Switched to FCPX - A continuing commentary on FCPX

BenB said:
Nice review, but I'd disagree about Media Management, as there is a system in place that most folks simply haven't become aware of yet. As a trainer and Final Cut Server guy, I've found my FCSvr users take to FCP X's metadata/database paradigm as second nature, it's actually a more sophisticated way to work with "digital" assets. I have a complete course on this coming out soon.
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I actually like the logging/binning/keywording. It works great. I was referring to moving events/projects and stuff. You can only seemingly move one thing at a time. If an event is moving, you can't move projects around at the same time etc. I like how it organizes media/projects/data though. VERY slick.

Are you aware you can in fact specify what you want in the Visualizer? It's not blatantly obvious to a lot of folks, but much of the Visualizer can be specified to what you want to see. Working along with the Inspector, I find using both at together, not as separate entities, to be very fast, very accurate.
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I don't think I know what you mean, but I'm excited to learn how it can work better!

Really like your examination and conclusions. I may be presenting FCP X at a house of worship conference coming up, and am very happy to see FCP X works well for this market.
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Again, we just implemented and we are learning but it is so much better overall. And right now, even with some NAS limitations, it is SICK AWESOME how this is gonna be working! I'm excited to post about it in the coming days.
 
TheReverend said:
Alright, so some of you guessed correctly and said the first clip was FCPX
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Also, your news segment workflow description pointed that you created the latest segment in FCPX. The content in the videos gave it away for me. FCP7 clip stated classes were about to begin where FCPX segment stated classes began last week! Other than that, I would have had a difficult time figuring it out. Nice work!
 
TheReverend said:
This isn't a green screen! Crazy, but true! We pulled the technique from a place called Church On The Move. If you are interested in the technique, check out this link: http://seeds.churchonthemove.com/blog/post/162
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hi mate,

I'm very interested in learning more about this technique but the link you provided isn't working......it just says "internal server error" :(

could you please tell me a little about it or provide a new link? I've tried googling it but can't find anything :(
many thanks

cheers

scott
 
I don't think there's any question on quality from any front line NLE today. You can take FCP, Avid, Premiere, whatever and make identical videos with all of them in top quality. The question is what was the process like to get to the end.
 
Jarek Zabczynski said:
I don't think there's any question on quality from any front line NLE today. You can take FCP, Avid, Premiere, whatever and make identical videos with all of them in top quality. The question is what was the process like to get to the end.
Click to expand...

I won't disagree with you there. So far, the process is good! There are occasional learning moments with the new storyline design. But editing so far is VERY nice. Quality internally is good too, so much less AE needed. Media management is the biggest learning curve, Events and Projects and managing them well. Overall, a good workflow though. I'll post more in the coming week if i can find some time!
 
igetcha said:
thanks mate ;)
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To let you know, the biggest thing for this kind of shooting is, get ALOT of light DIRECTLY on your subject. If your cloth is black and non-reflective, this is super important as well. But really, the direct light is what is needed most. Here's a list in order of importance
1) LOTS of direct mid-soft light on subject
2) Black non-reflective cloth for a backdrop
3) No "dark" clothing on subjects
4) Very "muted" and flat, low luma backgrounds.
 
It's been awhile since I've done an update, but wow, alot's go on since the move to FCPX in September. I'm gonna go through things slowly and try to take have a few pics as well. I'll summarize good stuff and bad at the end of each section.

1) SAN/NAS and Data Management.
From the get go, we had planned to use a Network Attached Storage device over gigabit ethernet with FCPX. We have a goal of setting up an infrastructure that is easily learned and trained to new volunteers with no experience how to edit or data manage. We also wanted multiple stations to be able to access projects between stations. In September, we got the go ahead to purchase a NAS device to keep our mounting data secure and accessable.

