[Ronny Courtens]

Hey Mike,

The projects you describe are relatively simple compared with what they do at RTS, or even what we do on a daily basis. And we don’t see any of the issues you describe. So either you are using a completely different FCP X than the rest of us, or there is something wrong with your setup or your workflows. If you send me an e-mail with your system specs, OS version and FCP X version, I will be very happy to help you solve the issues you say you are experiencing: ronnycourtens@mac.com

– Ronny

[Ronny Courtens]

Steve Connor: : “Apart from an overly expensive Mac”

LOL! True, Steve, but you can buy a helluva lot of Macs for the price of an enterprise-level shared storage system.

– Ronny

[Ronny Courtens]

Andrew Kimery: Though I’ve yet to hear anyone try to roll out FCP X at a facility that does a lot of highly collaborative work like reality TV shows.

Hey Andrew,

We have implemented FCP X in quite a lot of facilities that do highly collaborative work. I’m going to publish some more stories in the coming two months, most of them dealing with collaborative editing using FCP X. One is about Endemol Shine Africa where they do sitcoms, reality and entertainment using only FCP X in a collaborative environment, another is about two Warner divisions who have switched to FCP X for reality productions. And you may have missed this one: https://www.fcp.co/final-cut-pro/articles/1687-final-cut-pro-x-in-enterprise-level-television-production

– Ronny

[Ronny Courtens]

Hey Neil,

Although project sharing has been possible with FCP X for a long time, I’m pretty sure there will be a few very interesting develompents in this field in the near future. And these will not involve needing exclusive and overly expensive hardware solutions.

– Ronny

[Ronny Courtens]

Hey Herb,

In such operations there are many different factors that can swing decisions in one or the other direction.

Premiere was an option. But none of their editors use Premiere and they found it didn’t offer anything particulary interesting or unique that would make it worth re-training their editors and rethinking their workflows. Avid was the easiest option. All their editors know Avid, and they have the infrastructure for it because news is cut on Avid. But no-one in Post Production wanted to go back to it. The third option, Final Cut Pro, seemed to fit best into their existing workflows for the reasons they have mentioned in the article and which I’m not going to repeat. And the editors found it really easy to make the transition from the old version to the new one. The only barrier was their concern about Apple’s commitment to the application. As soon as we took away any doubt about this at management level, the choice was easy.

– Ronny

[Ronny Courtens]

LOL Mark!!

Now seriously. We have tested the new release on quite a big X-SAN and on a fast modern collaboration system (ShareStation Enterprise). In our experience, opening Libraries on the SAN has improved considerably. We also noticed improved waveform generation speed on very long files on both systems. So I think we should see this as a bug fix and performance update, preceding a feature update that will probably be tied to El Capitan.

We also should be aware of the fact that, in any software development setup, different people can be working on totally different aspects of the application at the same time. It is highly probable that, while this bug fix update was being prepared by a small part of the team, others have already been working on new features for some time. And these features will be released on a later date. Whenever that is, I really would encourage them not to hastily add new features just for the sake of it. We all have witnessed to what this can lead…

FCP X isn’t feature-complete yet, far from. And I’m pretty sure that the FCP X product management isn’t thinking any differently. At this time, performance and stability are very important selling-points for FCP X. I can only hope they will keep concentrating on these points, while adding new features that will be useful for a majority of their user base. I absolutely endorse leaving the development of specialized features to third-party developers. This adds special functionality for those who really need it, without bloating the code and sacrificing overall performance or stability.

– Ronny

[Ronny Courtens]

When you experience an unusual problem and this problem does not happen when working with a new user account:

– you may have conflicting or outdated third-party plugins
– or you may have a corrupted user directory

As a corrupted user directory is very easy to repair, that’s what I would try first:

https://www.fcpxbook.com/tips/resetting-the-user.html

– Ronny

[Ronny Courtens]

You probably have a Library opened in FCP X that has a storage location which is not available anymore. This can be due to a disconnected drive.

Select the Library in the FCP X browser and in the Inspector click the Storage Locations > Modify Settings button to see to which drive(s) the storage locations refer. If a storage location points to an unavailable drive, reconnect the drive(s). If you are not using this Library at this time, just close it from within FCP X.

– Ronny

[Ronny Courtens]

Craig, I entirely agree with you. When you know exactly what you are doing there is no real risk in exploring the contents of a Library package. But, except for troubleshooting purposes, there is nothing you can do in the Library package that you cannot do from within the FCP X interface. I have have seen too many people who had completely screwed up their production because they had been messing with Library files in Finder. That’s why I always advise to stay out of the Library packages unless you know exactly what you do.

– Ronny

[Ronny Courtens]

Hi Steve,

I totally agree there should be a way to change this within the FCP X interface. And actually it is possible to include this option when publishing a template. So we might see some changes in this regard in the future.

On the other hand I think it is good to make people aware of the powerful options we have in Motion 5 to customize and change FCP X effects, titles and transitions. Everyone of us has different requirements and it is impossible to include all possible options in a template without making it overly complex and slow. So I am glad you have discovered how easy it is to make a template work exactly as you want with very little effort. I hope this will encourage you to delve deeper in the neary unlimited possibilties Motion 5 offers when combined with FCP X.

Happy holidays!

– Ronny