withpassionuk asked: Hi anyone who may be able to help. I'm on the last stages of my first project in FCP X and I've come across a problem which must be really simple yet I can't fix it. I have a clip which it's not letting me select or do anything to. i'VE TRIED SELECT, TRIP OR POSITION TOOL, it's just not letting me touch it. It's active and I don't know what i could have done to it... Any ideas?

Have you tried duplicating your project (not the media, just the project) and seeing if the clip frees up there?

Auto Color Balance Issues

We’ve had little luck getting a usable result with FCPx’s automatic color balance analysis. Our footage is pretty good off the camera (mainly some gamma adjustments needed)…but the result when using the auto analysis ends up adding too much cyan into the shadows and midrange.  Ultimately, we turned it off.

If any readers have had better luck; or have some insight as to how to get a better result, please let me know.

Opening + sorting multiple clips in the browser

@Emily_Chichi sent me two tweets. The first was in regards to this post about opening multiple clips in the Event Browser. Her solution was a simple thing that I missed: select a group of clips, then press the right/left arrow keys to expand all of the clips at once.

The second tweet was in response to sorting keyword collections, with the possibility of sorting the Event Browser by Start Time.  Technically this should work, but the convention breaks as soon as you use Compound Clips, as all Compound Clips have a starting source time of 0:00:00:00. 

FCPx Color Correction: Serviceable, But Not Usable

That didn’t take long. Late last week I sat down to build and render the color grades for the spot…and about 15 minutes later decided to do color correction outside of FCPx - in this case via After Effects, since graphics had to be built as well, and we wanted to add a tiny bit of grain. It was a tiny bit of hassle since there is no OMF or EDL export, but the time spent separating the shots was a small price to pay for the ability to tweak the color the way we wanted to, not to mention avoiding some serious workflow issues in FCPx.

Some of those workflow issues:

- FCPx needs “Paste Attributes”, a la FCP7. Stop, do not pass go - this should be near the top of the list of features in upcoming updates. It was a simple operation in FCP7 to copy scaling, effects etc. from one clip to another - and it doesn’t exist in FCPx. Want to copy color correction(s) from one clip to the next? In FCPx you have to save the grade, then go to the next clip, open Color Correction, then open the saved grade…etc. It amounts to a lot of time diddling with file operations and interface, and less time working. Multiply this operation if you have multiple color corrections that you want to copy over. On that note…

- I don’t want to save a color correction file until I’m good and ready. It’s ironic that you don’t actually save project files in FCPx, yet you have to go through a process of saving presets for color corrections in order to apply them to other clips.

- If you have multiple color corrections on a clip, you can’t group them as a preset. If you have a clip with two or more color corrections - perhaps one adjusting gamma and color balance, and the second performing a subtle vignette -you can’t save these two as one preset / setup - each has to be saved individually, then laboriously applied individually to other clips if you wish.

- Inside Mask / Outside Mask attributes are NOT saved in presets. I thought this was a bug until I went back to the manual and realized that this behavior is actually documented. I’m at an utter loss as to why this is the default behavior, it makes no sense.

- Lack of truly fine controls. The controls are simple and easy to understand, but that’s also the problem - they’re too simple, and not suitable for detail work.

- Lack of color pickers. I want to pick a neutral gray off a color chart and get RGB values to check color balance, but this feature doesn’t exist.

- Want to see Waveforms and Vectorscopes at the same time. A small issue - but it is very useful to see luminance and chroma values at the same time while making adjustments. Right now, FCPx forces the user to switch between the two using a dialog.

It’s a shame that FCPx didn’t work out for corrections, as I was looking forward to using audition clips to try out different grading versions. In the end, the workflow issues above scuttled that idea pretty quick.

Keep in mind that while I have no insight on this whatsoever, I do wonder if Apple is ultimately going to include truly robust color correction tools within FCPx, or simply let third parties use the plug-in framework to sell add-ons. I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing a company like X-Rite port their software for the Passport Pro into the FCPx framework, at the very least as an option to get a baseline grade.

afriendlyeditor asked: Howdy,

I'm curious about "Timeline instability. The only other time we’ve been able to crash FCPX has been with timeline manipulations - particularly option-dragging a clip to duplicate. It doesn’t happen very often, but just enough to be an irritant." Does this continue to come up for you? What are you doing before the option + drag? Are you duplicating clips on the storyline, connected clips, or both?

