TOPIC:

Well I'm going to be quite blunt about this: I hope they don't waste any time in adding bells and whistles but they put all their efforts in solving some fundamental bugs that have been introduced with 10.1./Mavericks and that make 10.1.1 practically unusable for complex long-form television work. I'm talking about frustrating UI quirks, sluggishness on large productions (these issues have been reported in other threads on this forum) and various issues that make copy/pasting between projects completely unreliable. All this is happening with new 10.1.1 productions on clean installs of FCPX and Mavs running on the newest and the fastest hardware money can buy.

Because of our very specific workflow the negative effects on our productivity have been fairly limited so far. But in the past weeks I have been in regular contact about this with another major European production house and they are seriously considering downgrading to 10.0.9 for any new production they are starting up until these 10.1 bugs are resolved. I'm flying over to meet them in a few days to see if I can help them with some issues while waiting for a fix. Yes Apple is aware of all this, they have been extremely helpful so far and I'm sure they will find a solution. Since 10.0.6 FCPX was growing to be the best NLE we have ever used and I'm still very confident it is one of the best professional choices for the future. They just have to bring these 10.1 quirks back on track now before doing anything else. And if at the same time they can fulfill the wish list of Seanus, I'm sure everybody will be happy

-Ronny

I agree with your sentiment, ronny, stability should be paramount above everything else. That said, I'd say it's very likely that the mixture of people with the FCPX development team means that not everyone can do everyone else's job. There are certain to be varying and perhaps overlapping skill-sets within the team. So even if they put everyone they can on fixing these issues, that's not going to be the whole dev team. I've got to imagine someone working on new audio features or UI layouts is only going to have so much to contribute to the problems you're talking about.

And that's besides the fact that I think only so many people can work on problems like that at one time. "Too many cooks in the kitchen" as the adage goes...

So I don't think if you want stability, you have to forgo any further development. I just don't see it as an either/or scenario in terms of the way the product is developed.

Ronny,

My gut (and that is all) is seeing that the event browser was completely reworked in 10.1, now super smooth scrolling, no more stalls, and with new UI elements such as the slashed patter on yet to be drawn filmstrips and waveforms etc. I have to conclude that the timeline is in the process of getting the same treatment, but it didn't make it for the 10.1 release. Hopefully we will see a brand new timeline which will be dramatically faster sooner than later.

It's interesting as I think about my own statement about the diversity in the team, and parallel development across a bunch of disciplines, when looking at December's 10.1 update.

While the list of improvement's wasn't short, the big marque feature was the new Library structure. Nothing much happened with Audio, Colour Correction, Collaborative workflows, Motion/Logic interchange, UI... the areas we'd all imagined we might see development in 10.1.

So I guess my question is IF the team is diversified the way I'm imagining, then what were all those other people doing between Oct 2012 and Dec 2013, and even now? Perhaps it's that the structural changes to Events/Projects substantial enough that it was determined that anything else would have to wait- so it could be built on the new foundation.

I've been helping on some features that are at the end of the cutting phase and updating them to 10.1.1. One had a three hour load time which is more than likely a different problem.

But now with a film that took that long to load before, and now takes under a minute, that's good progress.

And as usual Ronny, I completely agree with you. More can be done to make it more stable.

As for new features, what can't we do now in X that other NLEs can? (Cept match frame editing, and cinemadng import) I'd like to know.

Just wondering what everyone thinks about dissolves in FCPX? I think the various options in the inspector are really great and often use the 'film' mode. While it would be great to have a preference to set your default to a mode other than 'video' I have a more important issue.

On my systems, dissolving to or from nothing/black/slug/filler (or whatever you wish to call it) results in a non-linear fade.

Add a title to an empty project, add filler to the start and end with alt-w.
Select the title item and control-t to fade it up and down.
If you watch the scopes the first frame of the dissolve up will jump from 0% to over 20% (I use 18 frame dissolves) then it'll continue to rise in a more linear fashion. The same will happen in reverse on the fade down. Now if you look closer move to the first farm of the dissolve. You'll see the L marker shows up in your viewer window, but the video is still at black.

If you open the dissolve in the inspector and increase the ease amount it will help a lot. But that's a slow workaround. Can anyone confirm they've seen this, and what would be your workaround.

There are always little glitches in the timeline too, items icons don't always quite line up. Say you have primary and secondary clips both dissolving to black at the same time. The icon for the dissolve on the primary appears a few pixels off the secondary. So you might need to zoom in to check it's lined up.

Often when I hit play, playback will be choppy for a few seconds before catching up. With the inspector turned off it's OK. I find I'm having to run FCPX with the bare minimum of optional windows opened. And regular restarts help the bogged down UI I often experience.

FCPX has now twice selected items elsewhere on the timeline whilst I've been zoomed in working on another area. Then when deleting the items I'm working on it'll delete those other items. This just happened to me today. I realised a minutes or so later so I was able to undo it. So I've checked my undos and redos back and forth trying to figure out how it could have happened. Could the clips be linked somehow?
It's a simple 5 minute interview with cutaways on secondaries. I'm not using roles, the rogue selections are from different master clips, some are titles. The two items I wanted to delete were detached audio clips near the start, FCPX seemingly selected 11 other items further down the timeline. All were on secondaries though. It makes no sense at all. I'm sure it wasn't operator error.

