FCP X edit on internal Mac drive

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Peem Washikiat

Active member
Howdy,

Just putting it out there- Have a 700gig project to edit in 4k. I haven't got my External Drive yet. So since Im working with files directly on the drive would optimized media be the best setting? Am I foolish for doing a 45 min project on my system drive? It a bran new iMac 2tb drive.
Cheers and thank you for comments
 
David Saraceno said:
A platter based drive probably will not sustain 4K throughput.
Click to expand...

Actually ProRes 422 HQ 4k streams fine off a regular USB 3 drive. 4k H.264 files from the GH4 handle great as well. If you're doing multicam though with multiple 4k streams, you'll want more throughput, an SSD or some kind of RAID array.
 
Proxy is another great option. File sizes are not much larger than the native 4k files but are insanely easy on the system and drive capabilities. I recently did a 9 camera multi-cam edit test for fun on my 2012 iMac with a single 7200 RPM USB3 drive and it was playing perfectly without a single hiccup. This was with 4k material transcoded to proxy. Proxy really is an amazing workflow for FCPX. Just flip a switch to render your project or if you need that little extra clarity of the original files.

Optimized is great because you get the speed and quality advantage but the files are huge with 4k. Quality wise you don't really gain anything from optimized since the damage was already done with the original H264 encoding from the camera. That is why I like using proxy. The transcoded files are tiny and the performance is insane. My final renders are slower when I switch back to the originals but that is only a large issue if you keep rendering client revisions for approval. If you only plan on exporting once then the extra time to render isn't a big deal.
 
Thanks-

My external drive arrives soon so Ill set up to edit on it. A concern is I have yet to acquire a number of drives to create an ideal backed up system so anyway to go easier on things seems relevant. The proxy media work flow seems relevant here. I just assumed with a new computer it would handle a single 4K project no problem- um yeah.. But thanks for all the feedback. I can't wait to dial this edit in and get the thing off the ground already.
cheers
 
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