Still Frame Playback (Poor) Performance

OK first the specs: El Capitan, FCPX 10.2.2, Mac Pro 2013 8 core/64gb RAM, Dual 700, SSD Boot Drive, Promise Pegasus 6 Drive Raid

When I'm cutting storyboard animatics, in a 1080/24p timeline, playback performance is all over the map quality-wise. I'm cutting very low complexity B&W jpegs (200 kb each) into storyboard reels. Very few EFX, one audio scratch track. Just about as simple as it could get. The JPEGs are 1920/1080. The films are about 2 to 3 mins long.

It seems like despite switching between Better Performance/Better Quality in the the viewer View pulldown, I get lots of dropped frames depending on whether I've played the sequence once or played it again. The first time around, the performance is generally the worst. Most of the frames are on for about 6-12 frames, sometimes less, sometimes more, depending on the scene timing. But I will often get dropped frames, especially when a sequence has a section of stills at relatively short duration each. Sometimes, it will just skip right over fast moving frames and hold the longer frame prior to the faster moving sequence.

The playback is so spotty that its often hard to judge edit points and timing. Live action video seems to work fine, but FCPX seems to get gummed up on timelines with just stills.

I even opened up Premiere yesterday in a fit of frustration, until I remember that cutting this kind of stuff in FCPX is way easier, despite the crappy performance.

Any thoughts on how to improve performance to acceptable levels?

Are you rendering?

If you mean, do I have auto-render on, yes.

The boards, when cut in, do not require rendering if just being assembled into the timeline. Only when I have type layers, or other effects on them do they need rendering. But just cut straight in, render red lines above don't show up.

That's unfortunate. With that many images that close together the heads really have to be flyng around. Wonder if they'd work better off the SSD drve.

You might have a point, Tom. I can try moving the project to an external Thunderbolt SSD drive or the boot drive to see if it speeds things up. Do you think it matters whether the media is externally referenced or managed inside the FCPX library file?

FCPX seems to have a hard time with Large numbers of still images.
This probably wont help in your case, but when I'm dealing with time-lapse and stop-motion I run the image sequences through motion or compressor and export them as ProRes 422 video files.

Managed or external should make a difference.

Yeah, these really aren't image sequences per se, because each frame is being individually timed to hit certain story beats. Some frames hold for a while (several seconds) and some are more like little transitions that need to move quickly. Making video files out them would probably be a mess and a half.

The reason I like using FCPX as opposed to say After Effects is that i can keep them all on the same track, time them all out to 24 frames each to start and then slip/slide to my heart's content until the timing works with the scratch track VO.

Does anyone have any ideas about how PreRoll/PostRoll Duration in Preferences/Playback might affect this?

I'm testing an SSD drive now.

Tom Wolsky wrote: Managed or external should make a difference.

They'd affect playback speed? Which way and why?

Sorry. Meant to say should NOT make a difference.

< from the Dept. of Silly Ideas >

what if ...
you drag all jpgs into a timeline , export a Master, re-import to FCPX, and add from there?
now, the jpegs are 'video'; …

I vaguely remember, when doing my first steps in FC/e on a Cube, I was told the same trick - then, the reason was 'weak horsepower' to handle so much jpgs..... weird in 2015 but ... worth a try?

Karsten Schlüter wrote: < from the Dept. of Silly Ideas >

what if ...
you drag all jpgs into a timeline , export a Master, re-import to FCPX, and add from there?
now, the jpegs are 'video'; …

I vaguely remember, when doing my first steps in FC/e on a Cube, I was told the same trick - then, the reason was 'weak horsepower' to handle so much jpgs..... weird in 2015 but ... worth a try?

Sorry Karsten, but the point is to keep them adjustable as stills in the timeline, not bake them into a movie. The end result is an animatic/ boardomatic which is of course a QT, but while I'm working in the timeline, I need the frames as they are so that I can adjust their lengths and replace them with updated artwork etc. The process is more like animation and less like Ken Burns and not at all an image sequence with a unified frame rate.

I did try moving the FCPX file within all of the media it an external SSD on Thunderbolt, and it makes no difference.

I'm wondering does anyone know what the Preroll/Postroll settings affect in terms of performance? Also, does FCPX prefer other still formats like PNG, TIFF or Targa for playback purposes. The panels I'm cutting with are b&w line art, so I don't care about color fidelity, bit depth etc. but I'm wondering if FCPX plays better with compression/decompression of other formats than JPEG.

PaulG wrote: …Sorry Karsten, but the point is to keep them adjustable as stills in the timeline, not bake them into a movie. …..

hmm, I should have elaborate…
You need 1-7 frames, you told us. So, to be save, make each jpg 10, 20 frames long before exporting the interim.

