Simon Ubsdell
6
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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Don’t know what happened to the amazing Brendan – it’s a shame not to have heard from him in a long while.
As for me, I got taken to task (by Oliver Peters, I seem to remember) for single-handedly destroying the plug-in market by posting free stuff … so I have been keeping it all for myself ever since.
I’m not being entirely serious here but I do sort of agree with the point that too much free stuff doesn’t ultimately do the third party market much good and right now it probably needs all the help it can get.
However, here’s a recent plug-in that I made to simulate a security camera look …
… with controls for:
Brightness, contrast, blur and noise;
Waviness, roll, static, color sync, saturation;
Scan line brightness, percentage and number of lines;
Tint color and intensity;
Fisheye radius and amount;
Vignette opacity.Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
Really interesting write-up of your experience, many thanks.
I find the sluggishness to be a very serious issue – ultimately far more of a concern than almost any of the other problems.
Like you I found that adding not a particularly demanding layer of effects and overlays made everything grind to a halt and start behaving unpredictably all over the place. For example: zooming in and out on the timeline became teeth-achingly painful; I couldn’t type in a new name for a duplicated project without qutting and trying again; the inspector wouldn’t show up without repeated prodding of Cmd4, etc., etc.
My machine is less powerful than yours: dual quad core (2 x 2.26GHz) with 8GB RAM and ATI Radeon HD 4870, but it’s not significantly underpowered either.
The main reason the world was waiting for a new version of FCP was that it would be 64-bit and lightning fast, and most important of all take advantage of all that unused power in our machines not addressed by legacy FCP.* And this manifestly hasn’t gone to plan if your experience and mine is anything to go by. I get significantly better overall performance out of FCP7 than FCPX.
What’s clear is that its RAM usage is needlessly wasteful – I notice for example that it tries to cache all the available projects in the event and if these have unrendered effects in them it becomes a problem even if the active project is fully rendered.
I’d be very interested to hear a discussion of this from people who understand it a lot better than I do – for the time being this issue has leaped to the top of my list of reasons why I won’t be doing anything serious with FCPX except watching and waiting for a good while yet.
* Within the last 12 months I experienced another application migrate to 64-bit, namely the excellent 3D app Modo, and the speed increase was breath-taking – rendering is quite literally twice as fast with my 8 cores suddenly behaving like 16 cores. I don’t believe we are seeing anything like this sort of 64-bit advantage in FCPX.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
Okay I got it now but I still don’t understand what you mean by dragging.
I meant you can easily pick any clip from anywhere and drag it into a secondary storyline – drag and drop.
Each time I add a clip I am using the range tool to select the bit of music I want to overlay the clip on to then hitting Q to make it a connected clip.
You don’t need to select a range in the timeline, just park your playhead where you want the new clip connected and hit Q.
(i>I am then selecting the new clip and the group of clips joined as a secondary storyline and hitting command G to add my new clip to that storyline.
If you do as I suggested and drag instead of trying to use CmdG you will get a more predictable result. When I tried what you describe, the transition gets left behind and a new group gets formed without a transition – which is clearly not what you want. If you just drag the new clip you want to add into the secondary it will work just fine. I don’t think your way of doing it is what Apple have in mind here …
As I say, secondaries need a lot more work.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
Having just (I hope) finished my first paying gig with it, I’d say good luck too – a bit of a rollercoaster with some hairy twists and turns that I hadn’t expected.
Very interested to hear how it went when you’re done!
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
I’ve only got four versions of the one 90 second project in the library; I’ve turned off background rendering because that’s not useful at all; I’m working with ProResLT media …
Anecdotal evidence suggests that it doesn’t like render-intensive effects – looks like the RAM gets maxed out very fast …
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
I find that once you get outside of the sweet spot of soundbite-based, news-style story packages, FCP X starts to become very cumbersome to use.
You’re so right – and actually the piece I’m cutting is only 90 seconds long anyway!!!!!
The poor performance of FCPX in terms of basic speed doesn’t seem to have come in for much criticism, which surprises me. Maybe everyone is running it on machines with massive amounts of RAM …
I can happily cut ProRes SQ (and even 4444 at a pinch) on my MBP with only 2GB of RAM in FCP7 – but even fairly basic editing in FCPX is virtually impossible on the same machine.
I’d love to know where the massive performance hike from 64-bit is supposed to show itself – I’m sure you can answer this conundrum far better than I can.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
Previously the first clip in the sequence I put a cross dissolve on (fade from black) That seemed to make it a storyline as well at the time. So now I have two storylines above the primary storyline containing my audio. Can I link these two into one? I cannot roll between them. What is the best workflow? I’d like to fine edit as I go but if I have to keep making all these little storylines that don’t talk to each other very well just to do roll edit’s what’s the point?
Not sure quite what you’re describing here – are you talking about subsidiary audio that is not your “primary” music track?
It’s pretty easy to combine the clips from one secondary into another by dragging from one to the other and once they’re in the same storyline you can roll all you want. Would that not work in this case?
I’d have to agree though that secondaries can get a bit messy (and need a lot more development work I think). Oddly you have to be a lot more organized in FCPX than traditionally if you’re going to keep everything tidy and manageable … especially given the limitations of the “transition have to be in storylines” thing.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
Just in the middle of my first paying job with FCPX (with a fresh, clean install) and the slowness of rendering is proving to be a really big issue for me – my paltry 8GB of RAM appears to be wholly unequal to the task.
Because I’ve got render-requiring effects on every clip in the timeline I effectively can’t edit until they are all rendered, but it takes so long to render them that it seriously impedes the process. It feels like being back in the stone-age with an early version of Media Composer. It’s certainly a long way from the speed of FCP7 – and that wasn’t exactly great anyway.
Not sure where all the vaunted 64-bit power of FCPX is getting used – it feels excessively RAM-hungry for no very obvious benefit.
…
(Otherwise I am really enjoying cutting on it and I’m finding that I just can’t live without the “power of gaps” when I go back to anything else.)
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
I’d agree – allowing more UI design control from within Motion 5 clearly seems like the best way of addressing this issue and I’m sure is part of the game plan.
I hope so anyway …
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Timothy Payton] ” I haven’t been able to get automatic duck to create a valid file, even for a tiny project.”
Hi Timothy
I’m trying to get to grips with Automatic Duck right now and having problems of my own, but I would really like to hear what you have tried with it and how it’s come unstuck.
Any details of your workflow much appreciated.
Thanks.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com