Final Cut Pro is Dead….Long live…..something else

So it's finally happened.

I now make more money as an Avid editor than a FCP editor.

Weird.

I fought against Avid for so many years, banging on about how great FCP was and now I am a god damn turn coat.

It does feel strange. It does feel like I backed the wrong horse. This must have been what it was like for people with BetaMax players and Atari STs.

I knew this day would come at some point. I'm still using FCPX at home, but none of the post houses I work for are going anywhere near it. A few have adopted Premiere, but not many. Some are still running FCP, but most seem to be moving to Avid.

Now where did I put that Edit Droid?

Global effects disable

One of the things that's been biting me with my current project is the lack of a global 'turn effects off' toggle. With Neat Video or FilmConvert slammed on a clip (occasionally both) trimming operations are painful, which results in a lot of clicking to disable effects, edit, then re-enable effects.



Ignore the stuff about 'complex clips' – that's the pre-10.0.6 way of doing compound clips which, if you remember, led to so many problems that (a.) people like me avoid compound clips to this day out of some weird folk memory of how bad things were, and (b.) the new way, which suffers basically none of the problems, was introduced.

But that layering technique in compound clips? That's genius.

Hmm. It does mean a bucketload of clicking if you want to adjust effects, though.

Playing around

No, I'm not being tempted into the willing arms of Premiere Pro CS CC CIA MIA MBA. Whatever the current version, I only have eyes for one floozie of an editing package.

But I do find myself tickling the zoom. Being able to edit audio at sub-frame precision is cool and all, but it involves an awful lot of zooming in and out on the timeline. In, to find the itty-bitty little grab handles for audio fades and adjust them carefully enough. Then out, to actually play the edit through without the playhead zipping off the side of the visible timeline and scrolling the viewpoint when I stop it.

Then in again to tweak the edit. Out again to play again. In again. Out again. In. Out.

Sorry, got distracted.

Today, the solution: ⇧/. Whack that sucker, and FCPX will get it on and play around the current playhead position. Once it's done, it returns to the current point.

I am so done with the spacebar. Just as soon as I've mapped ⇧/ to something I can reach with my left hand, my right being otherwise engaged while I'm editing.

With the mouse, obviously.

Yes, FCPX is this fast

This isn't Damien cutting his latest piece, but he works about this quickly. I spend far too long gawping at my own pretty pictures; my own time-lapse would look incredibly dull in comparison.

Benchmark that, sucker!

Back in the day of the not-a-law Moore's Law, I had a rule that I only upgraded my Mac when the new system offered three times the performance of the old. That was easy to achieve when moving from, say, a dreadful Power Mac 4400/160 to a Quicksilver G4/933, but it's become progressively more challenging.

My reasoning behind the factor-three rule was straightforward:

• Most things happen effectively instantaneously, and they aren't going to get any more instantaneous with a faster system.
• Things that happen merely 'very quickly' add up, but memory capacity and disk performance tend to have more impact here than CPU performance.
• Things that take 10 minutes are an absolute pain, and are to be avoided. Happily, there never seem to be very many operations that take 10 minutes.
• Things that take 20 minutes are 'coffee breaks'. When I'm working, I actually want some operations to fall into this category. They can be a pain, but I can also schedule around them during the day.
• Things that take an hour are where problems start. An hour is too long a break during the working day, which means hour+ processes are best queued up and run overnight.

A factor-three increase in performance starts to move 'overnight' processes into 'coffee break' processes. That's huge. No longer do you have to push export and compress jobs out overnight, you can run them today. Even several times during the day. Processes that used to be marginal for even overnight render can now be batched together, with multiple jobs run in one end-of-day break.

Now, my current edit system is a 2008 8-core Mac Pro, which despite being five years old continues to chug along at maybe half the speed of the fastest current Macs. That's both commendable longevity and frustratingly slow progress. For an example of what I mean: every editor's favourite plugin author Alex Gollner has a newly-minted FCPX benchmark: head to this fcp.co thread for the file, example results, and discussion.