It occurred to me that this must have happened again a few weeks ago when I had the same strange result. That time I didn't realise until much later and I only got the missing sections back by using an autosave and rebuilding sections of the project again. It was no fun.

ronny wrote:

Well I'm going to be quite blunt about this: I hope they don't waste any time in adding bells and whistles but they put all their efforts in solving some fundamental bugs that have been introduced with 10.1./Mavericks and that make 10.1.1 practically unusable for complex long-form television work. I'm talking about frustrating UI quirks, sluggishness on large productions (these issues have been reported in other threads on this forum) and various issues that make copy/pasting between projects completely unreliable. All this is happening with new 10.1.1 productions on clean installs of FCPX and Mavs running on the newest and the fastest hardware money can buy.

-Ronny

Amen to that. I've been experience long load times and waiting for the FCPX to catch up. 10.9 was just speedy and 10.1.1 is a nightmare.

cinemaloha wrote:

Amen to that. I've been experience long load times and waiting for the FCPX to catch up. 10.9 was just speedy and 10.1.1 is a nightmare.

I'm not the only one!

I will be very happy to see any number of little bugs (either newly introduced into 10.1 or present since post 10.0.9) fixed once and for all.

Just a "me too" about the general bugginess of 10.1.1

Two are killing me in particular:
1. Copy crop/transform attributes from a multi cam clip results in an incorrect paste (it doesn't seem to separate the crop/transform pixel numbers causing the clip to disappear!)

2. When duplicating a clip as a connected clip (for the picture in picture effect) it likes to jump BELOW the primary storyline no matter how much i move it up. Unless i move it up, but not with the shift key (keeping the timecode the same). So i have to then move it back over. It's just sloppy.

I hope they make those small bug tweaks - meanwhile, keep logging those feedback requests!

fcpguru wrote:

Two are killing me in particular:
1. Copy crop/transform attributes from a multi cam clip results in an incorrect paste (it doesn't seem to separate the crop/transform pixel numbers causing the clip to disappear!)

That one sounds like a bug for sure...

fcpguru wrote:

2. When duplicating a clip as a connected clip (for the picture in picture effect) it likes to jump BELOW the primary storyline no matter how much i move it up. Unless i move it up, but not with the shift key (keeping the timecode the same). So i have to then move it back over. It's just sloppy.

How are you doing this? I'd just Option-Drag the clip up out of the primary, or copy it and Option-Paste it as a connected clip. Am I missing something?

I'm just option dragging the clip above, but then it likes to jump below. Happens maybe 50-70% of the time.
Can't complain about the performance of 10.1.1 in regards to video though - I'm playing 10 streams of HD in real time with effects!

fcpguru wrote:

...Can't complain about the performance of 10.1.1 in regards to video though - I'm playing 10 streams of HD in real time with effects!

On what machine????

I've never seen that jumping below the timeline issue, and I do this quite a lot.

Just recently, if I move multiple loose clips earlier up the timeline, one or two will drop under the timeline. I'm dragging them from the secondary at the end to the secondary near the start.

As they are all still selected after I've moved them, I just Command-G them to pull everything together.

It is odd behaviour for sure.

Well, it's 10 streams of proxy, but still. I'm on a 2011 iMac 27". Picture in Picture multi cam edits with Stablization color correction and titles... pushing this little guy to the limit here.

Article in Filmmaker Magazine about the author's most wanted FCPX features-

filmmakermagazine.com/84632-the-12-most-...atures/#.Uxs5_dwref2

More useful Markers on Timeline::


I wished there was a solution for Markers Notes to show on Timeline. It would be very helpful to notate instructions from producer’s and would be a good guide to edit with.
See a rough example below …


what are your thoughts

willypimentel wrote:

I wished there was a solution for Markers Notes to show on Timeline.

This is perhaps one of the most "duh" items on a NLE timeline. It is amazing how little though has gone into actually organizing and making notes on a timeline.

Make sure you submit feedback to Apple on this one. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Just over 2 weeks to go before NAB.

I was going to go, but a $1800 drive failure has scuttled those plans. Thankfully all data has been retrieved.

My interest at PPW this year was going to be the 3 sessions on Davinci Resolve. Really peeved I'm going to miss those...

But looking at the schedule this year, there seems to be lots fewer FCPX related sessions than last year. No certification course (perhaps the new 10.1 version's not ready), and a smattering of X and Motion related sessions from Mark Spencer. Steve Martin doesn't appear to be doing any at all.

We already know there'll be some announcements from Coremelt with their TrackX plugin. Any other rumours floating out there about 3rd party announcements?

As for FCPX itself, I am betting we'll see a 10.1.2 release, and while a the last two NAB updates were pretty minor, I'm hoping we'll see something more substantial this time.