We had a choice to make though; FCPX got the 10.0.1 update that had SAN support. We chose NOT to go that route, and instead went the route listed here: http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?257605-FCX-with-network-users-SOLVED! This was a GREAT decision! We got the NAS and set it up ourselves with 3x3TB drives in a RAID5 for ~6TB of space. Attached a gigabit switch, followed the directions in the link above, and we were off to the races! We made a choice to make a few different "workspaces" if you will, divided up by task so that projects and data could be easily stored and managed.
NASDiskImages.jpg
Using these five disk image drives, a user can mount which drive they need and then begin editing. Data management over the NAS has been FANTASTIC! It's really easy to keep track of where files are. "Losing" data is NEVER an issue in FCPX, as long as you ALWAYS use FCPX to manage your data(events) and project files. Having the "Copy files to Final Cut Events folder" button checked is the key. Do this, and you'll never worry about misplaced media. Once you import media into FCPX, you must manage data by duplicating/moving/copying events and or projects. Doing this moves everything everytime. And you gain sanity by not having to micromanage your media. FCPX does the hard work for you!

Good things:
- FCPX manages data so you don't have to.
- With FCPX, you begin editing before importing is complete. YOU CAN BEGIN EDITING BEFORE IMPORTING IS COMPLETE! I can't say how much time has been saved because of this. It's phenomenal. SD card goes in the slot of the iMac and you are editing your AVCHD footage in seconds while transfer happens in the background. Fantastic.
- FCPX project transfers for mobile/offline editing is easier than EVER. Many times I have moved a project over to my laptop HDD and then back when I come back to the office. Simple and quick (over gigabit ethernet)
- FCPX works well with a NAS! Multiple users working over gigabit ethernet with no slow-down. We've had three editors working off three different disk-images all at the same time without a hitch. Pretty stellar.

Bad things:
- FCPX data managing is easy! BUT, you can only set ONE data managing task in motion at a time. For example, you are importing a 60GB Apple ProRes file. It takes ~20 mins to go through the whole transfer. That whole twenty minutes, I was able to edit my project and I want to duplicate it and make a tweaked 2nd version. BUT YOU CAN'T duplicate until the import is finished! You can't move a project or event, rename, or anything. You can't copy an event to one drive and select another to copy as well. There is no queueing up data management tasks, only ONE at a time. This needs to be fixed.
- Only one user at a time can mount the same drive. This is unfortunate because basically only one editor can work on one project at a time. Now, it's possible to duplicate events(media) to two different drives and merge projects later via compound clips. This is simple and effective despite being a HDD space hog. But in the case where you NEED to have more than one editor at a time working with the same footage(event), you just duplicate that footy to a secondary location. It makes sense that you can't have multiple editors using the same mounted drive, but someday you should, and that would be epic!
- Mounting/unmounting drives. FCPX will NOT let you unmount drives once they are mounted until you close the program. A pain for sure when using this method of SAN+diskimages. Same is true for an SD card as well. Transferred your data off the card and want to import from card #2? Close, unmount, mount card#2, reopen. You can of course just force eject things, but that's not safe to be doing with important data.
- Importing at times can take longer than a simple transfer. I'm still not sure if it's the expanding diskimages that we made (they grow as needed), or if it's some of the "analyzing" that FCPX likes to do. Either way, that can be a bummer.

OVERALL:
NAS and FCPX work very well together. Depending on the size of your organization and the breadth of your projects, FCPX can work well over shared storage.


2) Large projects - 35min Documentary

Can FCPX handle larger projects? The longer and more complex a project does FCPX start to break down? These are the questions that many people ask and rightfully so. FCPX can seem so simple and basic that it would seem that it wouldn't scale well. We were asked to put together a long form (20-40min) documentary for the 7-year birthday of The Crossing Church. This was going to be a massive project with old footage and photos combined with 10 or more one-hour long interviews. To break this down, I'm gonna talk general impressions/reflections and then give some good and bad points.

Generally, I feel FCPX proved itself up to the task. Working with all the footage natively in AVCHD saved ALOT of space. Using compound clips for different sections gave a great sense of "small projects" and not always one daunting, massive timeline. The tools inside FCPX really allow you to do pretty much anything you need to. At no time did I feel restricted by FCPX in terms of capability. Cutting feels SO MUCH BETTER once you get used to the collapsing timeline. Moving stuff around, trying different takes. It does feel more fluid and intuitive than FCP7.

