GH4 GH4 footage Plays Choppy in FCP7

Chadfish

Chadfish

Veteran
Hello,

I just got my GH4 and took some quick test footage in 1080p30 at 50mbps. I tried to edit it in Final Cut Pro 7, and the footage played choppy. I'm running OS 10,7.5 on a 1007 MacPro with 8 cores and 9 gigs of ram. It shouldn't be a problem. I did set the sequence to the file properties. Has anyone else experienced this? Any solutions you may offer? I'm sort of stuck because I can't upgrade my OS any further on this machine. I also noticed that it plays choppy on Quicktime 6, but plays fine o Quicktime 7.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Tanks

Chad
 
don't know if this will be useful to you but, on my iMac I had choppy playback when the native (not prores) files were siting on my internal drive. as soon as i moved them to an external, 7200rpm striped RAID, they played smooth.
 
David, I'm playing the files recorded from the camera, which I thought the point was with the GH4. You're supposed to be able to edit off the camera files. Of course it does play fine when I convert to ProRes. I converted to ProRes(LT) and surprisingly it's twice the size of the GH4 file. I thought both were 50mbps. Anyway, Zak, that's interesting. Maybe I need a dang raid now, or maybe it's time to learn a new NLE on top of the GH4, on top of the DJI s1000 octocopter. Ah, it was so easy with just an EX1 and a 2007 MacPro. Thanks for the report.

I'd like to hear from more FXP7 users so I can determine if it's mostly a machine thing or an FCP7 thing.
 
that is the point of it if you are using a modern editing program, FCP7 has always had poor h264 performance and it has been discontinued for almost 3 years so don't expect anything better if you are going to stick with it.
 
Maybe you can try FCPX and try enabling OpenCL or Cuda. I have a i2700k and haven't enabled Cuda so it also plays native files choppy.
 
At Chad's request I tested 4K 30p, 1080 30p 200Mbps, 1080 30p 100Mbps, and 1080 30p 50Mbps. All played back flawlessly within FCP7.

The difference perhaps is my machine: 2010 Mac Pro 6-core 3.33Ghz 32GB RAM Nvidia GTX 680 with the original files on a striped RAID array.
 
You'll always have problems with a H264 (or similar) codec in a 32bit application like FCP7. Even if you get them to work, try adding effects/grading, and you'll get the "Out of Memory" error... or it'll just crash.

I love FCP7... still by far my favorite editor, but I'm either converting to ProRes or just using Premiere for future projects that involve the GH4... I knew this day was coming :)
 
I have a few GH4 C4K clips here, which play smoothly on my 2008 Mac Pro (with ATI 5870 graphics card). In FCPX. I'd fully expect FCP7 performance to be horrible without transcoding to ProRes.

A little minor colour temperature adjustment does force me to use 'Better Performance' playback, which drops the resolution on playback. My early Retina MacBook Pro seems to cope a little better with the overhead. My hunch is that the 2008 Mac Pro is going to be usable for 4K editing, but not exactly pleasant, unless I swap the 5870 for a pair of 5770s or similar.
 
Yeah, I recommend going to FCPX….
I could barely edit 1080p projects in FCP7….
I was getting so many out of memory errors, it was a real pain…
And I have 32 gigs of RAM….but FCP7 cannot take advantage of more RAM.
I edit everything in FCPX now that I have the hang of the magnetic timeline.
 
Is it fairly easy to use different sized footage (720p, 1080p, 4k) in a single FCPx timeline? Also, if you have progressive and upper/lower field footage, is it fairly easy to tell FCPx what is what and make a progressive timeline without field issues? I too an still stuck in FCP7.
 
Cosimo Bullo said:
Is it fairly easy to use different sized footage (720p, 1080p, 4k) in a single FCPx timeline? Also, if you have progressive and upper/lower field footage, is it fairly easy to tell FCPx what is what and make a progressive timeline without field issues? I too an still stuck in FCP7.
Click to expand...

Yes on the size question - Don't know how FCPX handles upper/lower field footage…..I have not used interlaced footage since the SD days.
 
There is no point to ever use interlaced footage any more. Everything is converted to progressive now anyway, so you're only inviting potential scan lines. But maybe if you're going for a glassy video tape look as an effect it could be cool.
 
Please don't misunderstand. I'm shooting everything progressively, it's just that certain programs (like mpeg streamclip for example with GH4 4k footage to 1080) wrap progressive footage in an upper or lower first wrapper. It's still progressive. In final cut 7 I just go to the finder menu and stipify that everything should be seen as progressive.

Me too. I absolutely despise interlaced footage and gravitated to the Canon XL1 and it's progressive scan as soon as it arrived, even with the resolution hit.
 
After 7 years on FCP7, we switched to Premiere Pro 1.5 years ago and never looked back. I needed to be able to have no downtime in between projects to "learn" a whole new program. Premiere (CS6 at the time of our switch) was like having FCP8. Premiere Pro CC is even better. You won't have to worry about it falling behind as new codecs, resolutions and frame rates become available. One thing on FCP7 I do miss is the ease of "Log & Transfer". Adobe has Prelude but it isn't fully developed yet. However, I don't even transcode anymore to ProRes because Premiere handles everything natively which has been awesome. As for ease of use, in the menu of Premiere you go to "Keyboard Shortcuts" and then you'll have an option to use all the shortcuts of "FCP7" which will make the transition SUPER easy. No downtime. No learning curve really. There are lots of great NLE's out there, but like others have said, FCP7 is great, but it's discontinued and with every new codec etc. it's falling further and further behind. While Premiere was born and raised on the PC platform, it works great on a mac (which is what I use). With the huge migration of former FCP7 users to Premiere, Adobe has been adding/stealing tons of the "little features" that made FCP7 so great to it's own NLE. Updates are constant too which is awesome. Worth a try maybe. Enjoy!
 