My Pro takes about 120 seconds, which to be sure ranks as 'getting a bit old', but even the fastest current Mac struggles to reach a factor two improvement. That's good, but hardly represents the improvement one would like to see after half a decade.

This is why the new Mac Pro is interesting. My 2008 model holds its own because I rammed an upgraded video card into it. It's nothing special, but neither are the cards in the current iMacs. The trashcan Pro not only packs a newer graphics card, it packs two of them. Interesting.

Want an example? That G4/933 could handle noise reduction in video, but only for simplistic algorithms and only for an overnight job. For a short film, the 2008 Pro does a better job over a coffee break. The Trashcan? I'll be interested to see how much it can do in real time.

Factors of three turn special-case tools into everyday tools. They also enable completely new tools, and it's been a while since we've had the capacity to handle those on the desktop.

alt - v // pastey onto-of-y thing

Yes! Press alt v instead of cmd v to paste a clip above the storyline instead of in it! Why didn't anyone tell me about that!

Overwriting Photoshop files automatically updates the file in the Storyline

So.....I'm using a photoshop file in my storyline.....It's actually a layered tiff, but who's counting?

I had to change something in photoshop and I saved over the old file. I was expecting to have to relink media and all that bullshit, but no. The image is automatically updated in the storyline.

That's not normal right? I know it should be normal. And now it is. But that never happened with FCP or AVID did it? I don't think it did. I can't remember, my brain is addled and confused by how awesome FCP is.

That deserves a fanfare. Right?

Some Nice and Free Color-Board Presets

Here are some lovely colour board presets courtesy of Oliver Peters. What a nice bloke.

Override Clip Connections!

One of the things that seems to confuse a lot of new users of FCPX is the connections between clips.
And to be honest they can be a bit fucking irritating sometimes. However, thanks to a comment on this blog by gyula hegedűs I have discovered that you can actually move clips about independantly of connections.

Simply hold down ` and you can move clips on the storyline without moving any connected clips. Genius. Thanks gyula hegedűs.

Quit with the jumpy-jumpy!

I have 850+ clips in an Event – you can read the story of collecting them here – and for the most part logging them and entering all the useful metadata bits has been straightforward. Even pleasant, at times.

However, some of the rushes were captured with dual-system audio, so I'm locating matching pairs of video and audio clips and asking FCPX to sync them together. It's doing its usual sterling job of that, nailing sync pretty much every time, but the new clip inherits none of the metadata from its parents. Which is mildly annoying.

More annoying is that as I tab through the new clip's fields the Event browser's focus has a habit of inexplicably changing and dumping me several hundred clips further down the list view. At random. Scratch that, it's not 'annoying', it's infuriating, and it happens every single time I tab out of the Scene field.

Gaah!

So, so, so glad I went the JuicedLink route and hence have sync audio for most of these clips. I can't imagine the horror of having to log everything twice with the Event list bouncing around like a crazy thing.

Yes, I've filed a bug report. Another one.

WTF does that pointer thing mean?

Use Proxy Media!

You know when FCPX seems sluggish and annoying? You know when you press space bar and it takes a couple of seconds to stop playing? Yeah? You need proxy media.

Go on, don't be shy, you know your computer can't handle Prores 422.

Don't be ashamed, just use proxy media. It'll make your system a lot more responsive and it takes up a hell of a lot less space.

Go on...make proxy media as you import....do it....and then check use proxy media in the playback tab of preferences....Go on...do it.

It's like doing an offline, but remember if at any time you want to switch back to editing with Prores or your original media just switch back in preference.
And when you export it'll still export as Prores because it'll use your original or optimised media anyway. We all win.

Thanks FCPX.

POSTSCRIPT: MAKE SURE YOU CHANGE YOUR PREFERENCES BACK TO SOURCE/OPTIMISED MEDIA BEFORE YOU EXPORT OTHERWISE FCPX WILL EXPORT FROM THE PROXY MEDIA AND IT WILL LOOK SHIT. FUCK YOU FCPX.

POST POSTSCRIPT: YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE ABLE TO CHOOSE SOURCE/OPTIMISED FROM A DROP DOWN MENU WHEN YOU EXPORT, BUT IT BASICALLY DOESN'T WORK.

