T. Payton
Forum Replies Created
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Liz,
You wanna be careful deleting things in the event and project folders. Before you do something manually, use the “Delete Render Files” in the File menu.
Regarding the titling performance, can you tell me more about your project? Length? What kid of media? Are you using compound or synchronized clips to edit? Do you have a lot of events loaded? Sounds like something is up in that regard.
For a quick fix without other troubleshooting, see if you type your text in TextEdit or other app and then paste it into the inspector text area (not the viewer). That should at least get you by until you can find what is up with your timeline.
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
Stephen,
Welcome to FCP X, I think you’ll find it will speed up your workflow considerably. However, you’ll need to probably unlearn most of the workarounds you know of in FCP 7. I would recommend you get some basic training. The FCP X basics at Ripple Training come highly recommended. Larry Jordan also has excellent training and the PeachPit FCPX Books are excellent if you are book guy. I can’t recommend those enough. I’ve been with FCP since 1.0 and had a hard time with FCP X until I got some basic training. Most are less than $100 and if you bill rate is anything like mine, they will be a few dollars very well spent.
I’ll do by best to address your questions.
1. I’d like to keep the “bloat” of duplicates files to a minimum but don’t want regret my choices… so:
Bloat to some is a safety net backup to others. 😉2. ‘Copy files to Final Cut Events Folder’? (Does it transcode, or just copies clips to ‘events’ folder? How do I tell it where to place that folder?)
This indeed just copies files to the event folder and doesn’t do anything to the media, except for duplicate file names and it will append a incremental number “(fcp 1)” to it. Althought this sounds like a foreign thing coming from FCP 7, frankly I think you’ll find this automatic media organization excellent and a great backup.It really depends on your workflow how you want to avoid too much duplicated media. At my shop, I put all my fresh media on a “media backup” drive. And then copy from there to FCP X. That way I have two copies of my media if I ever need it, plus I have the benefit of letting FCP X keep everything organized.
WIth that said, you of course don’t need to do it that way and just keep your media wherever you like. If you don’t let FCP X manage your media you can easily change your mind mid project and organize your media files to your event. However, going the other way around is a little tricky, but not impossible.
3. ‘Create proxy media’ [and not copy full sized files if that box is unchecked]. Smaller files, snappier playback? But, when it’s time to render the movie would I need to connect the ‘storage drive’ so it can find the full size files? [Laptop specs listed below.])
Yes Exactly. Proxy is 1/4 res and Faster. In fact when you switch FCP X to proxy you can export using just the proxy media, only when you switch to original or optimized media will it look for that. You bring up an interesting workflow that I have not thought of before, perhaps someone else can comment on it.
4. Check both boxes?
If you have both create optimized and create proxy those will both be created in your event folder. So realize that will add some additional size to your project. However, my workflow is often exactly that when I work with h264 footage on my MacBook Pro 2007.5. Videoblocks clips are listed (on their site) as “Quicktime Photo-JPEG format”. Do I import these as is, or do I need to convert them for the best quality and performance in FCPX? And to what codec, etc?
Yep. Just bring them in as is, they work great. You will love this. The stuff that could never be played back in FCP 7 is perfectly find in FCP X. PhotoJPEG, Animation Codec, even bizzar flavors of MPEG4. If you find you need a bit more “boost” with those clips (and you might with your lower end GPU) you can always choose to optimize them.——
T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
Humm. Something is up.
I just did a test on my MacPro 2006, 2.66 4 core, 13gb of ram. 1 hour of 1080p prores, dropped on a timeline and then I grabbed an hour of audio from a another project. Disabled original audio.
I started the export and it was 20% completed, a 10.16GB file in 6 minutes. So based on that the whole thing would have taken about 30 minutes to export. Activity Monitor showed the FCP process running at about 195%. Using about 1.7GB of RAM. Disk activity was about 35MB/sec (this is probably due to the fact that the audio was on a FW drive.)
I then did a desaturate color correction on the entire 1 hour of footage (making it black & white) and put in about 20 cross fades. Then it was 10% completed, a 3.91 GB file in 5 minutes. So it would take about 50 minutes to do that export.
A few questions. Is your MacBook Air video card qualified for FCP X? What kind of storage are you using? Are you sure that your 1080i footage is not being deinterlaced? Is your project setting interlaced also?
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
No. Not normal. On my MacPro, I routinely do 2 hr projects. They typically export in faster than real time.
Ram could be an issue with your MacBook Air, but it shouldn’t be that big of an issue.
What type of footage is it? What codec is being used?
Are you exporting in the background? i.e. is FCP X showing it’s progress box during export? If not background exporting is much, much slower. See here:
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
I did composite heavy spot a month ago and I found that actually the .5 second background rendering worked really well. Rarely did I ever have to wait for a render, it was just done as I was tweaking.
If you have a bunch of layered text effects you might consider creating your own Motion template with perhaps many different text objects. That way FCP X is only rendering one motion project, rather than a stack of a whole bunch. The text generator “Feature” is an example of this.
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
Or just transform it 133% on the X axis.
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
I just did a quick test on my very underpowered MacBook Pro 2007 with just 4GB of RAM and I was able to play 5 stacked “basic title”. I tried “custom” and got some dropped frames but not beach ball.
Could be a corrupted font. Try switching fonts.
Also the “custom” text generator actually has a lot of animation properties built in, like Oliver said. If you don’t need that use the “Basic Text” instead and see if that helps.
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
BTW. Here is that screen shot:
I had it happen with separated audio too. There seem to be some trouble with redrawing waveforms in 10.0.5. Make sure you report those things to Apple.
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
I actually reported this to Apple earlier this week. It was the first time I saw it and I happened to grab a shot of it.
I would do the same if you have a screen shot. Put it up on drop box or even here and then give Apple the link.
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
I know I am stating the obvious but you could just grab your bug and move it above.
Also I have done some projects like this that need watermarks and I actually compound clip the entire timeline and then put the but on the compound clip, and edit inside the compound clip timeline.
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque
