Anyone on Lion yet to see if that helps FCP X work better?

W

wbrock001

Well-known member
As the titles says, I'm wondering if there are any early adopters who have taken the chance? I have read somewhere that Lion helps FCP X in certain ways, what those ways are is currently a mystery though. So has anyone taken the plunge and noticed any benefits to FCP X? Apple said FCS 3 should run fine with Lion, anyone confirm that? Any plugins broken? Thanks!

Bill
 
In Lion, Multicam is now functional. Option to turn on and off magnetic timeline; media reconnect is present, and full tape/deck support is unlocked. Also, XML is included and there is an advanced Color Correction module that looks like Color 2.0

FCP7 in Lion now supports full OpenCL, multicore rendering, and is 64-bit Cocoa.

Sorry. But actually, yes I did upgrade to Lion, and haven't noticed any changes in FCP X yet.... Apple has been updating other Apps like iWork and Aperture though so I am guessing a full screen mode and hopefully versioning will be coming to FCP X soon, and hopefully they will have a list of other updates/bug fixes with that update as well...

As for FCP 7 it still works fine and none of my plug ins broke (Magic Bullet, Sapphire Genarts). Just asked me to register again, and FCP 7 asked me to register again. Other than that, all good.

Mission Control is really cool, and some of the new gesture stuff is really smooth if you have a magic trackpad. The new login screen is also sexy.

I miss the color coded sidebar in finder and the multiple sections that was laid out iTunes style though, but not a big deal. AirDrop is sweet!! Wish I had it last week instead of having to use a thumb drive (was working on media projects with a group of people at a youth camp; airdrop would have been awesome)
 
installed Lion on my son's 27" iMac. no percievable change whatsoever to FCPX from what i can tell. found launchpad to be a bit stuttery when swiping from one page to another using the trackpad. wonder is thats what its supposed to be like or what.

im not impressed to much with Lion much. mission control, launchpad? no real net gain from what i can see so far. no better or worse. bought a trackpad for my son to see what he thinks of it and ill give it a go as well. lots of gestures that i guess have their merit for the finger people. its probably inevitable so time to get used to it. getting into a real editing program like photoshop or an NLE seems so far fetched for using fingers but general web browsing or things with pages and lots of tedious navigation then i can see a use for it.

FCPX has the same frustrations as before.

david
 
Ha ha, nice! Build it up then tear it down! So it sounds like no real rush to upgrade then, since there isn't really any clear benefit to doing so at this time. Thank you for the feedback!
 
I actually really like Lion. I have a magic trackpad to the left of my keyboard and mouse to the right. You can have both at once and set different sensitivity settings for both. I have a Logitech G5 mouse connected (don't like the Apple Mouse much) and have mapped the different buttons to different tasks (mission control, show desktop, etc.)

AirDrop is GREAT. You do NOT have to be at a WiFi hotspot or connected to a router to use it, you can be in the middle of the desert and if someone else has a Macbook with Lion just drag/drop the files and it will initiate the transfer... like a high-speed bluetooth.

I actually really like Mission Control and think it is a big step forward from Expose/Spaces. I always used spaces/expose and this is a marriage between the two. You can see all of your desktop spaces at once, and drag and drop between them, and flip around between them while leaving all windows fanned out (and unlike expose, all windows are fanned out but logically, by app - sort of like a mix between normal expose and application expose, plus spaces). You can delete/add more desktop spaces as needed.

If you make apps full screen, you can quickly swipe between them using 3 fingers on trackpad or a mouse mapped button or keyboard shortcut control+arrow. Being able to double tap and pinch/zoom in safari is great; just like iPad/iPhone.

Launchpad was not choppy for me, it was very smooth both on my beast MacPro and my older Macbook Pro. Perhaps a hardware issue for the previous poster?

Lots of minor improvements. Lots of nice aesthetic touches, versioning is really nice and would like to see it brought to FCP X (which should be updated soon), Automator and AppleScript have been updated, which is great for Folder Actions (right click a folder and look at folder actions if you don't know what this is). Anyway, definitely worth the $29... but I'd say wait till 7.1 if you are worried or have a lot of 3rd party apps. I went ahead and just jumped to Lion because I am running mostly Apple Software and read up about the Golden Master that's been in beta being very stable/compatible already, so felt comfortable.
 
