[Philip Davies]

Thanks for the reply Tom. Your answers to other posters’ questions have been a great help to me in the past.

The second question was about preserving hard drive space. Having just run a test:

– 60sec of original media is 103MB
– Optimized version is 766MB
– Proxy version is 132MB

So an hour of footage transcoded to the optimized version requires 50GB as opposed to 6GB. I probably capture about 5 hours of footage a week and back up to another drive, so there’s two 1TB drives a month!

[Philip Davies]

Brian / Timothy,

Thanks both for the very informative replies – you’ve given me plenty to think about. Timothy – thanks for taking the time to create and post those graphics, they are really useful.

[Philip Davies]

Tom…

Best reply to a forum post I’ve had in a long time thank you! Simple solution but I wouldn’t found it stumbling round. Great!

[Philip Davies]

Brilliant Steve, thank you.

[Philip Davies]

Fundamentally I think it’s a winner – I didn’t at first.

I can honestly say though that no woman, let alone a piece of software, has ever caused me so many frustrated outbursts. In retrospect, much of that was down to old habits and now that I’ve settled into a workflow, I think I’ve made the right decision sticking with FC.

It’s still got more bugs than a Swahili tuberculosis ward but I can just about put up with multiple force quits a day because, like a Mac, it is so efficient at restarting itself.

A year or two from now it will be awesome.

[Philip Davies]

Yes to both (I’m glad you brought it up) on all versions of FCPX I’ve tried.

ZOOMING
Specifically, when I zoom to a certain level the play head jumps to the start (as does the whole view of the timeline) and then the playhead gets ‘stuck’ about 2 inches behind the mouse cursor when skimming – like it’s lagging behind.

Zooming in or out one step resolves this, as does navigating out of the project and back in.

Also, when I click the + or – buttons to zoom in and out of the timeline, it’s hit and miss whether they work. It normally takes 3-4 clicks to activate a zoom. Need to check if this happens with keyboard short cuts.

SKIMMING
Skimming randomly disables itself at regular intervals despite the skimming button being selected. Deselecting and re-selecting the button doesn’t resolve the issue. Navigating out of the project and back in sometimes does but I usually need to quit.

[Philip Davies]

Easy! Thanks Simon, really appreciate it.

Phil.

[Philip Davies]

Thanks Geoff… simple!

[Philip Davies]

Thanks Jeff.

The main reason I’m considering switching from miniDV to SD cards is to save time on capturing/uploading footage. We typically have an hour’s true HD footage to capture at a time (which obviously takes an hour with tape)…

Would you say that uploading data from the SD card and then transcoding it is going to save much time compared to tape?

Thanks,

Phil.

[Philip Davies]

Thanks Cody – really, really useful tutorial.

Shane mentions in that screencast that AVCHD can be heavy/slow to edit but doesn’t go into any detail.

Is that the general consensus even with the latest Macs and cameras? I was hoping that a 3.4GHz quad core could make light work of things.

Phil.