Some thoughts about some differen kind of large projects

There was a thread about 'large' projects with FCPX on the Cow

Many of my customers are working with subtitles, sometimes with different languages in the same show. And these can be large projects even with no video or sound.

So I was asked whether I could do both an exporter for subtitles and an importer.

The exporter is quite easy, but with the lack of tracks it can be pretty confusing for the user since he doesn't know where which subtitle belong to. So take roles and work carefully with them. The XML for export is pretty fast. The reason for that is that all items are just referenced to an inventory of used clips and fx. Any special changes are just ignored.

The importer for subtitles id very slow if you got a lot of subtitles, since X has to 'jump' from the actual referenced subtitle to the reference in the inventory for every subtitle.
Actually you could have done the same thing with old FCP XMEML from version 1, this worked fine and fast - even with modified parameters for each subtitle (only the changes compared to the reference had to been stored). But with version 6 it didn't work anymore the old way - means fast. It was very slow. You had to write all parameters for each generator - that worked fine and fast again, but blew up XML size.

Now with X it's faster compared to the previous referenced way XMEML used but it's slow as well and it gets slower depending on the amount of open projects you have.

So a 'mid range 400 subs' imports in more than 5 minutes on my old 2008 Pro with 16G Ram from a 7200 rpm hardrive - XML size is 131 KB. No Video or Sound to connect.

The full blown XMEML from 7.x with 3.1 MB size on the same machine took less than 30 seconds to import and display. BTW it sets the parameters for each sub, which X won't do, or better cant do at the moment.
So ignoring the applying of parameters 7.x is about 10 times faster

If you look at the newly introduced Skimming within X I can scratch thru the X timeline and do see only black in case the Motion template does have fade ins. I have to zoom in, and zoom in, and zoom in until Skimming works. The problem then is I can only skim in the range which is visible.
With 7 there was no real skimming but you could have all 400 titles in the timeline visible and scratch around and did see the titles.

In both cases subs where not rendered (in 7 some of them where realtime - in X all played fine even unrenderd). In X though I get this spinning beach ball, when I change the 'part of visible timeline' or try to select a clip or a group of clips. I love the roles as said above, but you need be careful with them.

In X to make the same timeline launch it took about 10 seconds; rendering subtitles (using fxScript generators) in 7.x took 100 seconds.

In X to make the same timeline launch it took about 80 seconds; rendering - I gave up finally - for 10% it took 20 minutes. So estimated time about 200 minutes; with a rough calculation it is 120 times slower.

It's not that I'm a FCPX hater, there are some cool and innovative things, but you really have to test whether this version will match your job.

Andreas