When you then add a selection from this interim 'video' to your project, you're free to set each length to any number of frames, just by dragging the end of the clip - as you do with frames. Nothing baked. Same workflow, except the iniate 'conversion'.....

Idea was, to transfer jpg into 'video', ...

... just an idea ... <creeping under my stone> :lol:

Interesting idea, but I'm curious how or whether FCPX treats video differently from stills in a structural sense, if at all.

When you bring stills directly into FCPX, they're given a nominal duration (10 secs) as if they're a video clip and so I'm wondering if FCPX actually differentiates. My guess is that cutting a timeline made up of very short duration (1-6 frame) micro edits would exhibit the same problems. You would think using stills would be less overhead, not more.

Also, making a folder of stills into a folder of individual 5 sec QT movies seems inefficient and process heavy. The stills I'm cutting with are the same resolution as HD video, so it's not like they're very high res and need downsampling.

I'll try the conversion idea, but I'd rather have FPCX do a better job with stills in the first place.

One thing I noticed is that the first time I play the sequence, it drops frames like crazy, but then the next time, it plays them more or less correctly. It must be caching on the first pass, even if it doesn't display them, but for some reason able to display once it's been cached?

Hi Paul
Pre/Post roll will have no effect for stills.
Each still is brought in with the format/resolution of the original, but you can use photo editing apps prior to import.
Are you using a photo app?
Higher resolution than the video is only needed if you intend to zoom in/crop by significant amounts in video. How much you can cheat is dependent on how you view the video. Web, who cares, 40' movie screen, get all the resolution you can assuming original photo had higher res to begin with.
FCPX will need to transcode the still format to whatever codec resolution you are using in your project.
Movie pixels are not the same as photo pixels so FCPX must render into approximate size for video. At least they didn't used to be; square vs rectangular.
Try TIFF instead of JPEGs unless you need alpha channel for transparencies, then use either PNG or if using PhotoShop then PSDs. Pixelmator also supports alpha channels. Just because JPEGs are compressed, they still require transcoding. I prefer to stay away from JPEGs if I can. There are various JPEG formats, just like MP3s.
First run thru, each frame gets transcoded, lots of horsepower required. Then it will use rendered files until you make changes.
If the stills move in any way, each individual frame needs to get rendered each time you make changes.
Remember, if you have applied effects prior to edit cuts, then FCPX needs to re-render/apply all clip effects again if you change underlying clips. This goes for Text as well.
What are the specs of your computer system?
Lots of RAM helps. Not sure if FCPX uses vRAM / GPU for still conversion or not. Anyone???

Photos seem less problematic than they used to.
Haven't tried this for all still video, but you might consider proxy for rough cut and then export full resolution.

Hope this helps, Greg

As I said earlier, these are black and white storyboard panels hand drawn in Photoshop. Then exported as JPEGs at 1920x1080.
These are not photographs, but line-art drawings. They don't need alpha channels or other layers. The images are mostly white space with black character line- art. A three minute animatic might have 150 panels to tell the story.

By and large, they're merely being sequenced in a timeline. I'm not doing camera moves, filters, color correction, or anything fancy. Merely cutting them in time to a voice track. As this is a pre-production offline, image quality is unimportant at this stage. I'm only concerned with a fluid editing experience that lets me judge pacing and transitions correctly.

I tried lowering the timeline codec to ProRes LT. Using the Proxy workflow makes no difference.

My system is the MacPro 8-core trashcan with a 12tb thunderbolt raid, 64gb of RAM and dual D700s. Internal SSD boot drive. BMD MiniMonitor to Flanders SDI monitor.

This is pretty much state of the art in the Mac world. Should be powerful enough for a simple animatic.

There is clearly something wrong here, and I doubt it is with your images. We processed 400 4K jpg stills on our MP 2010 12 core with really acceptable playback. This was under 10.0.7 quite a while ago, so possible FCPX took a turn for the worse in regards to stills since then, but doubtful.

First, I would suggest you turn off background rendering in preferences and see if that actually helps.

Might be worth trashing the FCPX preferences also by holding down OPTION and COMMAND when you launch the app.

Another thing to try is to delete all render files in the library thru FCPX. Select the library and then in the top menu choose to delete generated library files, choosing RENDER FILES and ALL.

If none of that makes a difference, try copying your still images and pasting them into a new project in a new library.

150 jpgs should playback easily in a timeline of 1080 24p. Pulldown should not be an issue as you are not using video.

The 10 second duration for clips is preset by FCPX and not changeable, and the preference setting for still images only affects the duration of the still that gets selected in the browser to drag or append/overwrite into the project timeline.