[Paul Gracia]

Oh my god… After writing that last post, I realized the canvas size might have everything to do with that issue, so creating compound clips came to mind… voilá!!

Once the 1080p or 2K video are cropped down, I just need to make them a compound clip, which makes it 4K like the timeline, and editing is flawless. No more “half a second freezes” upon splitting, enabling disabling… anything 🙂

[Paul Gracia]

[Joe Marler] FCPX doesn’t force multi-pass H264 encoding, it defaults to single-pass. What changed was multi-pass now uses Quick Sync or VCE, whereas previously (I don’t know how far back) only single-pass used Quick Sync.

Ahhh, ok ok, I didn’t understand you properly then!

[Joe Marler] Unfortunately I’m leaving on a field assignment until mid-September so can’t do any work on this until then.

I don’t know how to prepare a XML file with effects, but I could upload some prores file. You can do the tests whenever you can, no rush here. As I said, in the end I’m still very happy, because my workflow has speed up (in general) like x5. These small problems represent like a 1%, but I’m a perfectionist so…

[Joe Marler] OK that was a good idea, and more people should test like that. This is difficult because most stores only have base-configured machines, not CTO (Configure To Order). You could probably try this on a base iMac Pro at the store, that might be interesting.

They did have one there, but after almost 2h in the store, it didn’t free up at any time, there was people in it constantly, including kids looking at facebook. (Won’t ever stop amusing myself with these people that log into personal accounts in apple stores or the likes).

I live in Barcelona, we have two Apple Stores, and they always have the top tier computer of each category. A friend of mine that worked in one of them told me that they do this because a lot of people want a better computer than the base one and don’t wanna do it through the internet, due to fear or impatience, and they end up buying the top tier one even though they probably didn’t want to spend that much. Free money I guess.

[Joe Marler] I agree despite the high performance of my 2017 iMac handling H264, my 10-core Vega 64 iMac Pro is preferable. It’s just more robust and stable when under extreme loads, quieter, and the more powerful GPU and additional cores help with compute-intensive plugins. I only suggested the 2017 iMac because it’s super-fast on H264 in FCPX but when you add lots of effects it slows down.

Yeah. Color correction isn’t that bad, but chroma keying a 150Mbps 2K file which is a cropped down 4K file is pretty challenging. Gotta say though, my Vega 64 has only gotten to a 55% of GPU use, and that was a special occasion which involved several effects I don’t regularly use. In normal operation (regular workflow) it sits between 35-45%.

Maybe with one of your projects with 2000+ effects… haha!

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Since we have time here, I’ll try to prepare a ProRes simple 4K file, nothing fancy, just to test export times.

Thanks!

[Paul Gracia]

[Joe Marler] I thought most Hacks must disable the on-board GPU which in turn disables Quick Sync. Max Yuryev has built lots of Hacks and he mentioned that in one of his videos, I can’t remember which one. See his Youtube page for details.

Most do, yes. But I chose a golden build per say. Everything works, including iGPU, or in other words, the integrated Intel graphics and therefore Quicksync. There are several video converters and terminal tests to check if hardware acceleration is enabled, and mine is. Plus, my h264 export times would be impossible without quicksync.

[Joe Marler] You formerly could infer if FCPX was using Quick Sync by using “Fast” vs “Better Quality” encoding — the multi-pass encoding was software only. However I believe the latest versions of FCPX use hardware acceleration for multi-pass, so it’s slower but not the huge difference in previous versions.

Ohhh my friend! This might be the thing here. In my old iMac the last time I updated anything was… well, a lot of time ago. I’m a CCC user and around 1,5 – 2 years ago my system “broke” after an update, so I went back to my previos backup and didn’t update since then. This was my main and only work machine and didn’t wanna risk it again, so FCPX stayed in 10.1? Or 10.2 for a looooong time. I only updated to 10.4 now with this new hack, 10.4.3 actually.

I use my own compressor settings which had Multipass disabled, but if FCPX now forces it… it makes sense that times are slower… In a same computer it might be 2x, but since this computer is faster it’s just a 1.4x times slower?
Makes sense in my head. Also my 4K tests were including chroma key, color correction, etc; so the much higher performance of the Vega 64 vs the M295X is doing the trick. With the same graphics it’d probably be slower, but since the Vega outperforms the old one it’s actually a 35% faster.

Joe Marler Premiere Pro before the 2018 version did not use hardware acceleration for H264 encoding on Mac. It was about 4x or 5x slower than FCPX on the same iMac hardware. Starting with 2018 it uses hardware acceleration on both iMac and iMac Pro, so it’s roughly as fast (encoding) as FCPX.

Interesting. Didn’t know that. Only time I tried Premier I went back at lightspeed due to the low performance. I was shocked to see so many people could use Premier on the Mac. Exports were insane, as well as transcoding etc.

