[Nick Rucka]

First, in answer to your question, yeah just output a master clip and bring it back in. It’s not an elegant solution – and in fact eats up drive space – but it’ll solve your issue in the short term.

Definitely let us know what your Color Finale test shows. As it turns out, an editor in my office knows those guys so we might be able to talk to them about it if the situation can be recreated.

Lastly, it’s not your 5k iMac. We have four work stations in our office – some supped up iMacs some mac pro (trash can) – and the issue occurs independent of it. It seems to be something that occurs in certain libraries that somehow get borked. What we don’t know is what exactly causes this, but I really do suspect it’s certain plugins and their interactions.

Have you optimized your footage? Transcoded it to ProRes before ingesting? Are you working with proxies? If so, has the problem continued independent of this?

Anyway, I hear you with your frustration with the plugin situation but I’ve found that all editing platforms have their weaknesses and quirks. FCP7 had it. Goodness knows that Premiere still has it. And should we talk about Avid? FCPX is doing some serious processing and some fancy footwork, so I try to cut it some slack. Hopefully the situation can be figured out soon, though! :/

[Nick Rucka]

Hi Jim,

I’m glad I’m not alone! 😉

I’m cutting a number of spots, including one particularly complex 29 minute one with a ton of graphics, 4K footage and complex sound design, on FCPX and have had the same issues you describe. I get the ghost clip, clips disappearing, a black screen in the viewer when it should be displaying video from the project timeline etc etc. I’ve actually figured out a trick to get these things to go away, which is to disable (V) a top layer clip and then re-enable it, which seems to convince FCPX that the clip is fine and was there all the time. It’s weird that this does the trick, but life is strange what can I say?

The issue of the renders disappearing or randomly getting lost is also a real hassle. I’m dealing with this now and after talking to some editing friends, we agree that this seems like a continuation of render file relinking issues that the old FCP7 suffered from. In my office, since we have our renders and cache being saved on an office SAN (we cut on multiple stations, and have to move around depending on editorial needs), one of the thoughts is that the SAN isn’t a good place to keep this sort of stuff. That said, I’ve cut other projects with the renders and cache on the SAN and haven’t had the renders getting lost issue, so I’m not certain that that’s the culprit.

Now I’m especially intrigued by the Color Finale plug in issue that you mention. I am using the hell out of that plug in the projects, in addition to Hawaiki Keyer, and have noticed another issue occasionally where it leaves like a 2-3 pixel white boarder around the edges of the video I’m color correcting. I have no idea if that has any relation to what’s going on, but it’s certainly a bug that has yet to be fixed.

As for the iZotope point, I’ve only recently installed it on my primary editing bay, and while that plug in definitely borks my machine, all of those other issues predate its installation. So I don’t think that’s the problem.

At any rate, I’m very interested in what you find out from Apple Support. In the meantime, I find that rendering regularly, and baking stuff in by outputting and reimporting, does the trick if and when I have onerous playback issues. It’s dumb to have to round trip it like that, but when you got a deadline, you figure out work arounds eh?

Thanks and good luck!

Nick