Ronny Courtens
Forum Replies Created
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Forget Bricklayers and Sculptors… this is the future!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Yf0KEcXIYA– Ronny
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Totally agree, you are doing some amazing work Alex. Happy to hear you will stick with FCP X. Any chance you will be coming to IBC this year?
– Ronny
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Hi Alex,
This is a no-brainer. You have established solid workflows with FCP X, and it looks like your productions are running well. So if others want to join your team, they should adapt to your workflows and not the other way around. A really talented editor will have no problem whatsoever doing this. For the kind of work you do, mixed workflows will only add complexity without real benefits.
– Ronny
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Agreed. If you don’t know how popular FCP X is in the professional marketplace (whatever that still means), you really should get out of your cave one day and you will see there is a world out there that is much, much bigger than you think.
I am lucky enough to be able to travel around the world visiting major production companies and tv stations all the time, and I see FCP X everywhere. In a few weeks I will be going to Poland where both the public broadcaster and the commercial national tv exclusively use FCP X (240 seats in total). A few weeks ago I was in Spain visiting one of the largest film schools in Europe (1800 Spanish and international students each year) where they only teach FCP X for editing and nothing else. A multinational client of mine (Schibsted Media Group) has 100 FCP X seats only in Norway. And I can go on and on. So please don’t tell me that FCP X has not caused a dent in the professional marketplace, because I will prove you wrong with hard facts and figures any day.
– Ronny
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Hello Kate,
I agree with Loren. Your crash report shows a crashed thread 0 with the com.flexolibrary indicating a crash due to media that are missing or cannot be linked to. So your issue is indeed related to the fact that you have gone into the library and you have manually moved things out of it via Finder. This will break the links between the FCP X database and the actual media. If you ever need to move things out of a library, there are tools right inside FCP X that will allow you to do this without creating havoc.
If you can post screenshots of your project folder + a screenshot of your clip browser we should be able to guide you through this.
– Ronny
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Works without any issues here.
Tested on 2013 Mac Pro running FCP X 10.3.2 / El Capitan and on 2016 MBP running FCP X 10.3.2 / Sierra, using Basic Lower Third title.
Are you using a third-party title template? That may be the culprit.
Or maybe just update to 10.3.2.– Ronny
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Some Apple users have built hackintoshes and others have ditched the iPad for the Surface Pro.
And most Apple users haven’t done anything like this. I think the vast majority of people using Apple computers are quite happy with what Apple has to offer these days, and I don’t see the MacPro as something this vast majority uses or even needs. Not even those of us working in television or film production.
A year ago a friend who works at a large tv production company asked if they could have a few MacPros to try out because they were planning to buy 42 new computers to use with FCP X. They tested them for a few weeks and they decided to buy 42 maxed out iMacs instead because the price difference did not justify the performance gains. And these guys need performant hardware because they produce long-form television programs that often involve heavy 4K multicam projects that they want to edit natively. I spoke again with my friend not so long ago. He told me that since their purchase they have been delivering 200 hours of on-air content with the iMacs without any problems. So it seems to me like Apple’s current product line is more than powerful enough to handle even the most demanding editing tasks.
But I do agree that some people who work in specific niches in our business (VFX, 3D, VR etc…) would like to see more CPU and GPU power than the current MacPro can offer. If Apple does come up with an improved MacPro, good for them. If Apple does not produce a more powerful MacPro, I think those people may rightfully decide to switch to another platform. The question is: is this really important? Because I already see quite some companies who happily use Macs for media management, editing and delivery alongside with Linux computers for VFX work or PCs for VR stitching (most stitching applications are Windows-only anyway).
As an example: another friend of mine is currently editing a 10 million Euro drama tv series for Spanish television. The show is cut on FCP X using 4 iMacs, VFX is done in-house with Mistika on a PC, audio is also done in-house running ProTools on an old MacPro, and all systems are happily connected with each other over a 100TB LumaForge Tower. Even if Apple releases a more powerful MacPro today, this won’t matter to them at all. So where is the problem? Just use what you think is the most efficient hardware available for the specific work you need to do today, because we all know that tomorrow things may be completely different. At least, that’s one thing I learned from being in this business for the past 38 years.