It’s been very inconsistent + rare; and not readily reproducible. Overall, FCPx’s timeline is pretty stable. The crashes we encountered were of clips on the storyline - we were moving sections of the edit around to work out sequencing of the spot, and every now and then, FCPx would just disappear.  Restarting would load the project as it was before we attempted to option-drag.  Didn’t lose any work, but it was one of the few times we crashed on the timeline.

Please excuse the quiet…

The client for the PSA has been traveling, and I’ve been on other non-editorial projects in the interim. Finally, we’ve got a locked cut, and I’m settling in for finishing, so this blog’s activity should be picking up through this week and next.

I will say that after an hour of toying with FCPx’s color correction tools, I’m have serious reservations about performing color grading in FCPx whatsoever.  More soon…

24tracks asked: RE: So far, the biggest workflow problem in Final Cut 10.0 is…

Have you tried using the Time Line index to view and select the keywords you've added to your clips? Even when you have a keyword applied to an entire clip and then a keyword for a range within the clip, you can use the TL index to at least get them sequentially ordered if not visually/spatially, it's a workaround but, hey.

I was hoping that would be an option, but it’s a mess. If you have multiple keywords attached to a clip (a very likely possibility), the list is populated with every single keyword of every clip, some of which may be as mundane as “b-roll” or “synced”.  It’s a lot of noise to wade through.

No visual reference for keyworded sections

In FCPx, a clip can have a keyword applied to it as a whole, or have a keyword applied to a selected segment of the clip. These clips and/or sections can also be marked “Favorite” or “Rejected”.

In the Event Browser, a clip that has a keyword applied to it as a whole is marked with a blue line.  If there are segments of that clip that are marked as a “Favorite”, those segments are represented by a green line, as such:

That’s a handy way to glance at a clip and get an visual idea of where important sections are.  Unfortunately, this interface approach is not extended to keyworded sections.

If you have a clip with keyworded sections and the clip also has a keyword applied to it as a whole, you cannot see where the sections are in the visual depiction of the clip.

In this example, the clip has a keyword - “Synced” -  applied to it as a whole.  There are also other keywords for selected ranges in the clip. In the Event Browser, the clip only shows a single blue line, representing the clip has a keyword or keywords applied to it, but there is currently no way to see where those sections are in the clip view.

Keyword & Compound Clip names in audition clips

I went over the issues with clip + compound clips names in this longish post here.

Add audition clips to where this interface issue also causes a problem. Since keywords are not shown on the timeline in favor of the name of the parent clip, loading different keyword ranges into an audition clip results in an audition interface that shows vague and relatively unspecific clip names:

Project Library & Timeline Switching

Remember the tabbed timeline in FCP7, where you could load and access multiple sequences very quickly and with little effort?  I’m missing that functionality more and more as the days pass. FCPx’s approach to sequence/timeline management and accessibility is at best a bit labored in approach, and at worst buggy and unpredictable.

For this PSA, we took each of the interview subjects and created sub-edits from their footage using what we felt were the best selects to tell their story. Ideally we could have simply sorted the selects in the Event Library and gone through them sequentially in the Event Browser, but the numerous interface issues that have been discussed before on this site made that a less-attractive option.

After this task, we had 4 separate sequences (or Projects, in FCPx parlance) to select clips from and built our master edit. 

A catalog of issues ensued:

1 -  There’s no simple way to load all four projects into the timeline with one keystroke. Instead, the user has to click one Project at a time, let that load into the timeline, switch back to the Project Library, click on the next Project, and repeat, repeat, repeat.

2 - Once you’ve gone through that, it’s possible that some of the Projects that you loaded previously have been mysteriously purged from the Timeline switcher, forcing you to go back and re-load the Project again from the Project Library.  Once you do that, you may unwittingly purge a Project that was previously loaded in the switcher, and the cycle maddeningly begins again….

3 - Sometimes a project shows up twice in the switcher, for no discernable reason.

4 - The switcher has two arrows - forward and back - although I can’t determine how or why a project is “forward” or “back”…nor do I care to remember or keep track; it’s a meaningless construct.

5 - The process of switching between projects is slow.

6 - We have been unable to find a way to simply “close” a project so that it doesn’t appear in the switcher.

I’m not exactly sure what Apple is trying to do here, other than over-simplifying how timelines are managed. It’s perfectly normal to be working concurrently with multiple sequences during a project - sometimes you just want to test out an idea - but FCPx’s handling of multiple Projects can feel like the application is working against you.