Is This Normal? Importing footage into fcpx taking extremely long!

[Vince27]

Can anyone tell me if this is normal:

Specs: I'm working with AVCHD footage on a SDHC card from a HMC150 camera...
- my computer is a new 27" iMac 16g RAM, 2g Vram, i7 (3.4) -
- the footage i imported today was 720/30p...

I imported a 1 hr. clip into fcpx yesterday,
& the first import phase (where you see the little circle on the clip filling up) was pretty quick...

but then...

the background tasking of this went on for almost 4 hrs! (specifically i believe it was the "transcoding & analysis" that was just taking forever!) - it got to the point where i had to force quit the program because i had to leave (and it was still only at 67% complete after 4 hrs!) -

when i went to import, the only thing i clicked was "create optimized media"
- (so i don't understand - what is this thing transcoding/analyzing - for 4 hours?)

i left everything else unchecked (because the first time i imported a week ago i remember checking some audio stuff & again, it took hours!) - so this time i figured i would just leave everything unchecked...

i view this as a problem because i can't see sitting there for hours upon hours just to import footage - this doesn't seem right to me) - isn't importing supposed to take roughly the same amount of time that the clips are? (like in iMovie?) -

**before i started working with fcpx, i was playing with imovie 11...
when i imported into imovie (selecting "large" for import - (same footage) a 1 hr. clip would take just under an hour to import (and then that was it, the import was done) - so i don't understand why fcpx is taking HOURS to import the footage??

- Is this normal?? or am i missing something here & doing something wrong?
- should i import proxy instead?
- should i not check either selection?

**also just out of curiosity, when you force quit (& the background tasking isn't complete) does this then mean the footage wasn't properly imported? - and will you need to re-import?

- It just feels like importing should be alot quicker (like the way iMovie imports) -

Any help/insight is greatly appreciated! - thanks!

- Vince

 

[Curtis Mack]

Have you restored data from your previous computer? Are you importing to an external drive? There are all kinds of things that can cause this. Since it's a new computer, you have 90 days free support from Apple. I encourage you to use it. It takes about ten minutes to reach someone, but when you do they know how to help you.

 

[NoahK]

Creating optimized media can take a long time. First it has to copy all of your footage over and then it recompresses it all to ProRes. If it's a lot of footage on a not top level machine with normal speed hard drives- this can take a while. You can create optimized media after ingest- so next time try an import with nothing checked and see how long it takes.

Noah

 

[Vince27]

hi Curtis -

the first time i imported to an external (g-drive 7200 - fw800) it took about the same amount of time as this time (where i imported straight into the iMacs internal hard drive (7200) - no restoration or anything like that, just import into fcpx with sdhc card...

you think this could be a computer problem? - as opposed to the way fcpx is operating?

 

[Vince27]

hi Noah -

is it quicker to create optimized media after importing it? (do you have to create optimized media?)
why does the program have to recompress the footage to ProRes? (what exactly is ProRes?)

my iMac is maxed out for power, so i think the machine should be fast/powerful enough...

do you have any idea then why iMovie can import the same footage (in under an hour?) - i'm assuming iMovie isn't doing this transcoding/recompressing?

thanks!

- Vince

 

[bbalser]

No, it's not quicker, takes the same time in my tests.
Fast/powerful enough is a very subjective statement, what graphics card is in that iMac? They're not top end graphics cards.
iMovie uses AIC, not as much image quality/fidelity, it's not as concerned about image details as ProRes.