Final Cut Pro 4 Quirks and Caveats

[Richard Brown]

Well, after a week or so of using FCP4, I have noticed a few quirks...

1) FCP4 likes to gobble RAM, 1336 MB out of my 1500 MB.

2) Porting an FCP 3 project can produce glitches, particularly in 
previously nested sequences or those with significant effects and 
rendering. It seems porting a project with render files may NOT be the 
best idea. Like me, you might end up having to trash your renders in 
some cases, forcing a re-render, or worse, reworking a scene. It may 
save headaches to just do a fresh render of a project within FCP4 at 
the beginning of an edit.

3) FCP4 has crashed only once in a week, but with an interesting 
pixelated flourish. However, given FCP3 never crashed in like fashion 
(while tweaking filters) I would suggest setting the auto-save to five 
or ten minutes rather than the default (30).

4) Firewire drives may not like significant daisy chaining. I have 9 
ADS Pyro (Oxford 911) in three flavors daisy chained, primarily to add 
another 500+ gigs to FCP4 for a feature edit. I've seen some odd 
behavior in the chain resulting in insufficient speed for video 
playback...  even after offlining the apparently offensive drives.

Well, that's enough for now. Will report on any new findings as they 
happen. I will be completing a DVD via FCP4's Compressor tonight...

Richard Brown