[Nick Papadopoulos]

If by professional you mean busy and complicated then you are lucky because there are so many options for professionals now with resolve, avid and premiere. One finds it child-like, another feels its spot on and clean cut. I don’t understand why frustrate over this?

For me all I need is up front and everything I don’t is tucked away. Sure it’s not a perfect tool, but it fits my mentality and aesthetic. As for the naming conventions, why would one be happy when Apple changed the whole concept of editing but that same one is frustrated when it renamed certain functions and objects to better fit the purpose?

Rethinking an interface should start from the bottom up and naming (re-naming) UI and functional elements are no exception.

Also, if one feels debased as a professional editor, just because the shadows of a UI or rounded corners are not to his liking and that redesign might make a tool accessible to more people perhaps it is something that should get him or her thinking. It’s a tool. Telling a nice story is not something “everyone” can do, not matter the tool they use.

[Nick Papadopoulos]

Further testing with macvidcards.com based Nvidia GTX 970 6 GB Mac Edition in a Mac Pro 2009. Optical flow works there on the same project. So perhaps a laptop based issue?

[Nick Papadopoulos]

I have the same issue. Added any Canon 5Dmk2 clip in a timeline, 25% speed, turned on optical flow and crashes on 7%. MacBook Pro mid 2010 as well. Will either go back to 10.1.4 or get twixtor to solve this… Please make sure to report this here in order to get it fixed: https://www.apple.com/feedback/finalcutpro.html

By the way I just tried the same project on a Mac Pro 2013 and it worked. Perhaps it has to do with Nvidia Graphics cards based machines?

[Nick Papadopoulos]

I can only guess that it’s a sort of index of everything in the project. Nothing seemed to get lost by deleting it, and it got regenerated the moment the event loaded. Although it solved my problem without issues, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t backup anything and everything important relating to that project.

[Nick Papadopoulos]

Try removing any markers you might have on the timeline… Has helped some. I have a lot of multi cam-compounds on the timeline, and those are the problem. I’ve edited a 17 min 16 cameras project without multi cam and it worked perfectly fast. I’m working a 3 camera XDCAM 12 minute project and it’s slow to the point of suicide… And all this on the new Mac Pro 2013 with dual D700s 1 TB (project is on the 1 TB Flash) and 16 GB Ram, this is an FCPX bottle neck. Needs optimisation from apple… I thought the new D700s would accelerate the interface compared to the 5770, but to no avail…

[Nick Papadopoulos]

Deleting the CurrentVersion.flexolibrary worked for me as I was getting crashing while opening the library…

[Nick Papadopoulos]

We have 3 drives:

1. Archived projects
2. Camera Media Archives
3. Final Videos

In drive 1 we put the project folder with the media and no exports. We use Final Cut Library Manager and trim the library down to the minimum.

In drive 2 we ingest the media with the Create Archive option of FCPX in the beginning of the project (CF, SD cards etc…).

In drive 3 we export 2 versions of each delivered clip. One Clean and one Dirty version with 8 Channels of audio. Clean is without graphics. Dirty is the finished clip with everything and the kitchen sink on it!!… Channels of audio are as follows (tip: we use roles for this)
8 Channels:
01 Full Mix – Stereo Left
02 Full Mix – Stereo Right
03 International Sound (Atmo) – Stereo Left
04 International Sound (Atmo) – Stereo Right
05 Music & Effects – Stereo Left
06 Music & Effects – Stereo Right
07 Voice Over – Mono
08 Dialogue – Mono

That way if the project is not opening with all plugins etc… a year from now, we still have a clean version to cut from with most audio available seperately. 8 Channels was chosen mostly for compatibility with XDCAM discs. One can use as many channels as they like….

[Nick Papadopoulos]

Coming from an audio production background, I really (really) appreciate some things FCP X has audio wise and wish the latest Logic X would work more like FCP X to tell you the truth. Try the following when in the editing and mixing stage of your video. I won’t go into too much detail as to why. Anything that is unclear why I do it please ask 🙂

First some guidelines (for a stereo mix):

1. When importing anything!!… into the event browser always set the pan mode in the inspector to stereo. This includes importing video clips, voice overs, music, or (especially) effects from the FCPX audio library. Set everything to Pan Mode: Stereo!

2. As a bonus to save time later on, assign roles to everything. I stick to the main 3 audio roles FCPX already has and I also add “Voice Over” and “International”. This covers pretty much 90 percent of my projects.

