Warning: Cutting Long Form in FCPX

A cautionary tale about not putting all your eggs in one basket if cutting long timelines in FCPX:

www.hdwarrior.co.uk/2013/07/21/shocking-...o-complex-timelines/

Though Nick Watson didn't find any probs when cutting his recent doc for BBC4 in X:

www.fcp.co/final-cut-pro/news/1140-using...umentary-for-the-bbc

Makes sense to break an hour long storyline into sections though maybe?

Well, i edit only longform with FCPX. About to edit my fifth feature length TV-Movie with FCPX.

I edit individual scenes in compound clips within my main movie event. Once all the scenes are edited i work in one project for the whole movie. No problems so far.

Didn't this guy have lots of compound clips within compound clips? We know the stability issues that causes....

Used to have the same problem in 7 with using too many nested sequences. Had to break it down into multiple sequences or the app would grind to a halt. Not sure what the joy of editing inside compound clips is except that seems to be more like legacy versions where media and sequences are in a single container, the event. I'm not a great fan of compounds because they can produce odd behaviors, shifting secondaries and such, not to mention the playhead isn't positional recursive when moving from project to compound and back. CCs have there place, but I think too many people use them for no real purpose like compounding a green screen with the background.

One of these two knows what they are doing... take a guess!

Im editing a feature length doco on my ancient MacPro with no issues so far. Though I've never been a fan of compound clips and avoid them unless I have to nest something.

I just finished editing a 2:30:00 multicam concert shot with DSLRs so there was an insane amount of clips to organize and keep track of, but FCPX pulled it off.

I had a few issues yesterday where rendering stopped working, but I fixed that and it was a minor issue.

I was never supposed to edit this project, but our editor was using premier pro and since there were hundreds of clips to sync he just couldn't do it after at least 8 hours of trying.

In FCPX I properly named all the media, selected hundreds of clips, had FCPX create a multicam clip based on camera names and sync with waveform. It took me about 2 hours to do what premier pro couldn't do in 8.

FCPX can handle huge projects, you just have to know what you're doing, and clearly some people don't know and don't want it to work because they would rather trash talk.

Also, using roles I was able to color grade super easy by highlighting a specific camera, selecting all the clips from that camera and then pasting color attributes to all clips from that camera.

FCPX is a monster, it still has issues, but it's very good at what it does.

Julian wrote: FCPX can handle huge projects, you just have to know what you're doing, and clearly some people don't know and don't want it to work because they would rather trash talk.

I think this says it all. We cut long-form on a daily basis, so do many other people. This means that FCPX is good for this type of work. So if someone says differently I would question this person's skills and not the app.

You've nailed it Ronny on that one... this sort of thing has been going for quite some time now; I suspect they think that they are so smart they don't have to bone up on FCPX. Fools :evil:

Also the machine youy're using makes quite a difference. I wouldn't start a project without a Mac with a newer Sandy or Ivy Bridge processor and a lots of RAM and VRAM. That's why the older MacPros (no matter how many cores) just don't perform as well as the newer iMacs and MBPs. FCPX's code is optimised to use the AVX of the newer Intel CPUs (Sandy and Ivy-bridge and the new Haswell).

Edit: I've mostly done long form editing with FCP X. Just finished my second theatrical feature on FCP X.