[Rick Lang]

Whew! Looks like an exhaustive list.

Will the widescreen effect include the ability (using Motion controls) to track something for example on the original 1:1.778 (HD) source media to keep an object in the expanded frame? If that’s not clear, imagine a ball thrown in the air from the ground level from the left to right of a normal screen, a parabolic arc that would all be within the original frame. When you convert to a 1:2.35 widescreen, would we have a way to track that ball in flight so it remains in frame flying through the air?

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Rick Lang]

Frank, refreshing post that must bring a smile to someone’s face after the downpour of criticism being heard. I was reviewing some of the same day and next day posts when FCP X was released and in retrospect, it’s amazing that many of the posts’ negative comments were due to inexperience with the product however those were reason enough to abandon FCP X for competitors’ products.

I’m not talking about the legitimate complaints about the well-documented shortcomings related to professional house workflows and the inability to import FC Studio projects or easily use multi-camera or dedicated audio tracks. I mean the “can’t do this” and “can’t do that” litany of complaints which we are frequently seeing now as “can do” and sometimes people are now writing about things that they have discovered only FCP X “can do” and wishing it could be done in FCP 6/7.

I think it’s reasonable to expect many of the technique limitations in this first release (10.0) will be addressed by 10.1 or 10.2. We already have a commitment that features such as Multi-camera support are coming in the next major release and workflow features coming soon in point releases, meaning 10.0.1 or 10.0.2 etc. I’m thinking someone may have a solid solution to the multi-camera problem even using the current product’s capabilities since secondary storylines and compound clips seem to point to a solution—just need to solve the edit limitations. Perhaps those limits will be removed by a future update.

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Rick Lang]

Tony with all the freeze-ups and crashes, is there any chance you equipment is under-powered for FCP X or at least the FCP X features that may take extra processing resources? It may be that configurations that meet the low-end of the requirements my experience some difficulty—I’m just speculating here as Apple certainly doesn’t give many details about what is needed and how capable their minimum configuration will be when various features are used.

Are you using Apple ProRes or Apple ProRes HQ or a native codec? When you are using Effects on the clips, do you notice the problems more frequently?

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Rick Lang]

You can add markers to Event clips or in the Project storyline. As suggested it may be appropriate to add the audio clip as the primary storyline.

There’s no automated detection of beats, but you can add (and adjust if needed) markers on the fly as the audio plays. It may not be as bad as it sounds assuming the audio isn’t an hour long.

https://help.apple.com/finalcutpro/mac/10.0/#verf3fd3b5c

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Rick Lang]

Gary, I’m very new here and was not familiar with Chris’ hardware so I thought I’d ask to see if anything he was using was not currently supported by FCP X. For example, what if he was using XSAN and got it to work somehow before formal support was added.

This was trying to eliminate reasons he had such poor results. But now I’ve read other posts also describing what appear to be unreliable results. Don’t see a common thread in them and there may not be one other than the fact that the software is release 10.0.

If his further analysis is right, although he’s doing something completely supported (i.e.not copying media to a new Event when he wishes to share it across projects), it may not have been tested as thoroughly as a configuration where all the media and project items are not using aliases. Apple’s quality assurance team will know if that’s possible.

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Rick Lang]

[Ryan Pratzel] “I take anything they say with a grain of salt.”

Agreed. I’m embarrassed I read an article from that site; must be a ‘senior moment’ and I hope it doesn’t happen again!

I think I’d rather do my own thinking about Lion after using it myself. Same attitude applies to more than just Lion. Love these forums for covering the news, offering techniques, solving problems, and reading informed opinions, but that’s not the same as letting someone think for me.

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Rick Lang]

Thank you for the additional information regarding the media and your equipment. Certainly would not find anything problematic with your equipment so that does narrow it down to procedural or some software bug.

Your further analysis may be right so I hope you provide feedback to Apple on this problem. I know that can seem fruitless as they don’t reply to the feedback leaving you in the dark… until one day there’s an update that includes “corrects a problem related to the use of aliases when media is not copied to the Events folder.” This is an important feature of the new FCP X to reduce needless copies of files and fits in with the concept of having media shared across many projects. So hopefully it gets quick attention.

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Rick Lang]

Thank, Ray. That’s a nice laptop you have and certainly no one would think a couple of minutes of video would be problematic so that is disconcerting.

I was reading yesterday about the recommendation to use disk images to isolate Events and Projects via a .dmg file that is opened when you want to work on that particular project. I thought that was possibly overkill but if such a small effort can have reliability issues, maybe it’s worth creating these disk image islands to see if they help minimize problems. You could always have your general purpose stuff that you apply frequently to your projects in the normal location but new and unique Events and Projects could each have their own disk image and only be opened when needed. Reduces clutter and maybe complexity causing problems and helps simplify archiving the related items.

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Rick Lang]

You are right that the long-term direction could mean that, but I don’t think so based on what’s happened with Garageband and iMovie. The mobile versions of these desktop applications are not as capable as the desktop versions at this time but do not appear to me to be a replacement product. It’s true it’s not necessary to own the desktop version to utilize the mobile version, but the mobile versions are more limited and could be seen as complementary products to be used on a more restrictive platform and used by a broader less-demanding audience but I am suggesting this doesn’t preclude a ‘pro’ from making use of the mobile tools if it was useful to them.

Following the argument that the best camera is the one you have in your hand, just as mobile-device cameras abound, they would not replace a pro camera but nonetheless over time are able to take a quality picture for limited purposes and even a pro may use it for effect or convenience. Since Apple already has iMovie on the iPad and continues to offer a more functional iMovie on the desktop, I would expect if Final Cut did appear in some form on a high resolution iPad, it would have reduced functionality (especially with regard to media inputs and outputs) but could have a useful purpose in a professional capacity along with FCP X. Examples of how it could be used have been discussed by others on Creative COW.

I have no knowledge of Apple’s roadmap other than the speculation in the public domain.

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Rick Lang]

“The final nail was that there is no way to force FCPX to save projects. In theory it is always autosaving. In reality, it forgets a lot. You can open a previous project and find some of your work gone. Open it again and find even more gone. Suffer a crash and lose 2/3rds or more of the blood you have been sweating out to get this done.”

Fully understand if you just want to forget this post. But surely this unreliable performance is not everyone’s experience. Would you be willing to provide information about some of the characteristics that might be a factor?

What DSLR was used?
What format was used for your clips eg ProRes 4:2:2 (HQ)?
Anything you can think of that might explain the losses such as unsupported additional media used?
What machine was used? Processor? Graphics unit (GPU and graphics memory)? Speed? Memory? Booted in 64bit?
How often if ever did you quit FCP X while working on this (which should save anything not already saved)?

When it crashed it appears to have corrupted the database. Was there any application message when you restarted after the crash?

There have been many people noting they experienced crashes, but your note seems to indicate very unreliable results even for the times there was not a crash. Did you provide feedback to Apple?

Thanks for any response.

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB