Metal and FCPX

Please forgive me if this has already been addressed but I just can't find a straight answer.

I am working with long timelines (30 to 60 minutes) and with thousands of clips. What I am looking for more than anything else is stability, stability, stability and speed. Don't use many effects so El Capitan's ability to handle effects is of little interest.
Can someone please tell me if El Capitan brigs stability and speed to FCPX 10.2.1 and above? I mean stability and speed in long timelines without effects? Does El Capitan and Metal mean anything to FCPX in terms of both speed and stability or does metal only relate to effects?
Thanks.

Ryan

If you go to OS X 10.11, update to FCPX 10.2.2. Metal is something an app has to be written to take advantage of. I'm sure we'll see an Metal enabled FCPX soon, IF Metal has anything to offer FCPX at all. FCPX is not a gaming app. But, as for stability and speed, some of us are seeing stability and slight speed increases with OS X 10.11. But take that with a grain of salt, some aren't. Most importantly, keep up with 3rd party hardware and software, verify what you use is compatible.
www.finalcutprox.guru/support/supportblog/

My personal advice is to wait until OS X 10.11.1 and FCPX 10.2.3 are released.

I agree with Ben. I'm usually 3+ months behind on OS updates since the first version is rarely as stable as the version before it and usually takes a couple of updates to settle down. I didn't upgrade to Yosemite until about 4 or 5 months ago!

Hi Ryan,

You won't see many benefits for the kind of work you are doing. I would skip this one and wait.

- Ronny

I agree with Ronney. Don't update just because you can. I have specific needs with El Capitan, most are not video editing related. If all I did were TV commercials, I'd skip this OS update for now. You won't really gain anything. When FCPX updates to take advantage of Metal or something, then I'd update the OS for that. But not now, there's no real advantage to FCPX at this moment. And LPX is seriously crippled by it, anyway. Its very own Alchemy synth won't validate properly. Ugh...

Hey Ryan, former Razzia (Doceye) editor here

I am curious as to what you are experiencing.

My take on FCPX so far is that, while I hardly have any crashes, even with a lot of effects, UI drawing becomes pretty bad over time - this has been the same on both macbook pros and several iMacs. "Performance" is robust, in regards to rendering, but the UI itself becomes extremely choppy and slow over time.

Have you tried having a big timeline and Console.app (filtered to "final cut") side by side?

Examples of what I am getting:

kernel[0]: process Final Cut Pro[4812] thread 718817 caught burning CPU! It used more than 50% CPU (Actual recent usage: 94%) over 180 seconds.

[CL_INVALID_OPERATION] : OpenCL Error : GCL context may not be released: Invalid operation

WindowServer[176]: disable_update_timeout: UI updates were forcibly disabled by application "Final Cut Pro" for over 1.00 seconds. Server has re-enabled them.

Final Cut Pro[4195]: AVF error: Perf capability check failed: 0xe00002be

Final Cut Pro[561]: *** OpenGL error 0x0506 (invalid framebuffer operation) in function "GL_CHECK_CURRENT_ERROR"


... I suspect the "windowserver" and "opengl" messages to play a part in this. You could try this and see if any console messages relating to final cut seems to be corresponding to your issues.

If you want to do some more in depth analysis, you could try the Instruments.app that is part of Xcode and then choose "file activity" and select fcpx. *Maybe* you will be able to find some useful info there..

Christian

Rvdenmark wrote: ...Does El Capitan and Metal mean anything to FCPX in terms of both speed and stability or does metal only relate to effects?...

Metal is Apple's new API for low overhead access to the GPU -- for apps which are re-written to take advantage of it. In general the GPU can accelerate effects but not encoding, decoding and other editing operations. Our terminology can be confusing because we sometimes loosely say "render the timeline out", when what we mean is "export and encode the file". Technically you render an effect but encode or export to a video stream or file.

Not all effects can be accelerated -- the algorithm must favor this and the programmer must write the effect to use an API like OpenGL, CUDA or Metal.

Back when I used Premiere Pro CS6, it was very good at GPU-accelerated effects. These would run at full speed without software rendering, and were indicated in the timeline with a yellow bar. Only certain effects were GPU-accelerated but the list was increasing. Effects which could not be accelerated were indicated with a red bar, and fully rendered effects a green bar.

Superficially this might indicate that FCP X does only software rendering. IOW the FCP X orange bar equals the Premiere red bar. However this is not necessarily the case, as some FCP X effects use a lot of GPU if monitored with the right tools. Many common FCP X operations are CPU-bound on all available cores. An infinitely fast GPU wouldn't make that go any faster without changing the core algorithm, and that is only possible for algorithms which can be parallelized and efficiently mapped to a GPU's execution resources.

Programmers and academic researchers are always looking for ways to further leverage GPU resources. Even difficult-to-parallelize algorithms like H.264 encoding are being closely examined, albeit without great success thus far. There is always hope the GPU can be used in a more general-purpose fashion (so-called GPGPU).

In general GPU performance is increasing faster than CPU performance but at the highest end (Xeon) level there is less difference. This is due to higher CPU core counts and optimizations like vector instructions. But nobody wants to leave performance sitting on the table, so there's incentive to continuously tap GPU resources.

I'm happy to see Apple make any steps to streamline access to GPUs but I don't think it will make a big near-term difference. Also some of the slowest effects I run are 3rd party and they would all have to re-write for Metal, while maintaining backward compatibility with older APIs.

I don't see Metal making a big difference in FCP X outside of effects, but maybe I'm wrong.

Ben I like your new profile picture

Thank you Manoucho! She is our newest family member, Corine.