The Irish TRex said:
As for ease of use, in the menu of Premiere you go to "Keyboard Shortcuts" and then you'll have an option to use all the shortcuts of "FCP7" which will make the transition SUPER easy. No downtime. No learning curve really. Enjoy!
Click to expand...

Thank you! I have a copy of Premiere Pro 6 I haven't dug into, and I set the keyboard shortcuts. I'm already off and running! I've been thinking of going with FCPX, but it's not intuitive, and also since my machine is a 2007, I can't instal Maverics, and I can't get the latest FCPx.
 
Chadfish said:
Thank you! I have a copy of Premiere Pro 6 I haven't dug into, and I set the keyboard shortcuts. I'm already off and running! I've been thinking of going with FCPX, but it's not intuitive, and also since my machine is a 2007, I can't instal Maverics, and I can't get the latest FCPx.
Click to expand...

Chad, sounds like you are fighting the generational wars on the mac. I've done much the same, am still using FCP7, and haven't upgraded to Mavericks either due to a bunch of other legacy software which doesn't play nice with Mavs. One thing I've realized is that no one operating system is going to cut ice anymore. Of course on a Mac Pro you have four drive bays and in my case have Lion, Mtn Lion, Windoz7, and soon will have a drive for Mavericks so I can transition to FCPX and the other apps that need it. Add a big raid and you are covered for backup….mostly.

You might also look at some accessory breakout boxes or cards from Matrox for example. They can help with some of the heavy lifting if your processor is weak in the knees, including direct input for either hdmi or sdi. They are pretty good about codec updates and can give you some monitoring options as well including driving a HDTV.

Although I have no experience with Primere, I do have a visceral deep hate for Adobe. Within CS6.5, on the mac, it is a buggy mess. Many of my CS apps lock up regularly, don't save consistently (commands come undone for example) and the updates for these issues is rarely forthcoming or prompt when it does happen. They compromised my personal information during a huge hack last year, Adobe being a tech company that can't even keep credit card numbers secure.

And of course if you don't have an actual license, once you start to use Adobe CC, you are hooked up with the extortionists for life if you ever want to re-edit.

Did you get the YAGH? How is the audio?

Grant
 
No interest in the YAGH really.I wish they just had a small XLR box to get pro sound. I've orded a padded cable to use my MixPre with. Though I will use the GH4 more and more as time goes by for my real video work of doing TV ads and things around my small town, I'm happy with my EX1 cameras for that work due to the audio and ease of use. I got the GH4 for aerial video mainly. And yes, I got the B&H protection plan! My NLE woes now revolve around round tripping in Motion. You can't do that in FCPx/Motion5. I cut an aerial video sequence together in FCP7, then send selected clips to Motion 4 for stabilization, and fisheye removal using Magic Bullet Looks 2, then I bring it back into FCP7. I simply LOVE the stabilization of Motion, and I'm bummed there is no round tripping. So even if I could run all the latest software, I'd be in for a headache trying to edit in Motion 5, which it's not designed for. Also now Magic Bullet Looks 2.5 is out, and free, but it only runs on FCP7, but not Motion 4. So I'm screwed there too. Oy vey! I will play with Premiere for a while and see how I like it. I also like the looks of FCPx, but I hate how it doesn't let you save a project file in the folder with everything else. It wants to have all the project files in a central location, and I don't like that because I archive projects on many drives, and I like to know the project file is with the project.

How it it get so hard! You spend 5 grand on a machine, and you should be able to use it until it falls apart.
 
Choppy footage is largely a byproduct of slow media drives and native footage, particularly if it is a variant of AVCHD/h.264. The processor has to decode the native files, and that takes some horsepower to play back native AVCHD footage at 1080/30p without dropping frames.

My 2012 MacBook Pro can play h.264 4K footage smoothly which was downloaded from YouTube natively.

However, I have a SSD drive that specs at 400 mobs read/write, a quad core 2.3 GHz i7 and FCP 10.9.

I am unable to do this on my dual quad core 2.26 late 2009 Mac Pro using Seagate 1 TB drives for native files. Pro Res is fine, however.

BTW, you don't need FCP X 10.10 and Mavericks. I run 10.9 on Mt. Lion without any problems. I even take 1060/60p GoPro footage into it natively.

Just my thoughts Chad.
 
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FCP7 became less stable in Mountain Lion and unbearable in Mavericks. have it on 2 work 12 core macs and my home 8 core and FCP7 is not reliable anymore. many crashes when pushed and even crashes when its not working hard at all. sad but FCP days are all but over with newer OS's as far as i see. been in PP CC with a GTX780 and its been pretty incredible. no complaints. also chad, I've forced myself to learn the native keyboard shortcuts in PP since thats where i plan to be going forward. its been tedious but getting the hang of it. going back to FCP7 is really whacky though as to key shortcuts but i still have many projects i regularly reference. can't wait to FCP to sleep for good.

david
 
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