Fuck Me, isn't multicam a joy to use?

Multicam in FCP7 was an absolute count. Sorry, but it was.

It was an areshole and you always had to look up how to do it every time you wanted to do it.

Not any more.

Thanks FCPX.

 

Ripple n' roll, slip n' sliiiiiide

Select the Trim tool ('T'), click a clip, and you get this:

You can now use the trim left/right keys (,/.) to roll the selected clip without changing its duration or the clips either side. Or use [/] to select the in or out edits and ripple those.

This morning, in a key-fumbling daze, I selected the clip using option+click. The result is this:

…which leads to the obvious response, vis:

Try it. Now try the , / . keys.

Yeah, I know, right? Slide on by, man. Nice and smooth.

Oh, and Damien, the slacker whose blog this ostensibly is? He looks exactly like Beaker. With exactly that expression.

Keywording

One of the most common causes of my explosive swearing at FCPX is when it doesn't quite keep up with me when I'm adding keywords, and I end up with bins smart folders keyword collections called things like 'i' and 'nterviews.' Grrr. This week's MacBreak Studio freebie from the Dynamic Duo of Mac video training Steve Martin and Mark Spencer covers another way of working:

 

You know, I've been a keyword nut since FCPX came out, and I never spotted the playhead info skimming trick. Brilliant.

Adjustment layers

FCPX doesn't have them. You can't slap a layer on top of a bunch of clips to apply filters or colour correct across all of them.

 …which is a pity, because it would be terribly useful.

 …and is also not true, because you can. You just slap an empty title caption on top, then apply colour correction and bung filters on to your heart's content. Here's how:

How to build and use adjustment layers in Final Cut Pro X - fcp.co

I've just done this to slap a white balance correction and vignette across an entire scene, then tweaked colour on a shot-by-shot basis beneath. The biggest issue is that in the Project browser you only see the adjustment layer preview default, not thumbnails of the final composition.

Select NONONO! Oh damn

I wanted to find the total duration of all the media in a keyword collection, so I hit 'command+A' to select all. Only, the input focus wasn't in the Event, it was in the Event Library list.

As I type, FCPX is dutifully trying to load every clip from every Event from every drive. I have several drives connected, dozens of projects, and thousands – many thousands – of clips.

...and of course I can't interrupt it.

So that's lunch, then.

Minus Green

FCPX doesn't have a white balance filter, which on the SI scale of inexplicable counts as about five Marie Celestes. Sure, you can fiddle with the colour board, waggle some pucks around like you know what you're doing, bitch about how much easier it would be if they'd only used three colour wheels because, dammit, you were familiar with waggling those around like you knew what you were doing and you shouldn't have to learn this whole new way of waggling, FFS.

Yeah, or: you can drop a few bucks on one of the squillionity of white balance plugins out there. Which is cheaper than the time you just spent bitching about the colour board, right?

Ah, but which one to choose? There are so many.

I've used a couple of these, haven't tried them all, but my favourite so far? Nick Dashwood's in his Editor Essentials pack for FxFactory. For $49 it comes packaged with a dead pixel fixer, anamorphic reverse de-mungers of every stripe, quick gamma curve correction, and... wait for it...

...

...a preset for 'minus green.'

What, you're telling me you always wrap every practical fluo tube in minus green gel ahead of every shoot? T'ch yeah, right. Oh, you have a bridge for sale? Sure I'm interested. Let me finish this post first, m'kay?

Right, so making people look less like aliens from the planet Queasy is one of those things we do every.single.damned.day, but lining things up on that itty-bitty skin vector is quality time when you could be down the bar. Deity Dashwood brings a preset that, on my footage, nails it. Hard.

Mind you, Jonathan Richards is a nice guy too and his HyColo(u)r plugin has a green caste removal checkbox. Dammit, choices! How am I supposed to get any work done? I'm done with FCPX, I'm jumping ship for Premiere Pro!

What's that? Premiere doesn't have a minus green tool by default either?

Pour me that damned drink, I'm gonna explore Lightworks.

Leave the bottle.