Joe Marler If you inspect your encode times vs mine on the 2017 iMac, mine is 3.4x faster than your Hack (8:45 vs 2:34), and 4.6x faster than your 2014 iMac (11:47 vs 2:34). This indicates neither your iMac nor your Hack are using Quick Sync or something in the test is distorting the results, such as effects, non-rendered timeline, etc.

Well, that comparison isn’t fair, is it? I used a 120Mbps 1080p file with a custom 1080p compressor export setting. I don’t know your source file, but you probably used FCPX’s h264 default export option, right? We could upload a test file and try both using the same export method, would be interesting.

And both my old iMac and this Hack are using quicksync, of that I’m sure. If you manually get rid of quicksync, export times of good quality 1080p is incredible slow, it’s almost hard to believe.

There is something that could be interfering though: My chip is a Coffee Lake and hackintosh patches include adjustments for Skylake architecture. Maybe, just maybe -and I’m fully speculating here-, Skylake used pipelines or memory addresses or something from 1 to 100 (just to put an example) and Coffeelake uses from 3 to 102, which means I’m using 2 less than the actual needed. I don’t know if I explained myself enough, hehe.

Joe Marler I don’t recollect ever seeing this, and I edit 4k H264 multicam every day, but I usually don’t do chroma keying. I just finished a documentary that was full of multicam, probably had 2,000 color correction effects, sometimes 10 keyframed corrections on a single clip, and it ran fine using proxies. The media was on a 4-drive Thunderbolt 2 SSD RAID-0 array. This was on both 2017 i7 iMac and 10-core iMac Pro.

My library is in my M2 drive, 2500/3000 MB/s write/read speeds, it can’t be that. I don’t know what it is really. My workflow is a little weird though, I got used to working in a strange way but it saves me several time and hardware:
* I capture 2K + 1080p in one same file in a 3640*1440 resolution canvas.
* I also capture a native 4K file in a regular 2160p canvas.
* 2-3 audio tracks, sometimes more.
In FCPX I create a 4K project and put my base 4K video track and over it the 2K+1080p video track. In some projects it stays disabled the whole time, in others I crop it so it uses the 2K one, in others the 1080p, and in some I duplicate it to use both. These are the tracks I put more effects (and maybe chroma key) on.

I know FCPX sometimes struggles with timelines which have tracks not its actual size, so this might be it? It’s very suble as I say, and usually only when “cutting” a track in the timeline, a half second timeline freeze. It might happen from time to time when adding the chroma key effect as well.

Joe Marler You could possibly greatly improve your FCPX H264 encode performance by just getting a used or refurbished 2017 iMac.

I know that is not the case. The graphics power is very low, my Vega 64 isn’t easy beatable. I tried to export 5 mins of the 4K projects in the app store in their computers and times were much slower. They even had top tier iMacs and MBPs but none got close to my Hack.
In 1080p maybe, but it only represents like 10% of my exports, and the extra time is so little… 4K projects on the other hand, with all the effects… the Vega 64 help is amazing, at this point I think only the iMac Pro can beat it because of its extra 8GB of GPU RAM (mine is the 8GB version), but the iMac Pro doesn’t have quicksync so… it might even be slower in my projects.

Thanks!

[Paul Gracia]

Hi! Thanks for the responses.

Noah, quicksync depends on the processor and all Intel chips have it, so it should be the same. On the other hand, as Joe says, there might be some issues with FCPX or even the OS when engaging these hardware accelerations. This is because when “hackintoshing”, you have to manually enable some memory addresses and pipelines, and some might be workarounds that work at a 80% performance.

I guess that there is no way of checking whether or not FCPX is using quicksync instead of vce, right?

Maybe some future EFI updates that are more appropriate for the current intel chips may solve this, in the meantime as I said, I’m not particularly worried because the one thing that was taking forever (4K transcode, edit and export) is much more fast now. 1080p… well, a 41% isn’t much when we’re talking an average of 10 mins exports, it now takes maybe 14 mins…

I also wanted to say that I wanted a hack because I needed a modular system, a computer that I could open and clean, upgrade one single part, install a new fan if needed, add another hard drive, etc. Also there is no iMac that can beat this CPU power (besides the pro that is), even though it’s not its main task, I also use Handbrake quite often and oh boy… that’s fast!!

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On another topic and since you mentioned proxy editing on multicam 4K… I have an “issue” I’ve chatted about with other editors and they all suffer it to some degree, (with actual macs as well).

Even when editing with proxy files, if my timeline has multiple 4K video tracks (for instance a base + 2 chroma keys), every time I do a cut the timeline freezes for like… half a second. In my old iMac this was like 3-4 seconds.

Since everyone I talk to suffers from this, I’m guessing this is FCPX related, but maybe you guys know what causes it?

Thank again,
Paul