Big issue... FCP X only outputting uncompressed &

[William Hohauser]

It depends on your work, I never need to deliver anything HD in any format except ProRes these days, that's become a universal format for distribution. The last shoot I did in XDCam was converted to ProRes for editing by request of the client. Of course, the usefulness of straight codec to codec would be a welcome addition to FCPX, however the only time I would use it these days is for the odd NTSC DV SD projects I get.

As a note regarding export speeds:

Yesterday I exported three FCP projects on two different systems, a 4 and a half 2K slide show for a theater, a 4:40 ProRes SD project for DVD and a 65 minute 1080 60i AVCHD project. On my 2009 2.66 MacPro, the 2K project, which was rendering large, high resolution print stills with static CG overlays, took 12 minutes according to the progress bar. The SD project (also on the MacPro), with nothing done to the clip except a couple of trims, took 40 seconds. The AVCHD project was exported to an HD ProRes file on a 17" MacBook Pro (sorry, I don't remember the processor speed), with nothing done to the clips except dropped in order of shooting, and took 38 minutes according to the progress bar.

One thing I have noticed is that the progress bar tends to over-estimate the times on some exports and the export will successfully complete before the progress bar is 2/3s across.