Do I have enough power?

I'm currently using:
Retina 5K iMac, 27-inch
Late 2015
3.2Ghz CPU
16GB RAM
AMD Radeon R9 M380 GPU 2GB

I use external harddrives through USB 3 for all my FCPX editing.

So far I've just been editing short films, promos, etc. The system works great without any noticeable lag.

I recently got asked to edit a 60 minute documentary. Will my system be able to handle something this complex without too much lag?

Thanks!

Yes.

Although I'd use a RAID, 4 bay, configure to RAID 5 for my Library. USB 3 will work fine without too much lag.

I've done a one hour TV show on a 2010 Mac Pro, 1GB GPU, very old external SCSI RAID. More lag than I wanted to deal with, but workable. Your system shouldn't be too bad.

If you have an SSD system drive, even better.

Your Mac isn't the issue, as Ben suggests. It's your media storage.

You're entering a new level of responsibility, though. You may not be accepting money for your work but your relationship with the producers is the same as if you were: you must protect their job and all of the resources associated with it. That means securely backing up the media and the project files. And secure backups require offsite copies. RAIDs can be configured to rebuild if a drive fails and they can create mirror images of data but that's not the same as having a full set of replacement media someplace else.

You may decide this investment is unnecessary of course. Most of us ignore this kind of insurance.

Unfortunately I don't have an SSD drive.

Thanks for the info!

bogiesan,

The media files will all be kept off site by the producer in their server system.

But if I do take on this job, I would factor in the cost of a proper RAID system. I'm thinking a RAID 10.

Thanks!

RAID 5 is standard for video editing and other mission critical environments. RAID 10 won't buy you anything extra realistically. Keep it simple, keep it efficient.

thomas.lim wrote: ....I recently got asked to edit a 60 minute documentary. Will my system be able to handle something this complex without too much lag?...

Key items include what resolution and what codec. If it is 1080p H264 or a less compressed codec, it will handle it. If it is 4k it will require transcoding to proxy for smooth editing.

If your final product is 60 minutes, using a typical documentary shooting ratios of 20:1 or 50:1, this implies you might need storage capacity to hold around 50 hr of content, plus back that up. If that content is H264 and you need to transcode to proxy (not optimized) that might roughly double the size. So storage is important.

Some codecs cannot be imported by FCPX with "leave files in place", so in that case you will need (briefly) at least double the disk storage to hold the native content before import then the version after import. If the incoming material is on a portable hard drive that provides the storage before import. Although practices vary, it's often a good idea to maintain copies of all the camera native content even after importing it.

FCPX.guru:
I find RAID 10 more simple than a RAID 5. None of this parity stuff. Direct duplicate of all data.

www.diffen.com/difference/RAID-5-vs-RAID-10

joema:
Thanks for the tips.
Had no idea the ratio could be up to 50:1!

thomas.lim wrote: ....Had no idea the ratio could be up to 50:1!

The shooting ratio on David Fincher's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl were both about 200:1, and they weren't even documentaries. Mad Max: Fury Road was 240:1. Some reality TV shows use a 300:1 ratio.

Even independent documentary productions now use extremely high shooting ratios. DSLRs, GoPros, etc. enable multiple-camera shoots with long takes. It is easy to hit 100:1. What's really a killer is combining high shooting ratios with 4k.

Here are some other shooting ratios on well-known feature films:

nofilmschool.com/2016/03/shooting-ratios...oad-primer-hitchcock

Shooting ratios are"shooting" ratios. Editing stock can be reduced to one tenth of that volume with prudent selection and culling. You want to keep ALL of the footage someplace but you only need what you actually need loaded up and in play. Amateur documentary producers shoot far less than they need, they fail to cover the story because they're amateurs. Good doco producers shoot about what's necessary and then they cull the waste. Folks who have been in the doco business for decades tend to shoot ten times more than need, "just to have it." Which is fine if you've got the storage and the time to edit 120 hours of stuff down to one hour.
There are many different documentary theories, genres, and styles. Not every doco requires 50- or even 15-to-1 shooting ratios. Yours might. This is discoverable in early planning.

bogiesan wrote: Shooting ratios are"shooting" ratios. Editing stock can be reduced to one tenth of that volume with prudent selection and culling. You want to keep ALL of the footage someplace but you only need what you actually need loaded up and in play....