– Ronny
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So happy to see that Final Cut Pro X has become a benchmark for other NLEs (-:
– Ronny
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Happy to hear some real-world experience as well. I don’t think that the issues you experience with the QNAP have anything to do with the apps. They certainly don’t have anything to do with “the way Macs handle networking”. We have dozens of all-Mac installations with anything from 6 to 26 connected users users that run perfectly in online 4K environments, either on Premiere or Final Cut Pro. But I think you hit the nail right on the head when you say “SANs in general max out with HD, for real time online editorial work.” With one important little correction, if I may: replace the word “SANs” with “cheap NASes”.
And to illustrate this I would like to share another real-world experience.
In November last year, during the FCPX Tour Barcelona, Spanish post-production manager David Lopez explained the workflows they use on the award-winning tv show “Salvados”. If you haven’t had the chance to read about this yet, here’s the link to an article about this show including a video from the presentation:
They used to shoot in HD, then they started shooting in 4K (3 to 4 C300 cams) and they moved their post production to a big post house in Barcelona. 6 weeks ago my friend Jesus Perez-Miranda in Barcelona called me to say they were having lots of issues working with FCP X in 4K multicam on the 24-bay Qnap shared storage system at the facility. They couldn’t work natively, everything needed to be transcoded to proxy mode if they wanted to avoid spinning beach balls, and the FCP X thumbnails and waveforms took a very long time to generate on long clips (which are typical with multicam). The facility blamed FCP X (of course).
So I jumped on a plane to Barcelona to see what was wrong and we took a little 8-bay JellyFish Mobile from LumaForge with us to test their workflow performance bypassing their current shared storage solution. We connected 6 users direct to the Mobile in their server room (without needing a switch) in less than 20 minutes, then we spent 2 hours waiting for their media to be transferred over to the JellyFish. Then they started editing their show with 4 editors over 10GbE and the difference was mind-blowing. Thumbnails and waveforms generated fast and they even could edit their 4K multicam show in native MXF instead of having to convert to optimized or proxy media.
The 3 engineers of the post house who attended the test were baffled to see a little 8-bay portable server handle this show faster than the 24 bay rack system they had set up. When I asked them why they had chosen their current server solution, they replied: “because it was cheap and because it worked well with the HD projects we have tested”. We are currently looking into replacing their solution with another one.
My conclusion: Qnap indeed offers decent and cheap shared storage. Especially when you work with only a few editors in HD and you can hire someone like the great Bob Zelin (whom I absolutely recommend because I have worked with him on another project) to assist you. But when the going gets tougher, I’m not sure if the cheapest solution is always the best one. If it were, I think everyone who sells solutions that cost over 15 grand would be out of business by now. But they aren’t, quite the opposite. I will leave any further discussion as to why and how to people who have the time for this. As an editor I only care about real-world performance.
– Ronny
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If your delivery format is not XDCAM but AVC-Intra, ProRes, DVCPRO or Uncompressed, you can export your multitrack MXF straight from the timeline without needing to export a multitrack QT first. To do this you just need to select Share > Master File > MXF > codec of your choice and set the Roles according to the delivery specs.
As to audio compliance:
You just need to make sure that your Stereo Mix (1+2) is compliant. This is what they test at QC. To do this you disable the stems (3,4,5) on the timeline and you play the stereo mix measuring compliance.
Furthermore it’s always a good idea to make sure that the sum of your stems (3+4+5) is compliant as well. To do this you disable the stereo mix on the timeline and you play the stems measuring compliance.
If your audio has been rejected while you say that your stereo mix is fully compliant, you should contact that broadcaster and ask them how they measure compliance. Maybe they are using different compliance standards than you do.
Should they tell you that they do the QC playing all your MXF audio tracks at the same time, tell them to contact me and I will gladly teach them how to do a QC on a multitrack MXF. No-one measures compliance by playing the stereo mix together with the individual stems.
– Ronny