The downside to using FCPX on such a large project is this, FCPX is almost TOO capable. Fifty layers of Color Correction? Sure! Use it on 35 mins of footage though, and things can start to crawl. What this means is two fold, 1) you need to be careful how much you ask FCPX to do at one time, and 2) you need to allow FCPX to do some of it's optimizing (ProRes transcodes, render timeline footy, etc) to keep things flowing. Basically I used too much CC for FCPX and applied it to too much of the project at once and it bogged down the final render. I used usually 4-5 Color Corrections per clip. It was probably too excessive :D and especially to do for one 35 min project. Looking ahead, if I were to do another project like this, I would DEFINITELY explore using Proxy media. I didn't for this project I think that was a bad mistake long run.

Good things:
- FCPX color correction is solid. It's REALLY good in fact. Not being able to copy and paste specific CC's independently from a clips ENTIRE effects chain is unfortunate. But saving presets works well enough.
- FCPX works natively in AVCHD. In this case it was kinda a double-edged sword, but in one sense the time saved transcoding and in disk space is formidable.
- FCPX works much better than FCP7 using the same features. Thumbnails and waveforms are AWESOME to use in FCPX, and I would NEVER dream of using them in FCP7 because the whole thing would just crash. FCPX is more capable and better overall FOR SURE.
- Backup of the project and transferring to mobile was a great! Never had that same kind of capability/power/ease in FCP7.

Bad things:
- Renders should not fail. And particularly, they shouldn't fail after hours of rendering, reaching 100% and then failing to finish. This happened once or twice and I had to work around it by rendering chunks at a time and then combining into a final render. It worked in the end, and I'm sure I didn't lose any quality, but it was NOT ideal.
- Slowing down is an issue. I mean, all our computers only have 4GB of RAM, so really, it's probably our own fault. But still, loading and unloading the project became insane near the end. Much of this probably had to do with the lack of transcoded originals/rendered timelines as well.
- We have MANY hour-long sermons. Want to use a 20 sec portion of that 40GB file? With FCPX as far as I could find, your hands are tied. On the one hand, if you move it to the project, you import a 40GB ProRes file. On the other hand, if you don't, the media doesn't move to your NAS and move with the project. Workaround? MPEG Streamclip our Quicktime Pro 7. Set in and out points. Trim. Then import a reasonably sized file. Again, not ideal. File import needs to have the option to trim.

OVERALL:
FCPX made a beautiful 35min documentary. I've never done a project on this scope and I would have NOT liked my results from FCP7. It would have been cumbersome. The visual quality would NOT have been as high coming from only FCP7 for color correction, and using another program to grade would have added more time to the project which we didn't have. All in all, FCPX was up to the task and handled it admirably!

MORE FOOTAGE AND PHOTOS SOON!
 
TheReverend said:
It's been awhile since I've done an update, but wow, alot's go on since the move to FCPX in September. I'm gonna go through things slowly and try to take have a few pics as well. I'll summarize good stuff and bad at the end of each section.

1) SAN/NAS and Data Management.
From the get go, we had planned to use a Network Attached Storage device over gigabit ethernet with FCPX. We have a goal of setting up an infrastructure that is easily learned and trained to new volunteers with no experience how to edit or data manage. We also wanted multiple stations to be able to access projects between stations. In September, we got the go ahead to purchase a NAS device to keep our mounting data secure and accessable.

We had a choice to make though; FCPX got the 10.0.1 update that had SAN support. We chose NOT to go that route, and instead went the route listed here: http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?257605-FCX-with-network-users-SOLVED! This was a GREAT decision! We got the NAS and set it up ourselves with 3x3TB drives in a RAID5 for ~6TB of space. Attached a gigabit switch, followed the directions in the link above, and we were off to the races! We made a choice to make a few different "workspaces" if you will, divided up by task so that projects and data could be easily stored and managed.
View attachment 43210
Using these five disk image drives, a user can mount which drive they need and then begin editing. Data management over the NAS has been FANTASTIC! It's really easy to keep track of where files are. "Losing" data is NEVER an issue in FCPX, as long as you ALWAYS use FCPX to manage your data(events) and project files. Having the "Copy files to Final Cut Events folder" button checked is the key. Do this, and you'll never worry about misplaced media. Once you import media into FCPX, you must manage data by duplicating/moving/copying events and or projects. Doing this moves everything everytime. And you gain sanity by not having to micromanage your media. FCPX does the hard work for you!

