Don't count Apple (FCPX) out yet .........

[Cassius McGowan]

The new m2. HD are great in the new macbook pros. The test on mines. And I run fcpx easy with only 8gb of ram. 

[jcs]

@jonpais Neat Video is an amazing product, the best NR on the market (Dark Energy was very cool, too bad  it was only for AE). However I don't really use it anymore. Two reasons- A7S II, C300 II and 1DX II don't need it in general, and using lights. The slowdown in editing isn't worth it. I now only use it for short clips such as slomo where I didn't get enough light and didn't realize it was so noisy while shooting (in other words- a mistake).

Also note that by the time people see your material online it's gone through two levels of 'free' NR- once when you render to H.264 to upload and once more after it's transcoded on YouTube/Vimeo (you can minimize bit crushing by uploading an ALL-I compressed video at a high bitrate in 4K (upscale 1080p content)). All content is now transcoded to multiple sizes and bitrates for adaptive streaming (we used to ask for no transcoding on the back end to preserve quality and allow for instant playback (after validating the bitstream)).

[Trek of Joy]

10 hours ago, Axel said:

Another trick for improving performance is to limit the number of clips your Mac has to access all at once. In the browser by filtering. I never see more than 50 clips, mostly much less. In the timeline by splitting up the whole into shorter sequences (=projects). 

Great tip, going to try that out as I shoot lots of short clips instead of long takes.

8 hours ago, Dimitris Stasinos said:

Also: Never leave Libraries loaded on your FCPX's browser. It's important to have a single Library (the one which you are working on) opened ONLY. These are data that are also loaded into your ram and slow down your machine for no reason.

Never thought of that, do you just delete the other libraries? I dumped Premiere (and all things Adobe outside of LR) and still learning FCPx. Thanks.

[Dimitris Stasinos]

6 hours ago, Trek of Joy said:

Never thought of that, do you just delete the other libraries? 

No just right click & close them. 

[jonpais]

So if I understand correctly, those who are saying their iMacs have no problem running 4K video, are they're using proxies or original media? And are able to apply two LUTs and Neat video, and the RAM isn't completely depleted? It's a bitch trying to find RAM in a third world country!

[Axel]

2 hours ago, jonpais said:

So if I understand correctly, those who are saying their iMacs have no problem running 4K video, are they're using proxies or original media? And are able to apply two LUTs and Neat video, and the RAM isn't completely depleted? It's a bitch trying to find RAM in a third world country!

Didn't check if the RAM is depleted when using Neat, but there ab-so-lutely is no real time, not with Optimized Media and not with viewer set to Better Performance. Render times are also the longest ever. I wouldn't use proxies for Neat, with noise being one of the things I wouldn't want to judge in quarter resolution. Proxies are better for multicam (you can check in preferences) or if you have to save disk space abroad. Otherwise (depending on CPU and Quicksynch or not) I'd use Original / Optimized. Note, that you can't choose to view one over the other once both appear in inspector under Available Media Representation. On the long run, ProRes will work better than H.264. If you are not only performing simple cuts.

9 hours ago, Trek of Joy said:

Great tip, going to try that out as I shoot lots of short clips instead of long takes.

...  and still learning FCPx. Thanks.

A few more basic tips:

1. Watch One Smart Collection To Rule Them All. Since this MASTER ACCESS collection lives in the new library, you'd have to create it every time anew. To facilitate this, I made an empty library with just my OSCTRTA, I call it FILTER (german for filter) and exported an XML. You can download it here. You double-click it to open FCP X.

2. Learn shortcuts, also those for navigation. See Editing At The Speed Of Thought for inspiration, and imagine how long it would have taken if he had just used the mouse.

3. Use the new workspaces. I made my own ones. I resized the windows for Organize and Color & Effects (scopes opened, viewer very big). I even made my custom workspaces the default shortcuts (cmd shift 1 & cmd shift 2), but that's a "hack", I tell you only if you can't stand to have to use the menu anymore. 

4. Make your own shortcuts. Two I use very often are set volume to silence ("0" - zero) and automatic speed (conform clip framerate to project framerate, ctrl cmd r).

5. If you encounter any problems and you can't google them, send feedback to Apple. There are bugs, and there is no point in tolerating them.

 

[Dimitris Stasinos]

3 hours ago, jonpais said:

 It's a bitch trying to find RAM in a third world country!

You can find them on eBay easily. You have a late 2013 iMac 27" so any ram with those specs: 

PC3-12800

Unbuffered

Nonparity

204-pin

1600MHz DDR3 SDRAM

Will do the job.

Crucial, Corsair, CSX, doesn't really matter...

[joema]

On 5/3/2017 at 3:09 AM, jonpais said:

So if I understand correctly, those who are saying their iMacs have no problem running 4K video, are they're using proxies or original media? And are able to apply two LUTs and Neat video, and the RAM isn't completely depleted? It's a bitch trying to find RAM in a third world country!

I edit lots of H264 4k on a 2015 iMac 27 using FCPX. Using proxy and deferring Neat Video to the very last step is best. Also jcs had excellent advice about limiting use of Neat Video. If you haven't use proxy before, this will produce huge performance gains during the edit phase. Before the final export, you must switch it back to optimized/original, else the exported file will be at proxy resolution. That final export will be no faster but all the editing prior to that will be faster.

However I'm not sure just adding 16GB more RAM is the solution. It sounds like a possible memory leak from either a bug in plugin or FCPX itself. Pursuing that is a step-by-step process of elimination and repeated testing, e.g, eliminate all effects then selectively add them back until the problem happens.

Starting with 10.3.x, there is a new feature to remove all effects from all clips. So you can duplicate the project, then remove all effects from the duplicate then add them back selectively: 

https://support.apple.com/kb/PH12615?locale=en_US

[Axel]

9 minutes ago, joema said:

Starting with 10.3.x, there is a new feature to remove all effects from all clips. So you can duplicate the project, then remove all effects from the duplicate then add them back selectively: 

https://support.apple.com/kb/PH12615?locale=en_US

Very smart indeed.

[thefactory]

2 hours ago, Axel said:

Very smart indeed.

Sheeeet. Did not know that. I have been moving around 20tb of libraries this week as my NAS shit itself. Opening every library to delete optimized media etc to make the libary smaller and had heaps of red in the time lines due to old plugins that i dont use anymore. I was going through each project and deleting the plugins scene by scene. 

[Axel]