[Richard Jacana]

I have a top of the range 2011 i7 Air with 8Gb of memory and the 4000 card. I can only compare it to my Mini with same processor but with the optional MD Radeon HD 6630M 256 MB card. For small projects it runs fine, I can even play original AVCHD footage encoded at 130Mbps. Running some comparison I did notice for some things the Air was half a quick as the mini e.g. add a “rain effect” took 2x on the Air so I assume the the Air was not using the 4000 with Open CL or something like that but the Mini was. Important is the same and the Air has a quicker SSD than the cheap SSD in the Mini. I was able to edit a poject with 1200 clips on both machines but I recall the Mini being a little faster to render thumbnails – used the same external TB drive that held the project with 1200 events.

I’d get the newest Air as the graphics card rocks now and uses more memory I think – don’t forget the card grabs memory from our Ram. Don’t get 4gb of Ram, get 8Gb and and i5 supposedly doesn’t have same mojo that the i7 has for stuff like video and hyper-threading if the app supports it.

[Richard Jacana]

How dare you say anything positive about FCPx! Moderators!!!

[Richard Jacana]

This was the shoot and as I told the client, not too bad for shooting in her living room with a cheapy $200 LED lamp. ( lighting a little flat but ok I guess) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyI46HjZqTM

Did a test with my DIY fluorescent bulbs with CRI of 83 and I could see the difference. It does seem that the green / or deficiencies are baked in and hard to change in post – at least with FCPx someone simplistic color correction.

Is anyone here actually shooting paid gigs with LEDs. The Academy of Motion pictures and sciences have a video basically dissing all LEDs but this was with film and from 2009 I believe.

I actually bought a gel to correct it a while back but didn’t use it for this shoot – – but I am going to build one of these – and see what’s up!

Desktop Spectrometry Kit
The KIT $40! – https://store.publiclab.org/products/desktop-spectrometry-kit
Some results: https://spectralworkbench.org/tag/led

[Richard Jacana]

I didn’t think the 5870 was that bad – in this test, and I think the 680 it talks about is better than the iMac one, it looks OK. Open CL, it thrashes the GTX680

https://gpuboss.com/gpus/Radeon-HD-5870-vs-GeForce-GTX-680

[Richard Jacana]

Clipwrap seem the best suggestion but don’t forget that it does not get all the meta data from the avchd clip – I believe stuff like camera ID and other stuff is lost at least with my Panny camera.

[Richard Jacana]

I have a GH2 and use some hacked version of the software for the camera. I took some shots on a vacation and I didn’t realize that some of them were corrupt – you could view them with quicktime but they had weird green flashes in them and they would play back oddly.

When I took then into FCPx they basically shat the bed so to speak, FCPx just hung on a bad shots and never went to the next shot. I had to manually go into the transcoding window and tell fcpx not to transcode the shot.

You could go in and edit out the corrupted part manually in Quicktime, use the trim feature and try to then re transcode it. FCPx also would crash too with these shots.

Just my experience with a somewhat experimental setup – but I love these hacks and getting 130 Mbps out of an AVCHD camera rocks! I now have a hack / patch that does not crash FCPx.

[Richard Jacana]

I don’t think the extra space is worth it, I have a tiny 128GB SSD on my mini and it seems to be fine, 256GB would be more than enough. I think I’d go choose the best graphics card with the most memory as this Open CL stuff is only going to get more exciting with FCPx. Eg I have a 2012 Air and Mini with AMD and 4000 cards, for some effects the little mini with a measly 256MB cards is twice as fast as the 4000 card who is no slouch either.

The new intel platform will have a 5000 so will be better but do some research and see what card works best with FCPx.

[Richard Jacana]

I saw this too, funny how a multi billion dollar company can be so sloppy. All they had to do is add some text such as:

You may be able to get better performance by doing the following:

Start praying
Go make some toast
Ditching HD and going back to SD
Get an HP
Get a Mac Pro
Bow down the the stuffed doll of Jobs you have on your desk

Oh well, I only noticed this when using a slow hard drive. USB 2 I think. You obviously need to run out and get a new Mac pro with 12 cores and 96Gb or ram!

[Richard Jacana]

If you go to barefeats.com you’ll see that the quattro 4000 is not a good card for FCPx https://www.barefeats.com/gpu680v.html – probably because of open CL stuff even though with some programs it rocks. I could be wrong on this but I think that’s what I see in the reviews – the newer 680s and AMD 7950 cards appear to be the ones to get as of May 2013. The GT120 is not that good too.

[Richard Jacana]

This is what my timeline looks like:

I’ve just been playing around with the “break apart clip items” option – so a compound clip can indeed be broken up right there in the timeline.