Good things:
- FCPX manages data so you don't have to.
- With FCPX, you begin editing before importing is complete. YOU CAN BEGIN EDITING BEFORE IMPORTING IS COMPLETE! I can't say how much time has been saved because of this. It's phenomenal. SD card goes in the slot of the iMac and you are editing your AVCHD footage in seconds while transfer happens in the background. Fantastic.
- FCPX project transfers for mobile/offline editing is easier than EVER. Many times I have moved a project over to my laptop HDD and then back when I come back to the office. Simple and quick (over gigabit ethernet)
- FCPX works well with a NAS! Multiple users working over gigabit ethernet with no slow-down. We've had three editors working off three different disk-images all at the same time without a hitch. Pretty stellar.

Bad things:
- FCPX data managing is easy! BUT, you can only set ONE data managing task in motion at a time. For example, you are importing a 60GB Apple ProRes file. It takes ~20 mins to go through the whole transfer. That whole twenty minutes, I was able to edit my project and I want to duplicate it and make a tweaked 2nd version. BUT YOU CAN'T duplicate until the import is finished! You can't move a project or event, rename, or anything. You can't copy an event to one drive and select another to copy as well. There is no queueing up data management tasks, only ONE at a time. This needs to be fixed.
- Only one user at a time can mount the same drive. This is unfortunate because basically only one editor can work on one project at a time. Now, it's possible to duplicate events(media) to two different drives and merge projects later via compound clips. This is simple and effective despite being a HDD space hog. But in the case where you NEED to have more than one editor at a time working with the same footage(event), you just duplicate that footy to a secondary location. It makes sense that you can't have multiple editors using the same mounted drive, but someday you should, and that would be epic!
- Mounting/unmounting drives. FCPX will NOT let you unmount drives once they are mounted until you close the program. A pain for sure when using this method of SAN+diskimages. Same is true for an SD card as well. Transferred your data off the card and want to import from card #2? Close, unmount, mount card#2, reopen. You can of course just force eject things, but that's not safe to be doing with important data.
- Importing at times can take longer than a simple transfer. I'm still not sure if it's the expanding diskimages that we made (they grow as needed), or if it's some of the "analyzing" that FCPX likes to do. Either way, that can be a bummer.

OVERALL:
NAS and FCPX work very well together. Depending on the size of your organization and the breadth of your projects, FCPX can work well over shared storage.


2) Large projects - 35min Documentary

Can FCPX handle larger projects? The longer and more complex a project does FCPX start to break down? These are the questions that many people ask and rightfully so. FCPX can seem so simple and basic that it would seem that it wouldn't scale well. We were asked to put together a long form (20-40min) documentary for the 7-year birthday of The Crossing Church. This was going to be a massive project with old footage and photos combined with 10 or more one-hour long interviews. To break this down, I'm gonna talk general impressions/reflections and then give some good and bad points.

Generally, I feel FCPX proved itself up to the task. Working with all the footage natively in AVCHD saved ALOT of space. Using compound clips for different sections gave a great sense of "small projects" and not always one daunting, massive timeline. The tools inside FCPX really allow you to do pretty much anything you need to. At no time did I feel restricted by FCPX in terms of capability. Cutting feels SO MUCH BETTER once you get used to the collapsing timeline. Moving stuff around, trying different takes. It does feel more fluid and intuitive than FCP7.

The downside to using FCPX on such a large project is this, FCPX is almost TOO capable. Fifty layers of Color Correction? Sure! Use it on 35 mins of footage though, and things can start to crawl. What this means is two fold, 1) you need to be careful how much you ask FCPX to do at one time, and 2) you need to allow FCPX to do some of it's optimizing (ProRes transcodes, render timeline footy, etc) to keep things flowing. Basically I used too much CC for FCPX and applied it to too much of the project at once and it bogged down the final render. I used usually 4-5 Color Corrections per clip. It was probably too excessive :D and especially to do for one 35 min project. Looking ahead, if I were to do another project like this, I would DEFINITELY explore using Proxy media. I didn't for this project I think that was a bad mistake long run.

