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FCP X: New Performance Tips

At this week’s Los Angeles Final Cut Pro User Group meeting, Apple presented the latest features in Final Cut Pro X at the meeting. (It was a nice demo, but no new features were announced.)

However, I did pick up a variety of performance tips that I want to share with you. (These are listed in no particular order.)

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STAY CURRENT

 

Up until recently, I recommended running Final Cut Pro X with OS X 10.6.8 for stability and performance. This evening, I learned that the 10.0.4 and 10.0.5 releases of FCP X included a number of performance enhancements specifically targeted at improving stability in Lion.

Apple tells me that FCP X now runs much more solidly and quickly on Lion. So, if you’ve been avoiding upgrading to Lion because of concerns about FCP X, it may be time to reconsider.

SNOW LEOPARD VS. LION

FCP X is designed to run on either 10.6.8 and the latest version of 10.7.x. If you are having problems with Final Cut, make sure you are current.

If you are running Final Cut on Lion, it is especially  important that you are running the latest versions of both Lion and FCP X to get the best results. If you haven’t upgraded Lion or FCP for a while, Apple suggests upgrading.

Although the basic operation of FCP X is the same on OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.x, there are two features that are Lion-only:

• Full-screen interface mode (meaning no menu bar at the top of the screen)
• Broadcast monitoring from FCP X to an external video monitor

COMPOUND CLIPS

I’ve gotten a lot of mail recently complaining of problems with compound clips and/or large projects. What I learned tonight was that nesting compound clips inside compound clips inside compound clips – in other words, going “deep” – may affect performance.

However, for larger projects, compound clips that aren’t nested inside each other can actually make the system run better. If you are loading lots of clips into the Timeline, Final Cut needs to track each of these clips individually. Instead, if there is a section of the Timeline that you are done editing, select all the clips in that section and convert it to a compound clip using File > New Compound Clip.

This tells Final Cut to treat those clips as a group. This improves memory management and overall performance, especially as projects and clip counts get larger.

SYNCING MULTIPLE CLIPS

Final Cut only allows you to sync one set of audio and video clips at a time. If you have a batch of audio and video clips that all need to be synced, check out Sync-N-Link X for batch processing: itunes.apple.com/us/app/sync-n-link-x/id517599985?mt=12

All-in-all, an interesting evening, with some updated tips that I wanted to share.

As always, let me know what you think.

Larry