Longest Project cut on FCP X

Just wondering out there what is the longest edit that anyone has tried on FCPX.

As I was talking to a ex-Apple trainer and he was telling me that more than a hour and a half FCPX can become unstable?

Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance

Probably an hour and a half. Didn't really notice much change. Apart from opening up the project (Library) itself.

I've cut a couple of hour projects. Regarding timeline performance issues it seems to be not related to duration at all but complexity and number of edits. Final Cut can handle timelines that are days and days long. In fact I don't there is a limit.

Thanks I am looking to edit a project about the same length, so slow loading project is not such a issue

Hopefully the edit will not be too layered.

tpayton wrote: Final Cut can handle timelines that are days and days long. In fact I don't there is a limit.

But you've to live with timecode jumps in this case

- Andreas

Andreas Kiel wrote: But you've to live with timecode jumps in this case

Good point! Keep it under 24 hours just to be safe.

Seriously, for a long project I would strongly encourage you to edit in sections, chapters, reels or whatever makes sense for you. Then you can bring together an assembly by duplicating your timelines and making compound clips (in their own event) and then stitching those together. You will be much happier, plus working on a long timeline is an organizational drag.

BTW. Don't to do heavy editing IN compound clips in 10.1.1 as there are some performance issues that creeped up in 10.1. But hopefully by the time you need to work with it we will have a fix.

I do this kind of stuff all the time, so please hit me up with any future questions.

Thanks for all your help. Will try and stay away from the 24 hours Directors cut!!

I have done a three hour film without any problems. Apparently a timeline can be at least year long, from a thread a while ago someones tested this out, and I have edited a 10sec 9K resolution timeline for fun.

There is this if you're curious about the impractical limits of the program.
nofilmschool.com/2014/03/1600-tracks-558...fcpx-on-new-mac-pro/

Will take a look thanks!

I'm in the middle of a few multicam concert performances with about 5 or 6 different angles and about two hours long. Performance is rock solid, even when I forget to switch to proxy when I have the multicam window open. I didn't even realize it, but I cut the first half of the show with full res 1080p h.264 and didn't even realize it wasn't proxy because I had no lag.

I think the biggest think is keeping the inspector tab and event browser closed if you don't need it.

It does seem to have to do with complexity. The problem, of course, is that most shows that get to a significant length will tend to be somewhat complex.

We do have even a 30 minute show that exhibits notable slowdown in the UI. It's not that you're unable to work, but it does have an impact on productivity. When you start to get the inexplicable beach balls, it can get frustrating. This is one of FCPX's biggest issues right now in my opinion. I would be happy if the next version did nothing else than make complex and long timelines as smooth and fast as short ones (well, there are some other bugs like keyframing and crop copying that I'd love fixed also... )

In short, I say go for your long-form project, but just be sensible with how you organize and break it up into manageable chunks before you merge timelines. In my opinion, those tests with days-long timelines are useless because they're just repeating very simple sections over and over. It's not indicative of the performance issues you'll get in a real-world project.

The longest one I cut was 2hr 42min (from a 3 camera multicam). Yes, FCPX slowed down a little, but was still usable most of the time. I did restart a couple of times a day just to get back to a fresh machine.

I just finished a doc that was 2hr 9min while it wasn't as snappy as editing something short with a consolidated library (this had multiple external media sources) it did run fairly well even when loaded down with extensive color correction & additional effects. Usually 2 camera multicam clips. This was on 8 core Mac Pro with dual 700 GPU.