Good things:
- FCPX color correction is solid. It's REALLY good in fact. Not being able to copy and paste specific CC's independently from a clips ENTIRE effects chain is unfortunate. But saving presets works well enough.
- FCPX works natively in AVCHD. In this case it was kinda a double-edged sword, but in one sense the time saved transcoding and in disk space is formidable.
- FCPX works much better than FCP7 using the same features. Thumbnails and waveforms are AWESOME to use in FCPX, and I would NEVER dream of using them in FCP7 because the whole thing would just crash. FCPX is more capable and better overall FOR SURE.
- Backup of the project and transferring to mobile was a great! Never had that same kind of capability/power/ease in FCP7.

Bad things:
- Renders should not fail. And particularly, they shouldn't fail after hours of rendering, reaching 100% and then failing to finish. This happened once or twice and I had to work around it by rendering chunks at a time and then combining into a final render. It worked in the end, and I'm sure I didn't lose any quality, but it was NOT ideal.
- Slowing down is an issue. I mean, all our computers only have 4GB of RAM, so really, it's probably our own fault. But still, loading and unloading the project became insane near the end. Much of this probably had to do with the lack of transcoded originals/rendered timelines as well.
- We have MANY hour-long sermons. Want to use a 20 sec portion of that 40GB file? With FCPX as far as I could find, your hands are tied. On the one hand, if you move it to the project, you import a 40GB ProRes file. On the other hand, if you don't, the media doesn't move to your NAS and move with the project. Workaround? MPEG Streamclip our Quicktime Pro 7. Set in and out points. Trim. Then import a reasonably sized file. Again, not ideal. File import needs to have the option to trim.

OVERALL:
FCPX made a beautiful 35min documentary. I've never done a project on this scope and I would have NOT liked my results from FCP7. It would have been cumbersome. The visual quality would NOT have been as high coming from only FCP7 for color correction, and using another program to grade would have added more time to the project which we didn't have. All in all, FCPX was up to the task and handled it admirably!

MORE FOOTAGE AND PHOTOS SOON!
Click to expand...

I agree with most of your points. I should point out that FCPX really does need an i7/16gb RAM system - I was able to work native AVCHD video with 4 layers of CC - not in realtime, but with playback at something like 12-16 FPS. That's incredible - if I had worked with ProRes (or fewer CC levels) realtime would be no problem.

One thing I did recently was disabling the auto-render - it cured 90% of my crashes and to be honest, I almost never render anymore unless I'm throwing on too many layers of CC (with native files) and need to render a layer and then create a nest/compound clip to improve playback speed. I don't do a lot of narrative stuff, so I tend to go easy on CC layers and playback is at or near realtime.

Another thing I should mention - in Lion at least, you can force eject a mounted sparse image while Final Cut is open as long as you don't have any of the events/clips or projects currently selected.
 
Those NAS/SAN issues, we solved with disk images. Each user has their own disk image on the RAID. All of the "source media" is in it's own folder. We only link to it. Problem solved.

Every client has their own disk image. Either locally or on the server. Makes things very compact, easy, transportable, achievable, like nothing else can match.
 
BenB said:
Those NAS/SAN issues, we solved with disk images. Each user has their own disk image on the RAID. All of the "source media" is in it's own folder. We only link to it. Problem solved.

Every client has their own disk image. Either locally or on the server. Makes things very compact, easy, transportable, achievable, like nothing else can match.
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So you never "Copy files to Final Cut Events folder", you move the files manually to a folder structure that you choose, and then you "import" by referencing?

The thing I don't get about that is how will you reconnect after data is removed over time? And for instance, do you just copy the contents of an SD card to a folder? No proper "importing"? That seems scary to me.

Also, how does this work with projects? You have three, Dave, Joe and Randy, disk images. They are working on Project X all at the same time, right? But how will they share projects back and forth? Mounting/remounting back and forth between user disk images? Or do they copy their project to the other guys image?
 