Please don't ever use transitions like this

Why are [nearly] all the transitions in FCPX shit? In fact why are [nearly] all transitions shit?

Cross fade is about the only transition you need regularly. Here's what larry Jordan has to say:

"The thing I like about transitions is that they can add life to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative".

No Larry. No.

Exporting for years!

About 732 million hours? That's about 30 million days. Which is about 4 million weeks or 84 thousand years! But is always speeds up towards the end doesn't it?

FCP 7 Out of Memory Error Solution

Like many of us I still have to use Final Cut Pro 7 from time to time. One of the bastard things about FCP7 is its 32bit-ness. It can only rock 4 gig no matter how many terabytes of RAM you have. This gives rise to the bloody fucking shit hole error, 'Out of Memory'.

Larry Jordan gives this explanation which can help, but often doesn't solve the problem:

The main reason I get this error is when using large still images. Big ass monkey images like 5K or summut.

For years I have searched for a solution online and in the ether to no avail. However, yesterday I was told a very simple solution.

Go to Sequence/Settings and click on the Video Processing tab. In here you will see that the default is to render in 10-bit. Changing this to render in 8-bit seemed to solve all my memory issues.

Oh and by the way rendering takes about half the time in 8 bit mode.

Good luck people, and stop using 7 anyway.

Why Can't you run FCPX and FCP7 at the same time?

Why? Why not? What?

Assigning FCPX keyboard shortcuts to FCP7

Er.....this is weird. I'm cutting in FCP7 and I keep pressing Q to connect a clip to the storyline.

F12 is what I really want - Superimpose, but that doesn't work on this keyboard because it turns up the volume.

Now I have remapped my FCP7 keyboard so that Q is Superimpose.

What the fuck is going on?

Installing FCP Studio after FCPX

If you install FCPX after FCP Studio your mac will bundle your out of date software into a nice FCP Studio folder.

If you install FCP Studio after FCPX your mac will overwrite FCPX. Yes this is annoying. But I guess it doesn't really affect many people.

Basically if you really do need to install FCP Studio after FCPX then you need to put FCPX in it's own  folder. Here is a rather dull article on FCP installation best practise. Even writing that sentence was boring. Sorry.

NAB 2013 Distilled

NAB 2013 Distilled:

all press covering the show on video, were cutting their reports on laptops using FCP X.

(Via digitalfilms)

Of course, Oliver goes on to say:

Although Premiere Pro “next” feels like FCP 7.5, that appears to be what users really want. The direction, at least, feels right. Apple may have been “skating to where the puck will be”, but it could be that no one is following or the puck simply wasn’t going there in the first place.

I'm not convinced by that. I'm more than happy that people wanting FCP 7.5 have Adobe to turn to, and I suspect the market represented by NAB will continue to be well served by them. The question, I guess, is what proportion of total video production is represented by broadcast and feature films, and in particular how that's changing. There's already been a revolution in terms of quantity of production. If that starts to be reflected in money terms too, Apple's bet may turn out to be a winning one after all.

Mocha coming to FCPX?

PleasebetruePleasebetruePleasebetrue.

Forum post here. Shame there'll be no 3D camera solve transfer... unless there's something big going down with Motion that we're not expecting yet.

Quit. Quit, dammit!

An all-night edit session, and the piece with Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, David Attenborough, Dava Sobel and a lobster[1] is almost good to go.

Almost, but I do need another pass on dub and grade. I always need another pass on dub and grade. So... oh, dang, it's stopped skimming. And it's stuttering on every cut.

Well, it does have about 40 Events open, thousands of clips across five drives. And it's been behaving itself more-or-less for the last eight hours. Fair enough, let's quit and relaunch.

Quit.

Quit.

QUIT, dammit!

Oh, right. Background process. Get all cancelley on that fucker. Now Quit.

Quit.

Cancel the background render. Fucking cancel. CANCEL!

Quit.

QUIIIIIIT!

Eventually, a response from FCPX. A spinning coloured disc.

Q. U. I. T.!.

[…]

Eleven minutes later, it quits. FFS.

--

[1] No, I'm not making that up. Promise.

