Paul Golden
Forum Replies Created
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Nonsense. Have you looked at Motion? It can play back footage in real-time at speed without pre-caching. This is not inherent to NLE vs compositing software. Besides, what’s really the difference between a timeline based comp software and and a timeline based NLE? They just have different feature sets, but they’re all capable of compositing to a large extent. Yes, AE has a more robust tool set for comping, but the basic nature of playback should be similar for things that don’t have tons of layers.
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[greg janza] “Also it was stated in the video that he’s spending hours rendering 4k videos and so it’s also fair to assume that he’s using an under powered system for his editing.”
Here’s the issue with Adobe: they write (or don’t re-write) software that can work on reasonably modest machines. Much of Adobe software (AE, Premiere) are resource hogs that are often grossly inefficient. Real-time playback in After Effects on basic uncomped video clips? Good luck!
FCPX can be blazingly fast when it comes to many tasks including output, filtering, real-time effects with even 5 year old hardware. I have a new iMac Pro and I’m still underwhelmed by AE or Premiere performance.
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I think AE is a fairly crowded interface and yet it’s pretty logical most of the time and I don’t spend a lot of time searching for stuff.
There are UI things I like about Motion, but I find organizing lots of assets in it cumbersome compared to AE. And you can argue whether the timeline or nodal paradigm is superior.
For motion graphics and animation, AE works really well and the tools are robust. Compositing could be improved; 3D could be improved; roto/tracking could be improved (they really need to give the Roto Brush some deep love). And collaboration is non-existent.
But my biggest beef is with performance. I still don’t see why a piece of footage with nothing done to it needs to be rendered in order to play back.
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Thanks Bob… I’d be interested in Motion, but there are two dealbreakers, one big, one small:
Small one: Why does Motion not support external grading monitors? They used to. What happened? Every other program I use (except Microsoft Word) knows how to talk to an external monitor.
Big one: After Effects is way more utilized by the Animation community and if I’m handing out scenes to animators, I can’t expect them to have or use Motion. Especially the PC crowd.
AE is still a joy to use in terms of UI, animation tools and organizing tools, it’s just the playback that really stinks. I’m not sure if it’s a problem with CC2018 or something else. I’ve noticed that I can get something close to RT playback on my GUI screen, but the playout to my Flanders through the BMD MiniMonitor lags by SECONDS and then drops frames like crazy. And it doesn’t matter whether its coming off my RAID or my spanking new 1600mbs internal SSD on the iMac Pro. Either Mercury Transmit doesn’t play at all well with AMD cards or there’s some other setting that I’m missing. Maybe my complaint about Motion and external monitors is essentially the same with AE, except that the difference is that when Apple can’t do something right, they abandon it, whereas Adobe will just implement a sub-par version and let you suffer. Next stop, the AE forum!
To bring it around to this forum, I will say something in favor of FCPX now. I just had an 8 minute multi-layered animated/live art film for a ballet in 4K that I was convinced I’d have to do in AE. After a few tests and working with an impatient director over my shoulder, we quickly abandoned AE in favor of FCPX where I was able to work in RT with many multiple layers with CC, FX, blend modes etc. FCPX was the champ and saved me from a ton of excruciating render time. It took organizing the footage a little differently, but I realized that my go-to AE impulse was misguided and that there’s a lot (and more and more) you can do right within FCPX that gets the job done.
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When I mean it fails, I created a Compressor setting with X264 and in both FCPX and Compressor, the programs errored saying unable to complete compression. It’s odd because I was running the same High Sierra version on my nMP and iMac Pro, but the iMac Pro balked.
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I’ve been using the X264 encoder for some time now. It’s another component that you can install in the components folder in QuickTime in Library.
Larry Jordan did a deep dive several years ago: https://larryjordan.com/articles/compressor-x264-improve-video/
On iMacs with optimization for H264 it was probably unnecessary, but I found X264 produced better compression with less space and quicker encodes. Especially with my Mac Pro tower and trashcan. With HEVC, it’s probably obsolete. Does anyone know if HEVC is universally readable by Windows & Mac for both desktop and web?
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Got my iMac Pro yesterday. I just upgraded from a nMP 2013 (8 core/64gigs/dual D700) to the mid level iMac Pro (10 core/64 gigs/16 gb VRAM).
My impressions on day 1:
Very pretty machine, nice to have all the TB3 and USB 3 connections. Using all the USB3 and two of the TB3 ports.FCPX: very smooth. Tried an HEVC export and worked really well. Will probably replace X264 for client WIPS (X264 fails on this machine)
Resolve: works well on 4.6K RAW from my Ursa Mini; still need to use caching for decent playback of anything with FX
After Effects: is there any machine where AE doesn’t suck at realtime playback? Had a 4.6K ProRes 444 timeline and with Mercury Transmit enabled, still can’t play a RENDERED timeline at speed where it’s downscaled to 1080p for the monitor. WTF is wrong with Adobe and realtime playback? I’ve been using AE for years and they’ve been promising RT improvements the whole time and it never gets much better.
I’m torn between learning Motion or Fusion (totally different workflows) but AE is still a great jack of all trades, so I will suffer some while longer. Apple has already shown that it can get a graphics program like Motion to play in real time, at least for simpler stuff.
Per Philip Bloom’s trip to the dark side, I understand wanting some more performance boost, but that box he bought is butt-ugly and soul destroying. I know as a “professional” that stuff shouldn’t matter, but I’d much rather have my iMac Pro than a beast like that lurking around my desk.
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Try the effect Bad TV, which is part of your installed effects with FCPX.
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One other thing I forgot to mention: this workflow depends on each editor working sequentially not simultaneously on the project. It would be possible for you to have two FCPX libraries and each reference the same shared media in Dropbox. Then at some point, you could merge your libraries and consolidate things a bit better.
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This may seem foolhardy, but I’ve been experimenting using Dropbox to share projects with myself between home and work and I’ve learned a couple of things:
1) Dropbox usually wants you to locate the Dropbox folder on your boot drive. This is unnecessary and you can change the location to your media drive, which in my case is a Pegasus Thunderbolt RAID. The advantages are that project files are run from a fast RAID, the files get regular Time Machine backup and my boot drive doesn’t clog up.
2) I keep all of media external to the FCPX library.
3) I keep the FCPX library on Dropbox when not in use, but, and this is key: before I open FCPX, I copy just the library out of Dropbox to another location on my media drive or boot drive. The reason for this is that Dropbox wants to synchronize your FCPX library with the cloud as changes are made. In doing so, Dropbox takes control of the library and if you’re running it in FCPX, you will error and crash. However, if the library file is OUTSIDE of Dropbox, you are still connected to the media but Dropbox does not mess with your session.
4) Once I’m done editing, I copy the file back to Dropbox to allow the other editor (in this case me at home) to open the project on their end. Again, the library must be copied out of Dropbox during edit.
5) Because the file is or is not in Dropbox, it’s easy to see if the other person is working on the library.
A couple of caveats:
1) Most Dropbox Plus users have a 1TB limit, so this may be a dealbreaker for some.
2) The media must be fully synchronized before you can edit with it on the remote end. The local user works as normal.
Some advantages:
1) Dropbox has a robust incremental version control system which allows you to revert to a version for at least 30 days (Pro goes for 120 days)
2) No duplicating of media, no proxies.
3) No reconnecting media because FCPX figures out where the media is (generally) and keeps in touch with it.
I’m sure there will be plenty of people to tell me why I’m crazy to try this, but I have completed several projects going back and forth between work and home and did not skip a beat. Please let me know if any of you have tried this or something similar in the cloud.