If you use Lion, you really need to use the Magic Trackpad to enjoy the new features.
FCP 7 does actually run a tad better and faster in Lion.
 
I'm finding FCPX to be almost unusable under Lion, Lots of other people on the Apple forums are finding this as well, at the very least you need a clean install of Lion and a re-install of FCPX to keep the reliability up
 
Sconnor said:
I'm finding FCPX to be almost unusable under Lion, Lots of other people on the Apple forums are finding this as well, at the very least you need a clean install of Lion and a re-install of FCPX to keep the reliability up
Click to expand...

Well it works fine despite a dirty Lion install on top of FCP7 and FCPX, but to me not faster or slower. Pretty much the same in FCPX.
 
Very early first impression, but it seems to be actually FASTER on my 2009 3.06 Macbook Pro... On the bad side, the computer just died after a few weeks of use, coming from a 1300 USD repair due to spilled water on motherboard :(
 
My FCPx was sooo slow, so I updated to lion hoping for a better compatibility. It was worst.
My solution: Buy 8GB of ram. FCPX seems to be GREEDY in ram.
 
alpi69 said:
What is FASTER? Is there something I could test to see if it also works better here?
Click to expand...

Sorry Alpi, just completely forgot about this thread. I had a problem with realtime playback on snow leopard on even a 4:2:2 prores file with basic CC. With Lion the Macbook pro could play it realtime with basic CC no problem. Still is slow compared to my Macpro 2.8 dual quadcore (2008) with quadro 4000, but that's to be expected.

The Macbook Pro with an SSD still struggles with some effects and with scrubbing the clips. H264 now plays back realtime without effects, which it didn't before.

In a Prores workflow, the Macbook pro performs worse in FCPX than in FCP 7. For H264 it performs better.
 
I have Lion on my 2008 early MBP and 2009 with FCP x. They appeared to run at the same speed but I'm sure Lion made the overall OS feel a little snappier especially Safari. I just got a Mac Mini 2011, i7 and am working on a 720p project with only 4 gigs of ram and this little bugger eats the video for breakfast (see my writeup in the forums) Gonna upgrade to 8Gb of ram but in closing I'd say for $29 go for it. My 2009 MBP defiantly feels a little quicker and the new features are nice. Folks who say there machines are slower, not sure what is going on my all my machine feel quicker 2008 & 2009.
 
If your machine can't handle full proves 422 then just use proxy. When it somes time to output the video it'll use the full process file and you'll be golden. I did notice that process 422 (std) take up more CPU cycles in FCP x during playback than it did in FCP 6. I'd also get a better graphics card, will help too.
 
To begin with, FCP X is very picky about the hardware you run it on. Apple honestly should beef up the minimum requirements. It's 64-bit so yes it eats up RAM. It's OpenCL so it makes huge demands on your qualified OpenCL graphics card (both VRAM and processor speed). It's very fast so FW800 drives are more of a bottleneck than before. But on the right hardware, it will scream with speed. But if your hardware is not up to spec and bogging down in Snow Leopard, it probably will in Lion, as the Lion OS will put more demand on your hardware, also.

And if your hardware does bog down, as thabo said, use ProRes Proxy. Just be aware that when you turn it on in the Preferences, any Timeline (clip, compound, project) that uses clips with no proxies made will appear to go offline. just turn Use Proxies off in Playback and it'll all come back online. But can definitely help with speed for sure, and still good quality visuals in the Viewer.

In that same vein, remember, same rule applies about media drives as in legacy FCP systems. Don't put media on your system drive, put it on a secondary drive. Yes, it lets you create Events and Projects on any connected hard drive, but that doesn't mean using your system drive is a good idea. Same data bandwidth bottle neck issues still exist.

There are quire a few known bugs, so expect that until we see the first upgrade.

There are some minor functions that are known to break in Lion (moving text around in the canvas for example). So don't expect Lion to be a magical cure all.
 
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