Final Cut X and Mountain Lion

I wouldn't change OS in the middle of a project. The app seems to work unchanged. I'm not a fan of the whole direction the Mac OS has been going in since Snow Cat. The new features mean little to me, and the continued dumbing down is frustrating. If you want a new OS buy it.

To answer your question, FCPX works fine for the the most part under Mountain Lion, but I did encounter one so far bug. There seems to be an issue with Optical Flow analysis. Anything that was already analysed prior to Mountain Lion still renders beautifully, but if I try to analyze any new clips it doesn't produce correct results. To be more specific, when I turn on optical flow for new clips, all I get is simple frame blending. I started using twixtor as a workaround, but it would be nice to have Apple's optical flow working again.

So far that's the only issue I've encountered. If anything, the all feels just a hair snappier under ML (who really knows, though). No show-stoppers or anything like that... so far. With all the updates Apple has pushed out this week I wouldn't be surprised to see a fix soon.

Optical flow was broken prior to ML. It's been weird for a bit now.

It was pretty clear for me... Working in Lion, 45 minutes later not working in ML. But like I said that's the only hiccup I've noticed so far.

It may depend on your video but ir hasn't been working properly since version .4. Did I have the discussion with you about the jelly effect it was producing?

No, but I might know what you're referring to. I noticed around the release of .4 that they changed they way it worked with regard to stabilization. If I uses the two together, I would get ghosting. I found that in order to stabilize AND retime, I would have to first export a stabilized clip and then apply retiming effects to the fully baked clip. That produces much better results and eliminates distortion.

I'm not entirely sure what elly effect you're talking about, but is it anything like rolling shutter? I do see distortion from time to time with optical flow against busy backgrounds, but even twixtor pro has trouble with that. My current issue isn't just problematic results, it's no results a all. The analysis is completing way too fast, which leads me to believe something is going wrong at that stage (I suspect it's a GPU issue since early builds of ML are said to have had GPU problems in FCPX).

It's similar to rolling shutter only more pronounced and near the edges of the frame. Not only on stabilized material. It very much depends on content; shots panning with moving objects seem most susceptible.

My analysis is not fast at all. Again it may depend on content. I looked at optical flow frames slowed to 25% and frame blended frames using waveform images and there is a noticeable difference in the output.

I encountered the same problem after updating to ML. Optical flow is broken. Please fix it.

I'm having the same exact problem after upgrading to ML. For me it appears that it's applying Frame Blending instead of Optical Flow. I've tried trashing the Final Cut preferences to no avail. PLEASE FIX IT APPLE!

Use feedback. It's not an ML problem.

I do appreciate your response Tom, but it HAS to be a ML issue. I haven't done a single thing different other than upgrade to ML. As Pulpjedi said above, worked in Lion and 45 minutes later it was not working in ML. I'm not getting a jelly effect or artifacts, it just plain and simply isn't working. It's applying frame blending, not optical flow. I don't see how this isn't a ML problem.

And what "feedback" are you talking about? Reviewing Final Cut in the app store?

Thanks Tom.

I just used the FCP feedback form. I hope Apple will read it soon and fix the problem with optical flow.

Same here userfcpx, just submitted it myself. It's a pretty big deal being that I had a few projects that I needed to do some final color grading touches on and now I can't export them without having my optical flow clips looking very bad (frame blending is terrible IMO).

Very same issue here.

Quite special. In fact, if the clip is in H264, it won't do anything *at all*.

If the clip is "optimized" or pro-res 422 encoded, it will do frame blending instead of Optical Flow analysis....

Have you managed to find any workaround ? This is very strange, because it doesn't seems to be exactly the optical flow process but the import process : Clip imported BEFORE the Mountain Lion upgrade can be Optical Flow analysed without problems...