Import .mts, dammit!

I get that FCPX can't import .mts files directly, that it needs the metadata on the rest of the card.

No, scratch that, I sort-of get why it needs all the surrounding crap, even though ClipWrap can just copy the file into a new wrapper, call it a mov, and make FCPX happy. That makes some kind of WEIRD TWISTED NO-IT-DOESN'T sense.

I get that FCPX can copy your card into a neat little wrapper which it stores in a 'Final Cut Archives' folder. Fine. Whatever.

What I just don't get at all is why it utterly fails to do anything with a straight Finder copy of the entire contents of a card. It has to be a Final Cut Pro X Camera Archive. So if you have the complete folder structure … tough. No-go.

Only: You can cheat! Fire up Disk Utility, make yourself a new disk image of whatever size your card was, mount it, copy the AVCHD folder into it... and FCPX will import from that.

What? How does this make any sense?

Momentary flashes of clarity and terror

We snug the belt down over our hips, feel the thin leather creak around our fists, watch the needles climb into the red as the lights glimmer and flicker towards us. Beside and before and behind and surrounding us machinery spins and spools and clunks and festers, waits and lurks, screams and strains.

Our teeth clench around the toothpick, chin dips as eyes narrow into the mercury glare burning through the thin-slit screen ahead.

New.

Fucking.

Project.

…and the world drops away beneath us.

Tempo-locked music edits

It's relatively straightforward, for many music tracks, to calculate the tempo. Many mp3 tracks already store that information in metadata anyway. So why doesn't the edit software we most enjoy swearing at offer a 'lock edits to audio track beats' feature? 'Snap to bars' would be a tremendously useful tool when cutting montage… so long as you could toggle it off quickly.

Presets

Speaking of inane presets that make your finely-crafted work look like utter crap via the most efficient route possible, Final Cut Pro X has this to offer:



What.

The.

Frack.

Were.

They.

Thinking?

New Vimeo Features

Vimeo has introduced the ability to add 'looks' to your videos.
It's a bit like Instagram for video and it adds a graded look to your entire video.

At the moment it's free so get over to https://vimeo.com/enhancer and have a play.
In the future you'll have to pay $0.99 for each effect.

It's powered by Vivoom if you have to know and the interface is nice and simple and it's easy and fun to use. Would I use it professionally? Nope, but there's nothing wrong with a bit of fun. Would I pay $0.99? Probably not.

If they can get it working with a mobile phone interface I'm guessing it'll become more popular.

Vimeo has also introduced the ability to add music to your videos. There are even some free tracks on offer.

Free Film Burns

They're free; they're film burns.
Well, they look more like lens flare to me, but they are still nice.
And they're free.

Go to Digital Cinema Foundry to find out more.

SPOD

That feeling when you fumble the mouse and click the drive in the Events list rather than the disclosure triangle next to it, and FCPX dutifully loads every. damn. clip. on. the. drive?

That.

Still waiting.

Ugh.

Weirdest timeline I've ever seen

This looks ridiculous:

Narrative parts are multicamera blocks, in between which I have not quick-cut montage but composites of multiple clips drifting across the canvas. Those are the vertical stacks. I've never seen a timeline that looked even vaguely like this before.

Sorting out the audio is going to be a nightmare.

FCPX isn't slow. Your momma's slow.

If you fiddled around with the FCPX trial back when it first arrived, you'll have thought things like: “This feels just like handling real film… with boxing gloves on” and “I’d be quicker doing this in Movie Maker.”

Bits of Final Cut X were very quick. Some of it was treacle-slow. Moving between supposedly ‘open’ timelines cuts projects[1] was beyond treacle-in-winter-shot-on-a-Phantom slow.

Alongside all the headline improvements since version 10.0.nothing, a huge amount of spit-and-polish work has been done. It’s only 10am, but for the tenth time today already I’m thankful that switching sequences storylines events projects[1] is now instantaneous.

[1] FFS.

Right-click everything. Like… everything.

See that thing? Yeah, that. Whatever that is. Right-click it. Anything happen? No? Try that other thing.

