I’ve just finalized my first quite large video project with SC and wanted to share some experience. The final video rendered to AVCHD with 55% quality setting was nearly 10 GB in file size and 100 min. in length and was composed out of 90 orig. video clips, more than 2000 images as image sequence (google earth studio), ca. 300 images composed as slideshow in SC and 1360 kB in final project file size.
As the project started to get bigger and reached the 1 MB project file size i recognized first quite massive delays in the response of SC. At the end i had to wait several seconds for each single step like adjusting the timeline, moving clips, inserting pics or clips and so on. In the whole process of composing, which took about 30 hrs in total, i only had one crash of SC - probably because of my unpatience. The very first final encoding instead worked like a charm and was astonishingly fast on my medium sized laptop (32 GB, mobil intel core i7 with no descent graphic card). It only took a bit more than 2 hrs to encode for 100 min. video!
I had organized all my orig. clips chronologically in folders and previewed them outside SC to see weather i would use parts of them or not. For the image sequences i used for slideshow effects, i imported them as a whole into the playlist and used the fuction “import to slideshow” which worked always fine up to 60 pics at once. The most annoying thing was adjusting and zooming the timeline which sometimes caused irratic jumps to the beginning or some arbitrary point and took a lot of time to reposition. Although i mostly used the magnetic snapping i experienced some problems in the final parts when the project was already quite big. This may be due to time lag, and i am not sure if the feature works over several tracks (snap to the clip end on the track above e.g.)?
For the audio filters like vol. gain e.g. i found it difficult to adjust the gain in the keyframe view to voice parts in the main clips as you cant see all tracks with audio at the same time. I would prefer a feature to adjust keyframes in the same timeline view as known from other applications.
But all in all SC performed the job quite well and showed no problems with the encoding of large projects. I had some bad experience here from other applications earlier which always tended to crash in the final encoding of large projects, so i had to retry with different settings after waiting several hours… So, great job, Dan! 