exactly the same, and then Relink the media in those events and projects to the newly made, lets say Clip C’s (altered and re-exported Clip B’s) then it totally works. FCPX doesn’t know the difference and everything repopulates with the new clips.
sorry if that isn’t what you’re looking for.
Director, Editor, Colorist
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I think the reason people get pissy on here tends to be comments like:
[Julian Bowman] “FCPX – 2 steps forward, 2 steps back, does a little shimmy but i wanted it to do a swoosh
“….when what you are trying to do is completely rudimentary stuff and couldn’t be more easy to do in FCPX. Arguably even easier in FCPX than FCP7 or Avid… just different.
My vote would be to just ask the question, without the negativity, get the correct response from someone who knows and keep editing. I find 90 percent of the comments on Creative Cow that are criticisms of FCPX are completely incorrect, and FCPX in those instances completely has a method for doing whatever it is they are complaining about, just differently.
Perhaps Apple should have called it “Continual Splicer Learned” and there’d be less issues, but here we are.
Director, Editor, Colorist
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To your questions:
1. I’m not sure why your having a problem with the resolution change. The Spatial drop down is kinda in existence for this very purpose. Switching between them, which you should be able to do on multiple clips should fix this. Perhaps you’re not also changing the properties of the Project to reflect the resolution change. That in concert with the Spatial drop down is your fix for this. i do it all the time.
2. A work around for this could be to take the new clip with the bad gaps, drop it on top of the low res edit. Manually make blade cuts and align the high res to the low res. Export the new cut of the high res as a new master file, and then relink to the file. With the duration the same it should relink. This of course assumes there is no additonal head or tail to the source clips in mention. If there is, you’d have to just do a “replace” by bringing in the new master, making in an outs, make blade cuts on low res timeline to reflect the same, and drag new master on top of low res and then click Replace.
Director, Editor, Colorist
http://www.trsociety.com -
I have tested all those theories before, unfortunately its not the case. The rMBP running everything off a Pegasus has the same issues as a MacPro with a Geforce 120. I’ve taken a look further and found during these types of beach ball or slowdown situations, disks and GPU aren’t even being pinged at all. FCPX is simply thinking.
One unfortunate thing is that any time FCPX is thinking, it only uses 100 percent of a single core, so computer speed matters a tiny bit but its not taking advantage of any real potential. While apple could open this processing thread up to multiprocessing, its probably more of an issue of addressable object limitations.
They’d have to come up with a system that doesn’t plop everything into the Original Media folder as an alias making every file “considerable” to every action.
This is one of the places where Avid is still a powerhouse, although I wouldn’t want to trade the performance advantage of FCPX for Avids.
Director, Editor, Colorist
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I figured the same thing. I’ve done some testing to that affect, and although I couldn’t quite figure out any magical number, I could deduce that once an event got over about 270 MB in size things when extra haywire.
I did notice though that the slow down seems pretty linear as it grew. Not so much that there was a single cliff. It starts to present itself on any sizable project, gets a little worse, around that 270MB mark theres a bit of a cliff, and then continues from there.
This will never happen of course, but it’d be good if you could put the program in some sort of “Long form Mode” and axe a few of the conveniences of “all loaded, all the time” in order to get more reliability on huge projects. On normal projects, the way FCPX holds everything at the ready is great, but it just falls apart at a certain point.
Interestingly, once i finally get every clip “loaded” as was noted before, FCPX is still only hitting at about 7GB of RAM. It’d also be cool if there was a “Pay Me Now, or Pay Me Later” choice with just having a long startup while all that data was dumped into Ram at the top rather than needing to click through each section, and then id just be diligent about leaving FCPX open at all times. But again, i realize this is such niche stuff, no one is ever going to bother with it.
Director, Editor, Colorist
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[Mark Dobson] “Sorry Nicholas but could you explain what you are doing here. Are you exporting a master file of selected clips and then re-importing this into a fresh event?”
Check out my rather long and boring post about that matter here: https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/344/16539
Director, Editor, Colorist
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I have posted on here before about this, but no one ever replies, I think my issues are a little over the average users needs, but yes I am currently editing a huge feature documentary in FCPX.
10,000 clips 300 hours of footage. Ive edited 10 feature docs, most larger in scale than this, so I’m a bit of a workflow junkie to say the least. Let me just say, I love FCPX for all the reasons anyone who loves it does, but doing this feature has been difficult.
First, media management. FCPX absolutely cannot handle huge Events. If you look at my last multi page post, you will see why working in multiple events sucks for long form verite style documentary and actually, breaking up over multiple Events actually gives you worse spinning beach balls than doing it all in one, when you need to search across all at any given time. (Kinda how documentary work goes when any shot could be the first, and any could be the last) So i started getting creative with workarounds. Again, read my huge last post to get more detailed info. But basically, I made Compound Clips and outside Multicam clips (Plural Eyes) of absolutely everything and imported that. Instead of 10,000 clips, there are now about 130 and even though it references the exact same number of media files, performance is completely different, not perfect, but manageable.
In my long post you will see how I discovered that FCPX handles merging of Events together in completely different ways depending on how you go about the process, and some really crazy results can take shape. I’ll just say, I must have been on to something as an entity I shall not name (creators of said program) got in touch with me and are asking to collaborate on “huge project” workflow enhancements.
Another large issue, Favorites. Favorites are a decent trade off for subclips, but not entirely. For one, if you accidently hit F while overlapped with a current favorite in a master clip, all metadata you entered for the favorite gets immediately erased and the word “Favorite” simply returns. Worse still, in 10.0.6. Favorite creation behavior changed. Before when you pushed F and got a new favorite, it was then highlighted. You could, as footage still plays, hit Tab, name the clip, hit return, and keep going without ever stopping. I did a 60 min doc before this one that was much smaller and subclipping with this was a revelation. After 10.0.6 creating a Favorite makes the highlight jump back to the clip name rendering an all keyboard logging work flow impossible. Last issues are when searching with only Favorites on, you get a instances of the master clip with the favorite as a drop down returned, rather than just a list of clips that match. not a big deal if you have just a few clips, but 50 with drop downs for each blows.
So for this new film I am switching to Markers. Better work flow in that its possible to stay on the keyboard, but not great in other ways. Marker searches reveal all markers attached to the clip even if they don’t apple to the search, and of course unlike favorites you still need to set an I/O around the area you want. But overall, this is working well for me.
A huge plus since 10.0.6 is really investing yourself into Compound Clips. When you start thinking about individual clips as just parts and pieces of what could be a large clip of alike footage, combined with the amazing power FCPX has to skim footage, it becomes hard to ever go back to another NLE.
Anyway, I’m considering doing a blog series on my experience since it seems like fairly uncharted territory.
Director, Editor, Colorist
http://www.trsociety.com -
Hey
Yeah, its most certainly a bug. It happens in various random instances I’ve found. It’s probably not such much of a bug as it is something of a fallback plan Apple put into the code when the program gets confused. Instead of beach balling it or quitting all together it defaults back to home as sort of a reset for itself. It is completely annoying though!Director, Editor, Colorist
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