New to FCPX, Questions About Performance

BenB wrote: Apple has the toughest quality testing of component batches of anyone in the industry. What they reject as not good enough gets sent back, boxed up, and sold off the shelf as OEM parts, that you put in your Hackintosh.

I'm well aware of the quality of Apple's parts, and would have happily bought into a new Pro had their design team not made a bunch of bad decisions. All the quality in the world isn't going to rescue a machine that isn't expandable, etc. But that's a discussion for a different thread.

I'd ask that folks stop derailing my thread regarding FCPX performance with talk about my Hack. If you don't like the idea of a Hack, great. Move along. I sorta know what I'm doing with regards to that. It's FCPX that I need the help with.

If all you care for are render speeds and benchmarks, then stick with Premiere and build your Hackintosh.

cgbier wrote: If all you care for are render speeds and benchmarks, then stick with Premiere and build your Hackintosh.

Although on the same hardware the Windows 7 version of Premiere Pro renders slightly faster than the Mac version...

My Hack has always run like a dream. Latest ML OS and FCPX.
Really easy to build, install and maintain.

Before you update the OS, first check on TonyMac that a software update is recommended.
If there's an issue they'll have a new mutlibeast build in a day or so.

Multibeast takes all of two minutes to run and everything's working again.

Day to day, month by month there's no maintenance required at all.
The only thing I do before running any major update is to create an incremental backup image of the OS SSD on a spare internal drive. But that something I do all my macs. And I run onyx now and then.

I'm a 40 year old professional and the Hackintosh is the first computer I've ever built.
Cheers.

Duncan Craig wrote: My Hack has always run like a dream. Latest ML OS and FCPX.
Really easy to build, install and maintain.

Well, it seems as though this thread has devolved into a Hack discussion and that wasn't my intent. But, I'm glad it works well for you so far. The process isn't terribly difficult if you take the time to research and purchase the right parts. Clearly if someone needs to buy-it-and-start-working-right-now, then a Hack isn't the right answer. Also, Apple doesn't really look too kindly at folks running Hacks, so folks doing it professionally are risking getting into a lot of trouble.

I get that. I understand it perfectly and I'm not trying to convince folks to go that route at all. Thus far: Apple's hardware has worked perfectly for me. If Apple's newer gen hardware works for you, great. Buy it and enjoy it. I don't begrudge you that one bit.

Now, Duncan: what card did you decide for your Hack? Did you go ATI or nVidia?

There's a huge number of Hacks out there now and no-ones been arrested yet
Here's my setup: www.duncancraig.co.uk/blazing-benchmarks/

Back to the original question...

I shoot on an FS100 which is AVCHD, but I transcode everything. It doesn't seem slow down my importing at all. I can start logging/cutting straight away and FCPX will read of the SD card until the file is copied into the event, then it will read the non-optimised file until the optimised file comes on line. Pretty great.
Of course it might not play perfectly straight off the SD card whilst it's importing it, but that the SD card speed causing a bottleneck.

I've just got a Lexar USB3 SD card reader and that's sped things up nicely, faster SD cards would be better still I suppose. I have a matching set of 8 Transcend 16GB cards that I also use in my EX1 so I won't be replacing them just yet.

You suggest that ProRes has no benefit to you but I'd argue that it would, as your exporting would be faster. Have you tried it? Your RAID 0 is 600GB, so are you finding that too small to consider using ProRes?
I can get around 200MB/s out of my 2TB internal RAID, I watched the Disk IO activity monitor while exporting from FCPX and it wasn't pushing the drives anywhere near that. But that all depends on the type of sequence and what FCP has to do to the material on export, right?

Of course if you want to get footage in and out in the very fastest possible time and you know PP is better then use PP as others have said.

Cheers, Duncan.

I've found that for many projects, getting footage in and out of FCPX is actually lot faster than Premiere Pro.

Why?

Premiere Pro insists on conforming audio. I have a job in a couple of days that I'll probably edit in Premiere Pro simply because I still don't think FCPX audio is up to the job. While we can argue that point back and forth, what I do know is that having imported all the footage to FCPX I could begin editing immediately. Having imported it in to Premiere Pro I'll have to wait around 90 minutes while Adobe figure out how to play the audio from all the different files by conforming it all to 32 bit float.

So, any time gained at the end (which may or may not be the case depending on the codec used) is already lost up front for me.

Also, the colour correction in Premiere Pro (Fast CC or 3W CC) is not up to the job IMHO because they introduce banding far too easily, so we end up using Colorista II. The entire production can take around 6 hours to export from Premiere Pro / Colorista II whereas the same production colored (with superioir results) in FCPX takes around 30 mins.

So, as usual, a lot depends on what you are talking about importing / editing /exporting.

Duncan Craig wrote: There's a huge number of Hacks out there now and no-ones been arrested yet

Arrested, no. Sued? There's always the potential, which is probably one of the reasons pros shy away from Hacks. It is, after all, against the EULA.

You suggest that ProRes has no benefit to you but I'd argue that it would, as your exporting would be faster.

I don't believe so. I'd have to first transcode from AVCHD to ProRes, and then from ProRes to MP4. No thanks. The whole benefit of being able to edit natively is that you don't need to waste time transcoding as the first step. You just start editing and then export it when you're done.

The transcoding thing is very much a "Final Cut" way of doing things, and it is, IMHO, too slow.

Of course if you want to get footage in and out in the very fastest possible time and you know PP is better then use PP as others have said.

If only it were that easy. I'm always looking forward and considering the future while I'm playing in the present. Adobe wants me to rent the new Creative Cloud version of Premiere Pro, and I have no intentions of ever signing up for that. It's just an unacceptable way of "selling" software. PPro CS6 has the aforementioned nasty AVCHD bug in it that makes editing with it impossible. Literally. They know about it and have yet to fix it. That leaves CS5.5, which works wonderfully. But for how long? I assume it'll work just fine in Mavericks. What if it doesn't? What if it doesn't work in the version of OS X after that? Also, CS5.5 and CS6 aren't multi-GPU aware. CC is. I'm sure the next Final Cut Pro X will be as well. I find that intriguing, but again, I'm not going to rent CC from Adobe.