Choppy playback on FCP X

[MaxCaron]

I everyone,

I've recently bought a Panasonic DMC-GF2 which I use to film sports mostly. I film in full Hd (1080) and get very very choppy playback when trying to edit my shots in Final cut pro X.I've tried converting the files to a smaller format and fixed the choppiness but the image quality was horrible.

I'm quite new to Hd editing so I'm not sure where the problem is coming from. I think my laptop is fine, I have a 15" Macbook Pro, Processor 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7, Memory 4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3, Graphics AMD Radeon HD 6750M 512 MB. I've started reading on the subject and some people seem to think I need more Ram? Others say it could be because I save all my footage on my laptops Hdd and that I should buy an External Hdd with a fast connection. I don't know much about file formats and all, transcoding etc.

Anyways what do you think? Any advice will be very much appreciated. Sorry for my english, I'm french

 

[chanc2]

GF2 records AVCHD, so I think your i7 MBP should be fine.
The choppy playback might be due to a slow harddrive. Try a fast firewire 800 drive or a thunderbolt drive, it will help.
Also, 4GB ram is sure not enough for FCPX.
If you want optimal playback performance, you can convert the AVCHD to ProRes first.

 

[MaxCaron]

Thank you very much,
I will try converting to Apple prores first, if that does'nt work I will try buying a new external hdd.
Do you know a good software I could use to convert .mts files to Apple Prores?

 

[chanc2]

FCPX can edit AVCHD natively, but it will convert your AVCHD to ProRes, if you choose to import them as optimized media.

 

[chmodme]

more details?

Hello.

I edit hours of FCP X daily on a MBP. I do not see what internal hard drive you use? Your overall machine is fine.

In my experience, you need more RAM (like another suggested) and you need an SSD to run the software. These two items alone will be a serious upgrade and help to reduce the incidence of clipped playback.

I happen to use Thunderbolt-attached RAID, which works fine, but I process to a Firewire 800 attached SSD. Using this, and a boot SSD, eliminated the stuttering I experienced trying to process AND write to the internal drive.

I also convert everything to Pro Res for editing as suggested by others.

chmod

 

[MaxCaron]

Thank you for the advice,

Here is my new problem (Sorry for all the questions, as stated above I'm pretty new to this. ) my camera records .mts files. Fcpx will not take .mts so I have to use a converter. I just got Toast Titanium and converted to Apple Prores 422 but when I import them to Fcpx the clips are smaller in size ( in the playback window). Whats even stranger is that the same clips, after converting, take up more space on my hdd. (example: 50mb before converting, 80 after). Is there a way to convert to Prores and keeping the same size and quality I previously had?

 

[MaxCaron]

Nvm I fixed my problem,

You can import .mts files directly to Fcpx by choosing Import from camera instead of importing from hdd. I plugged in my memory card and it still works.

Anyways, thanks everyone, I'm going to buy a SSD and more Ram. Hopefully that'll do and I can finally get rid of all this choppiness!