Simon Ubsdell
6
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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Interesting question, Rick.
Here’s another test with a clip that’s 34 minutes long.
Editing it into a new project gave a project size of 184KB, which expanded to 635KB after 20 blading actions.
Starting with another new project I added the same clip and made it a compound – the compounding action only took it up to 197KB.
One single blading action took it up to 1.6MB in one single hit.
While blading the compound 20 times resulted in a project size of 16.6MB.
Quitting and relaunching did indeed “flush the undo queue” but not as much as you’d have hoped – the project size only came down to 5.5MB.
These are worrying results and suggest that compound clips do need to be used with some caution.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
Thanks for the plug, Rafael – much appreciated.
I’m going to also try and bring them all together in one place on my website (still for free) – but there never seems to be enough time 🙁
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
Oliver Peters on Nov 25, 2011 at 9:57:08 pm
Ironically FCP 7 feels like it’s working better under Lion. At least it appears to render faster.
Thanks for the heads-up – sounds like it’s maybe time to make the move.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
That’s even worse news – I haven’t made the move to Lion yet, I’m still on SL and it’s got major issues!
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
It’s a fundamentally significant issue – it’s extraordinary that it’s not being picked up on more. Thanks for trying to keep the ball in the air on this one as it’s something people should really be aware of and be lobbying Apple about as much as possible.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
I think your point about markers – which you have been trying to get people to recognize for a while – is a very good one. But your experiment is pointing to an even more basic problem which is the monstrous rate of growth of a project when all you are doing is splitting a clip into pieces on the timeline.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
OK, so let’s forget large projects for a second. Here’s a very simple experiment I have just tried.
New Event, new project – import one 2 minute clip (1080P ProResLT 23.98fps), drag it into a matching timeline. Project file size is 401K. (Note that I did this a few times and the intial file size with exactly the same paramters is erratically different, but that’s another matter.)
Next I bladed the clip 20 times (nothing else, no markers, no effects, nothing at all). Project file size is now 3MB – every edit significantly increased the filesize by getting on for 100K. (And I get a comparable result when using the range tool to select and cut 20 portions of the same clip.)
This is not good.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
Thanks for your reply, Tom – all good points but I’m not sure I entirely agree.
My experience is that the analysis time is not negligible – although as you say much faster than video processes. A test I just performed on a 19 minute clip took 75 seconds for the audio analysis to complete. Quick but not that quick especially if you have many hours of audio rushes.
I would however accept that there probably isn’t a huge difference between the time to analyze a whole clip as against analyzing just the edited component parts.
On the background reduction issue, I think this is a terrible tool that just shouldn’t be there. Essentially it’s a very crude version of the Logic/STP noise reduction filter with no controls over the noise sample – it’s never going to be a good solution. You’re always going to get the nasty, flangy, digital artefacts (which are in many ways worse than the offending noise!) in some form or other and the Amount slider is just going to make it more or less offensive. Have you been able to get decent results out of it?
I think my point about EQ and compression is more a please for editors to try not to look for the automatic fix for audio – there really is no such thing, yet. There possibly never will be. Intelligent use of dedicated tools with adequate controls is always going to be better – and time spent learning and using them is always going to pay off in the long run. But maybe that’s a counsel of perfection in an increasingly flawed world!
I do take your point about the desirability of flagging audio issues but I don’t think this is really what happens in any kind of useful way – there is no feedback as to what the analysis is trying to fix and where, so from that point of view the flagging has limited value.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
There is no way to do this within FCPX – or even within Motion 5 – as far as I know. Apple seem to think alpha channels are a bit too complicated for the user to have to think about or manipulate 😉
Your best bet is to save a copy of the file with some other application (ideally in Photoshop but you could even use Preview) in such a way that you throw away the alpha channel and then import it back into FCPX.
The ability to manipulate the alpha channel – and indeed the RGB channels come to that – is something Apple really need to address if they want us to take this application seriously. It’s a disgrace that a supposed compositing app like Motion has no way of getting at the channel information in any meaningful way.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
Hi Akira
Your idea was a very good one – here is my version of it which I think should give you all the control you need.
You can scale and offset the position of the box, choose its colour and its opacity.
Do let me know if you can think of any improvements.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com