You have to look through all the content to determine what is useful. The question is what's the fastest way?

The old way was initially scrubbing through your content outside the editor, culling the useful stuff then importing only that. This made sense in an era when storage was expensive, editing software was slow and organizational tools were limited. However this required essentially going through the content twice, somehow moving or marking clips at a file level, then going through the imported content a 2nd time inside the editor.

Nowadays, storage is cheap, FCPX is lightning-fast, and its organizational tools are superb. No external tool is remotely as fast at skimming and marking ranges. Once the initial selection is made, this can be consolidated to another database to save space. Assuming "in place" import is possible for all media, this works well.

I have done many documentaries both ways, and IMO it's a lot faster to just import everything into FCPX "sight unseen", then do the initial evaluation there. Admittedly this depends on (a) "leave files in place" always working, and (b) Your hardware and FCPX being able to handle it. My top-spec 2015 iMac 27 can do this on a 5 terabyte library with about 7,000 clips but that's with the media on a Thunderbolt 2 SSD RAID. So there is a soft upper limit depending on hardware, resolution, codec, etc.

I don't recollect this aspect of media organization being covered in any tutorial or fcp.co article I've seen. It would be good to see some commentary on this or an article. Namely the overall strategy of initial media organization -- whether inside FCPX or outside, the history and pros/cons of each approach.

Thanks everyone!! This is all awesome info!!

I think I'm going to pass on editing this documentary. I just don't think I have the experience to take on such a major task.

As you say, you've done many. Your point of view is based on experience and comfort, a situation that is completely different from Thomas's.

If you think you have the time (that's a big commitment) and would like the experience, go ahead and accept the job! Just be honest with the rest of the crew and demand they are honest with you. Get the production's goals and expectations up on a white board where everyone can see them and, most of all, be realistic. First-timers tend to under estimate production time and effort by a factor of four, sometimes as much as ten.

thomas.lim wrote: …
Had no idea the ratio could be up to 50:1!

some hundred years ago, I was in charge as producer for gameshows (Wheel of Fortune 'n stuff) - we recorded 'live on tape' = ratio 1:1, I would have fire you instantly with such an 'insane' ratio of 50:1 …LOL!!

to get serious: modern, digital rec system encourage that 'don't miss a second/select it in post' attitude, or, vice versa, made it just possible. Watched recently a doc about Bob Dylan (not my music, but excellent movie) - done with hand-winded Bolex, after 3-5min stop, reload film, rewind camera ... very diff. way to shoot documentaries those days …

Karsten Schlüter wrote: ....some hundred years ago, I was in charge as producer for gameshows (Wheel of Fortune 'n stuff) - we recorded 'live on tape' = ratio 1:1, I would have fire you instantly with such an 'insane' ratio of 50:1 …LOL!!....Watched recently a doc about Bob Dylan (not my music, but excellent movie) - done with hand-winded Bolex, after 3-5min stop, reload film, rewind camera ... very diff. way to shoot documentaries those days …

One of the most famous documentaries was Frederick Wiseman's 1968 film High School. It was shot on a hand-cranked 16mm B&W camera and he used a 30:1 shooting ratio: www.zipporah.com/films/21 He edited it himself in four months.

The original Star Trek TV show was shot on 35mm film and used an approx. 6:1 shooting ratio. Had they only known, they'd have preserved all that footage. There were initially three separate editing teams, later expanded to four. So in that era for a weekly series it took four editing teams to keep up with a single production team, even though they had far more than a week to edit each one due to starting long before the air date.