You know the itty-bitty little drag handles that are the correct way of doing audio crossfades (rather than the hair-brained bastard transition nonsense Dza favours)? Right-click that.

Win. And yes, the constant-power +3dB fade is default, as is right and proper, but there are times when a long tail -3dB is called for.

I've never used a linear fade.

Remap your fucking keyboard

Dza discovers ⎇I / ⎇O to clear in/out points. Real editors remap their fucking keyboards so ⎇X is 'Clear Selected Ranges.'

Like it always was.

"Render-free", my arse

Yes, I am selectively fucking rendering my timeline. But it does have nine layers of mixed H.264 and AVCHD source in it. Animated. With effects. And grades. Deal with it.

VHS coffee table

What am I supposed to do with all this bloody VHS?

I guess I'd better glue it all together and make a coffee table.

I used to be proud of my wall of VHS. It was just a bunch of shelves, but it was big and high and full of VHS. It looked good, but I rarely watched any of it. It was just a folly. It was amusing, but not that amusing. Recently I decided I was being a dick and should throw it away. But I couldn't.

I couldn't throw it away, so I glued 128 tapes together to make a stylish coffee table. Sorry.

It's actually quite beautiful. And it's very amusing to look at. But it's bloody heavy. Like, really, really fucking heavy. It's a solid block of VHS and it's lovely.

I do have a soft spot for VHS. One of my most excited moments was getting hold of a pirate copy of The Empire Strikes Back at the age of 6. Wow. That beautiful hissing sound, it was like being by the sea. And the picture quality was just perfect. Like walking across the moors in fog. Bliss.

I took on a paper round and worked at a bike shop just so I could buy Aliens Special Edition and Robocop on VHS. My first VHS. What was my first DVD? I've no idea. After uni, my friends and I used to stay up all night discussing the virtues of big box video. We'd also trawl charity shops and Cash Converters to find lost horror classics not available on DVD. We also spent a lot of time using an analogue to digital converter so we could capture VHS and re-edit it into music videos and other nonsense. That was called Media Lounge and it was where I learnt to edit.

It's no wonder that my latest live performance video was shot on VHS. God bless VHS. Everyone has abandoned you, but I will never throw you away.

STOP PRESS: If you like that you'll love David Herbert's 2001, Lorenzo Durantini's 2216 VHS Tapes and Sean Cordeiro & Claire Healy's Lifespan.

Free FCPX Audio Cross Fade - Sound only transition

When you are making audio cuts you nearly always create a noticeable change in sound at the cut point.

In FCP7 the easiest way round this was to add a simple audio cross fade. You can't do this in FCPX. Why not? Why the fuck not? Because it's fucking stupid that's why.

But don't worry because Alex Gollner isn't stupid and he has created an audio only cross fade for FCPX. Not only that, it's free.

Download the audio only transition from Alex4D.

Thanks Alex. You help heal the pain and hurt of FCPX.

Go to In / Out Point

Shift I and shift o will move the playhead to the in and out point respectively.

Another simple and life saving hint that they don't teach you at the royal academy of Shakespeare.

Command 1 : Quit

Keyboard shortcuts are great, but sometimes they can fuck you over.

When you're editing at speed it's great to be able to select the Events viewer with Command 1. However it's so close to Command Q i.e. 'quit', that sometimes you end up closing FCPX.

Fucking annoying.

Fuck Larry Jordan

I was just looking through some of the google search terms that direct people to my site.

'FCPX is bullshit' is a common one, but my favourite so far is 'Fuck Larry Jordan'.

Both of these terms are quite amusing seeing as I don't think FCPX is bullshit and I quite like Larry Jordan.

Remove, clear and delete IN and OUT Points!

alt I and alt O get rid of in and out points respectively.

Easy when you know how.

Using Avid DNX files in Final Cut Pro

If you get sent some Avid DNX files you can use them in FCP as long as you have the right drivers.

You can download the drivers free from Avid.

Install the package, but don't worry if you get a weird error message like this:

The codecs should work despite the error.

The files won't work directly with FCP, but you can now slap them into Compressor and convert to ProRes