One more thing I think needs to be fixed - sending a batch of sequences to Compressor is a PAIN. In FCP7 I could just select all my sequences in the Browser and send to Compressor, creating one batch with all the jobs. In FCPX there's no way to do this, so I have to send each sequence individually and it creates 1 job/1 batch each.
 
hendosan said:
One more thing I think needs to be fixed - sending a batch of sequences to Compressor is a PAIN. In FCP7 I could just select all my sequences in the Browser and send to Compressor, creating one batch with all the jobs. In FCPX there's no way to do this, so I have to send each sequence individually and it creates 1 job/1 batch each.
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I find that it's easiest to use the share->"Export using Compressor Settings" which gives you access to your custom Compressor settings, and then sends the project to the Share Monitor. You can then do this same process as many times as you like stacking up jobs in the Share Monitor. Works really well, although you do have to repeat the process for each project you want to export. But it goes by super fast.
 
Dave © said:
Did you use AE to pull the key or FCPX? Could you elaborate on the technique within FCPX?
Click to expand...
AE does it better. Let's be straight up about that. With AE you can duplicate your original source file, blur it, and do a Luma Inv Matte with your background on it giving you superb results for a "shadow" behind your subject. You can even put text/pictures/objects behind your lighten layer (somehow, i forget).

In FCPX, you do the same type of thing. Use lighten mode on your top layer. Duplicate it underneath and set that mode to subtract. Then, put this preset on that subtract layer. View attachment Shadow Luma.zip This is a motion template to make that layer work similarly to the AE matte system. It's pretty simple and works straight forward. But it isn't as powerful as AE's matte system. But it sure beats exporting/reimporting/rendering.

And to clarify, it is NOT a key. It's a compositing that using layer modes that works assuming you light and shoot it right. Steps are, 1) super black backdrop, 2) Tons of light on subject, 3) subject has NO dark(black) clothing, 4) use lighten mode on your top layer and put a low luma background behind.
 
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Alright! Another great project done (mostly ;) ) in FCPX. All editing, coloring, text, and rendering done in FCPX. Looks great to me.


We used AE to do the snowflakes via the black screen method listed above. This was SUPER important to do in AE because of the black coat on the girl rapper at the end. Also, the "sleigh" license plate did not come in in time for the shoot, so we composited it in.

Overall, super happy with this video. I will probably post again soon with a pre-CC version of the video to give you a taste of what FCPX's CC can do. I find it VERY powerful, easy to use, and fast on the render/playback.
 
"AE does it better. Let's be straight up about that." No, lets be honest that Motion can do it just as well, and do everything very easily you described. The built-in new keyer in Motion 5 works just fine, but if you need more help with very problematic keys, either Phyx or CHV have fantastic and affordable plugins that also allow for Clean Plate work, too.

Snowflakes:
http://www.fcp.co/final-cut-pro/tutorials/661-making-custom-snowflakes-in-motion-for-fcpx
With this method, setting your Motion background to Transparent, there's no screen issues at all.
 
BenB said:
"AE does it better. Let's be straight up about that." No, lets be honest that Motion can do it just as well, and do everything very easily you described. The built-in new keyer in Motion 5 works just fine, but if you need more help with very problematic keys, either Phyx or CHV have fantastic and affordable plugins that also allow for Clean Plate work, too.

Snowflakes:
http://www.fcp.co/final-cut-pro/tutorials/661-making-custom-snowflakes-in-motion-for-fcpx
With this method, setting your Motion background to Transparent, there's no screen issues at all.
Click to expand...
Wow. Really BenB there is no need to be on the defensive about this.

Point 1: We were talking about the "black screen" video method. It is NOT a "key". It's not a luma key, a color key, or any other "key". It's a compositing mode trick. Please check out the linked post and be sure you understand the method which is different than keying.

Point 2: I'm well aware that FCPX/Motion can do snowflakes or many things like that. FCPX's (not Motion's) masking/matte features are NOT as robust as AE, and I'm glad I did the compositing of the license plate in AE with Motion tracking. I'm sure I might have been able to hack all of it in Motion, but I'm not too familiar with the program or it's capabilities in matte/masking and motion tracking. I've made the Motion template I attached but I couldn't find a way to do inverse luma matte in Motion or FCPX. If that type of a feature is available in either, I would gladly use it.

Point 3: I've not used FCPX to key and I'm excited to
 
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