[Timothy Dewey]

As a temporary work around, do you regain performance when you toggle layers/groups you’re not working on off?

[Timothy Dewey]

As a person who has been actively learning Media Composer for the last few weeks, Media Composer First has (mostly) been useful as a learning tool. Lynda.com has 2 updated Media Composer tutorials I’ve been following along, and I would say 85% of the features in MC First is there. Besides the limitations of the bins, there are many settings I cannot access, which can be frustrating, and a few “gotchas” here and there.

As a whole, I definitely wouldn’t use MC First to edit any actual projects with, but as a means to understand the general workings of MC without paying for an active subscription is invaluable. It’s another debate to ask wether younger generations would turn to MC edit their projects with. Different tools for different purposes, and while MC is an exceptional tool for editing, in my opinion, other tools such as Final Cut Pro X or Resolve definitely have more features to act as a one stop shop.

[Timothy Dewey]

To add to what you said, it’s a really great offline editor for Final Cut Pro X if you’re on the go. With some time for preparation, and making sure the filenames are the same, you can take the higher res footage and use compressor to shrink the resolution down to 540 with burned in timecode. Afterwards, you could place the offline footage on an ixpand drive, and import them into Lumafusion to setup an edit. Once done, you can send off the XML to Final Cut Pro X, and relink the higher res footage back ☺

Only downside is since Lumafusion doesn’t currently have an xml import, it’s only a one time go with each timeline/sequence. I’ve also read people claiming the xml will also work for Resolve.

[Timothy Dewey]

A lot of variables. First thing I would try is to disconnect the eGPU from you iMac, unplug the eGpu cable from your iMac, and plug it back in. I find myself doing this every so often, particularly if my MacBook Pro was sleeping.

If that doesn’t sort it out, consult with this.

https://egpu.io/setup-guide-external-graphics-card-mac/#tb3-enclosures

Or better, ask one of the friendly people of egpu.io. They would know their stuff a lot better.

[Timothy Dewey]

After a little search, apparently people on egpu.io has successfully used Thunderbolt 2 with eGPUs, such as the Sonnets, so if you wish to dabble, try plugging in an external monitor to the egpu, and see what performance you get.

[Timothy Dewey]

It depends on circumstance. To power the built in display, the eGPU for Final Cut Pro X has definitely been severely crippled, except for rendering out a project. On the other hand, if you use the eGPU with an external display, the performance will bely improved (i.e connect eGPU to iMac, and then connect a display to eGPU, and run Final Cut Pro X on external display.

Hopefully this issue will be addressed and fixed eventually, since Apple intended for eGPUs to act vas a modular upgrade for MacBook Pros. With that said, I would question if your 2012 iMac would potentially suffer bottleneck problems, since I’m guessing you’re using the eGPU with a Thunderbolt 2 to thunderbolt 3 adapter. Apple officially supports Thunderbolt 3 to power an eGPU, and I wonder if your Thunderbolt 2 would unofficially be fast enough.

[Timothy Dewey]

The latest update of Final Cut Pro X broke internal eGpu functionality. Before the update, when you were able to select prefer eGpu under the inspector, the eGpu functioned well.

Here is a discussion in regards to the matter at eGpu.io

https://egpu.io/forums/mac-setup/catalina-not-using-my-blackmagic-egpu/

[Timothy Dewey]

Random shot in the dark here, but you don’t happen to have a camera active in your project by any chance, do you? I remember a few times running into blurry projects, and I realized I had the camera’s depth of field on when I didn’t mean to ☺

It’s possible you may be editing with the depth of field off, but when you export, you have it turned on, assuming there is an active camera. But like O said, random shot in the dark 🙂

[Timothy Dewey]

Hey Everyone,

Thanks for the response. Was curious because it seems to find any recent in -depth information about Symphony seemed very limited.

Thanks again for the help!

[Timothy Dewey]

Just checking, did you mean Hevc, h264, or both? If it’s just Hevc, are you on Final Cut Pro X 10.4? Reason why I’m asking is because Apple recently offered support for Hevc files in 10.4.