Odd Behavior in FCP X

I have been using FCP X since it was released and I am generally pleased with the way it works. I recently saw some odd behavior which I have reported to Apple and thought it might help someone to hear about it.

I had been working on some relatively simple 30 second spots that were taking an unusual amount of time to render and/or export. I needed to get the spots out the door so I just bit the bullet and bulled my way through the project.

Later on I was going through one of the project timelines to see if I could figure out any reason why these were taking so long to render/export. (BTW-In the midst of all of this I had done some projects that were equally or even more complex and they seemed to be performing more as I would expect.)

I highlighted one of the clips in the offending project and on a whim opened the retime menu. Quality was set to frame blending and the menu was grayed out. I checked the clip and it was set to 100% speed.

Obviously, I thought that was unusual so I checked and found that every clip on the timeline had frame blending turned on and all of them were running at 100% speed. This is all DVCPro HD footage that I shot myself and never had any issues with when I'd used some of it before.

So....I quit FCP X and then re-opened the same project. This time when I checked all the footage the retime menu was set to normal. When I did a test render all was back to normal.

The strange thing is that I had quit and re-started this project several times and it always was sluggish. I had deleted render files, re-started the computer etc.

This looks like some kind of a bug or a corruption of these particular projects. I checked several other projects that I did recently and none of them showed the same issue.

Might be something to check if you're finding a slowdown in performance.

Thanks. I had two bizarre slowdowns last week. I bet that was it.

As a follow-up:

In looking into it a little further it looks like a bug. Not that this would be a normal workflow but I think it points to an issue. Take a piece of footage at 100%. Under video quality, normal is checked and the three choices (normal, frame blending and optical flow) are grayed out. That's what I would expect. Next I change the clip speed to 50%. Under video quality normal is checked and all 3 choices are not grayed out. If I choose (for instance) optical flow and then change the clip back to 100% what should happen? I would expect the video quality to revert to normal but it stays on optical flow. OK - so I change the speed back to 50% and check the video quality. Still optical flow. Change the speed back to 100% - quality is still optical flow and choices are not grayed out. Change video quality back to normal and when I leave and then go back to video quality optical flow is checked and the menu is grayed out. Change the clip to 50% and open video quality and normal is checked with choices not grayed out. Change speed back to 100% and video quality normal is checked and choices are grayed out. Is it just me or is this behavior odd? I see this on two different systems.

To get back to my original issue, I think that having all clips with frame blending turned on even though they are at 100% speed may have been causing the sluggish behavior. I couldn't find anything else unusual. I'm not sure how all of those clips got that way because I don't believe I ever re-timed any of them. I'll report it to Apple and see what happens.

When you see the sluggish behavior, has the Optical Flow analysis completed?

When I had the sluggish behavior the clips were all set to frame blending not optical flow.

I just checked an old copy of 10.0.1 and it did the same thing. If I have a clip that was re-timed and set to either frame blending or optical flow and then change it back to 100% it will not revert to normal mode unless I check "normal" mode and then toggle to 50% and then back to 100%.

If I change the quality setting on a re-timed clip from flame blending (for instance) to normal and then re-set the clip to 100% when I check quality I found that it would be set to frame blending and the menu is grayed out. Then I changed the clip to 50%, the quality menu is not grayed out, change to normal and then change the clip back to 100% and it sticks. I probably won't have time to do screen grabs today but try the process. I would think that if you changed a clip back to 100% it would go back to normal or at least stay on the normal setting you you check it and set the clip back to 100%.

I'm not even sure at this point that this was the cause of the sluggishness but I couldn't find anything else that was not what it should have been and I had never noticed this behavior before.