3. When you have interviews, after assigning a keyword to all of them to find them more easily, select the correct channel configuration in the Channel Configuration setting in the inspector and check ONLY the channel(s) with the correct microphone (lavalier,boom, etc). Some examples are:

8 channel mono – channel 1 only checked since it has the proper mic. all others unchecked.
2 channel mono – check only channel 1 or 2 which has the correct mic.

4. Try to never change the “volume” slider for the interviews. Leave it set at 0 db.

If you stick to the above, all clips, whether they have 2,4 or 8 channels, will end up having a predictable level output after assigning pan mode stereo to the clips. If you don’t, FCPX will play them back with different compensated levels for different channel configurations and the following tips will not work.

So on to the tips – Try this:

Say we have a clip with music and interviews over this music. I’ll talk about the following:
A. Treating the interviews
B. Treating the music
C. Putting it all together

A. Treating the interviews
We need to ensure the interviews have enough density to cut through the music. This is how i go about it:

1. Select all interview clips inside your event, before you edit them in your project.
2. Set their pan mode to stereo if not done so already on import.
3. Select 2,4 or 8 channel mono in the channel configuration section in the inspector
4. Check only the correct mic channel. Turn off all others.
5. The target here is to get the voice interviews pumping levels around -6 dbFS with their volume set at 0 dbFS. As a rough starting point, under audio enhancements, turn on loudness and set (A)mount to 50% and (U)niformity to 30%. So it will be peaking around -4 dbFS and falling at around -7 dbFS, on the meter. This will work for many situations. If there is a lot of background noise being brought up, try to set A: 40% and U: 20%. If recording is very low, turn up both amount and uniformity over this 50/30 starting point, while keeping about the same ratio: Amount being 20% higher than uniformity. Also keep in mind that uniformity set at 0% is like disabling the loudness effect.
6. Edit clip in project. Clip set at 0 db should be playing around the -6 db line on the volume meter and peaking at around -4 db.

B. Treating the music
The target is to get the music to play with a ceiling of -6 db SHARP!. Here’s what I do:
1. Import music into the event
2. Assign music role
3. Set pan mode to stereo
4. Set volume slider in the inspector to -6
5. Edit in timeline.

The result should be that the music inside your project is playing and peaking at -6 db without any interviews on top of it.

Usually music will be mastered to be peaking at 0 db. This means that any level in the music that exceeds 0 db is clipped by the limiter. This is useful because wherever you set the music’s volume slider in the inspector or in your project, that’s where the music will peak at. An exception is classical music which has a lot more dynamic range.

C. Putting it all together
The aim here is to have interviews playing over the music, and the music lowering only when someone is talking. Unfortunatelly this is still a manual process with rubber banding.

1. Lay the music under the interview(s).
2. Never touch the interview volume slider. Use loudness to control interview density.
3. Music should have it’s volume slider set to -6 db.
4. Rubber band the section of the music that the interview is playing and lower to taste. What usually works for me is for the music to drop to -14 db to -19 db when someone is speaking and to be raised again to -6 when someone is not. Adjust keyframe distance to taste to smoothly transition from -6 to -14.
5. When done with your mix, select everything in your project timeline and make it a compound clip.
6. Check visually for any problems in the wave forms (any red levels etc…)
7. Add a limiter (I use waves L2) and set the threshold to -5 and the output to -9.

Mixing with the above steps makes sure that the levels that you send to your limiter are predictable. It also ensures the interviews have enough density to cut through the music, and the music lowering when interviews are speaking is always the same two values so that can speed up your workflow.

Note: You will also have international sound (ambience, birds etc). I usually add a loudness on these too, to control them. I set the default values fcpx has determined for them (tip: use the auto-enhance button and keep only the loudness option checked if you want to reset this value to the default fcpx has determined). Then i set the output level of the international sound to around -20 db and -25 db and further adjust to taste.

What do you think?

[Nick Papadopoulos]

The same happens here mate. The problem is when you have extended the audio handles from some compound clips

[Nick Papadopoulos]

This happened to me today as well. One of our major clients – 12 minute highlight programme all video files gone while relinking. The library was local on the system, but the footage was over 1 Gbit ethernet and the drive was mounted over network.

Did your footage exist on the network by any chance? This was on FCP X 10.1.1 and OS X 10.9.2. I have sent a bug report twice. The first time I got a reply from apple saying that the only recommended protocol is XSAN and not ethernet, but they’ll pass this information on to the right department. Second report was today, so no idea when and if they reply…

So in an attempt to track this down, I believe it has to to with media residing on the network. Was that the case for you?