I"m running into an issue editing footage in FCP 6. Viewing edits in the timeline is extremely sluggish and sometimes unresponsive. This happens with two types of footage:
Quicktime: 960X540 uncompressed
WMV - any size.
The exported footage plays fine. It's just such a pain to hit play and wait 5-10 seconds for the timeline to start playing. Is there a setting I need to adjust? Do I need to fix my FCP preferences? Any help is much appreciated!
Re: Sluggish Timeline in FCP 6.0 by Chris Bryan on Jul 16, 2008 at 7:01:55 pm
I'm running FCP 6 on an Imac
2.4 ghz intl core 2 duo
2 gb ram.
960x540 is commonly used on the web for "hd" quality videos, it's half resolution of 1920x1080.
My understanding is that FCP supports wmv use. I know it's not the best source to use, but that's what the client gave me. Converting the wmv source file to quicktime will add another layer of encoding, and I'd rather not do that.
I realized that I had a sequence with both .avi and .wmv in it. It seems that mixing the two formats was most of what was making the playback slugggish.
Re: Sluggish Timeline in FCP 6.0 by Wayne Carey on Jul 16, 2008 at 9:14:08 pm
What is the original codecs used?
I ask because if the video is already half scale - another compression isn't going to hurt it much if you use something like ProRes422.
FCP doesn't play well with WMV and AVI files. They can be made to import but not good for editing entirely. Convert to something more friendly and every will run much better.
_______________________________
Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
www.schazamproductions.com
http://blogs.creativecow.net/waynecarey
Re: Sluggish Timeline in FCP 6.0 by david bogie on Jul 16, 2008 at 10:19:20 pm
[Chris Bryan]"960x540 is commonly used on the web for "hd" quality videos, it's half resolution of 1920x1080. "
You shouldn't be doing your scaling in FCP. work in the native format and do your frame conversions at the output stage using Compressor or some other transocder.
[Chris Bryan]"My understanding is that FCP supports wmv use. I know it's not the best source to use, but that's what the client gave me. Converting the wmv source file to quicktime will add another layer of encoding, and I'd rather not do that. "
You were misinformed. QT can transcode WMV on the fly with a plugin from Flip4Mac but it is not recommended that you mix formats in a timeline and expect realtime performance, too much computation happening.
The marketing hype behind the open-timeline capabilities of FCP are totally dependent on the speed of your machine. For most of us, it's easier to convert all weird footage to a common format for assembly, even if we have to recapture or uprez later.
[Chris Bryan]"I realized that I had a sequence with both .avi and .wmv in it. It seems that mixing the two formats was most of what was making the playback slugggish.
"
Lots of things can impact your timeline performance including stuff you can't see or find. Sometimes a simple restart will fix it, sometimes you need more in the way of help.
bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: "For crying out loud, read the freakin' manual."
Re: Sluggish Timeline in FCP 6.0 by Chris Bryan on Jul 17, 2008 at 8:46:58 pm
Thanks for all the advice, but I think my point is being missed. I am editing footage that is from the web. So my source footage is 960x540. There is no scaling being done in fcp. I work with a ton of footage from the web so it is always in abnormal formats. For me there is no getting around that. My initial question was asking if there is some setting I should look at changing within final cut so that it doesn't have to work so hard to play the footage back within the timeline?
In a perfect world all footage would be optimized for use in FCP, but that's not the case.
My issue was resolved by not mixing formats within one timeline.
