FCP X: Random Thoughts

Here’s a collection of short ideas that are not worth a complete article, but can still improve working with Final Cut Pro X.

FASTER EXPORTS

Andy Orley suggests that if you are experiencing REALLY slow exports on longer projects, reset your computer to not sleep.

Open System Preferences and click the Energy Saver icon.

When the Energy Saver panel opens, click the lock in the lower left corner and sign-in with an administrator password; this allows you to make changes to this panel.

Set the Computer to sleep after some duration longer than your export, or, just set it to Never. Changing this setting doesn’t hurt your computer in the least, it just means that it will use more electricity than it would if it were sleeping.

The Display sleep settings can be anything you want, this doesn’t affect exporting.

This screen shot shows you the settings that I use on my system.

COOL COMPOUND CLIP TRICK

Yesterday, I was creating cut-downs from this week’s webinars to post to my YouTube channel – www.youtube.com/larryjordanfcp

Each cut-down started and ended with slides and narration. So, I recorded the narration, and, rather than edit these clips into each Project directly, decided to create two compound clips: one for the open and one for the close.

Because I wanted to use these Compound clips in multiple projects, I created them in the Event Browser.

Steps:

• Select the Event Browser
• Choose File > New Compound clip
• Double-click the Compound clip in the Event Browser to open it into the Timeline
• At which point, I made the old audio inaudible (press V) and added the new audio as a separate layer

I had five of the eleven videos created when I actually listened to my narration and discovered that I misspoke a word in the opening; fortunately, I had a different take where I read all the words correctly. (Why is it that we NEVER hear these mistakes until we are deep in the middle of a project?)

Anyway, I needed to change all the narrations of the movies I’d already created. Such a pain.

This made me realize the great benefit of using Compound clips for recurring elements. All I needed to do was double-click the Compound clip from the Event Browser into the Timeline and replace the bad audio read with the good audio read.

Because the Compound clip is linked into each Project, my changes were instantly reflected into all the Projects that contained that Compound clip. I didn’t need to even open them to make the change.

Cool.

NOTE: Here’s an article that covers Compound clips in more detail.

FAST COLOR CORRECTION PLUG-IN

Dick Osso sent me a link to a quick fix color corrector for FCP X that replicates the behavior of using the eyedropper in FCP 7.

http://www.fcpeffects.com/collections/new-stuff/products/white-balance-plugin

REDUCING VIDEO NOISE

Larry Carter and I were talking about how to reduce video noise in low-light situations.

My first recommendation was to use lights, (yes, I know, its bleeding edge). But, if you are handed noisy video, check out Red Giant Software’s DeNoiser II.

http://www.redgiant.com/products/all/denoiser-II/

MISSING TIMECODE NUMBERS

I started editing a Project in FCP X and discovered that all the timecode numbers were missing at the top of the Timeline. However, I was in a hurry and needed to finish the edit. So, I just kept on editing, exported the Project, and quit FCP X. Since this was only the display of the numbers at the top of the Project, not the actual timecode associated with each clip, I wasn’t really worried.

Later, when I had some time, I went back to try to figure out what went wrong. Except, this time, when I restarted Final Cut, the timecode numbers were there.

Moral of the story: FCP X can edit just fine, even if the timecode numbers are not visible.

At the moment, I have no idea where they went, or what made them come back.