churchillstudios

Q: Final Cut Pro X Spinning Beachball

Hi folks outside of noticing all the missing features everyone's discussing, my first experience with Final Cut Pro X has also been plagued with slow, unresponsive hang-ups, usually accompanied by the spinning beach ball.  Most of the time the app recovers... takes about 30 seconds or so ... but other times the ball keeps spinning and will freeze the app, crash the app, or in rare circumstances freeze my whole workstation.

 

This is counter to the "no wait while rendering" I keep hearing about and is certainly not like what I saw from the NAB demo. So I have to wonder if it's something to do with my system, a brand-new Mac Pro - not a month old - with dual 2.93GHz 6-Core Xeons, 32MB RAM, and Nvidea Quadro 4000 graphics card.  All drivers are updated and I'm running on OSX 10.6.7.  Meanwhile all my other apps (CS5.5 Production Premium, Boris CC, Colorista II, Lightwave 10) are extremely stable and practically scream with speed.  None of these were open in the background when testing Final Cut, by the way.

 

I've researched the spinning ball even more by manually pausing the background renders.  When I do the app seems to free up and I can move around ... That is until I apply another effect that requires a render... then processing kicks back up, and I get more beach balls.

 

As for crashes, here are two quick observations: The app seems to consistently crash when I try to change the curve style of a clip’s opacity.  The other (more sinister) computer freeze has happened twice as I recall while simply accessing a pull-down menu.

 

Any thoughts?  I suspect it could be conflicting software or my Quadro graphics card?  Any help is appreciated.

 

- BC

Final Cut Pro X, Mac OS X (10.6.7), Mac Pro w/ Dual 2.93GHz 6-Core Xeon

Posted on Jun 22, 2011 11:59 AM

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Q: Final Cut Pro X Spinning Beachball

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  • by pocketdev,

    pocketdev pocketdev Jun 24, 2012 8:25 AM in response to Timothy Palmer-Benson
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    Jun 24, 2012 8:25 AM in response to Timothy Palmer-Benson

    This issue is not caused by the format of the files or the codec.   In my case, as I mentioned, getting rid of the bogus "Camera Render Files" folder that showed up in Final Cut Events as if it were an "event" got rid of the problem.

     

    Optimized media is used at export or render time to produce higher quality results-- but this would tend to cause *more* beachballs, not less, as Optimized media is trading peformance for quality.

     

    Proxy media is meant to trade quality for performance.  But Proxy media is not the issue here because, as I said, I've been using FCP X fine for weeks without any problems without ANY proxy media. (I tested it before choosing this as my workflow.)   And anyway, if it *were* taking too long to decode the media then I would have seen that my hard drive was pegged or the CPUs were pegged.  And as I mentioned neither were the case.

     

    After getting rid of the garbage folder in the Events folder, FCP X is working very speedily now, even without any proxy media, etc.

     

    Modern computers can render H.264 streams in realtime without breaking a sweat.   These problems are not caused by the codec.... they are, at least in my case, casued by junk in the events folder.

     

    I think that junk accumulated from a bug in FCP X that caused it to crash.  Somewhere the "event" directory is being set wrong and its putting the junk in the Events folder rather than the folder for the event it belongs in.

  • by montywent,

    montywent montywent Jun 24, 2012 12:02 PM in response to pocketdev
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jun 24, 2012 12:02 PM in response to pocketdev

    My son works at an Apple store so I thought I'd get insider info on the problems associated with fcpx. To my surprise the apple people don't even acknowledge the issue. They admit the problems are real, but said it's only a very small percentage of users and is not reflective of most users.

     

    One manager there said that forums like apple disscussions tend to inflate issues much bigger than they are and give the impression the problems are an epidemic when in fact it's just a fraction of users.

     

    I'm running fcpx on an older mac pro with only 4g of ram. Most of the time I don't have any issues and for what seems to be no reason it gets sluggist and then clears up.

     

    Keep in mind my videos are simple transitions with few effects and the longest video to date is 12 minutes long.

     

     

    My 2 cents for what its worth.

  • by dracbart,

    dracbart dracbart Sep 6, 2012 12:35 AM in response to churchillstudios
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Sep 6, 2012 12:35 AM in response to churchillstudios

    For me it was most likely a question of good media management. In my inital (made too fast) setup, the project files were in the 'movies' folder on the startup disk A. The event files were placed on drive B and the original media (linked from the event) were on drive C. Not at first, but after a few projects the spinning ball became annoying. After reading a lot of treads, i thought it might have something to do with the directory structure, and my complete media management. I copied over the project files to the same disk as the events, in my case drive B. The original media files are kept in drive C for now, linked to the events. For now it seems to have solved my problems with the hangs and spinning beachball. It is as fast as the original installation.

     

    I hope this solves it for me, i will report back after one week of testing.

  • by Luckinator,

    Luckinator Luckinator Dec 3, 2012 2:38 PM in response to dracbart
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Dec 3, 2012 2:38 PM in response to dracbart

    Was plagued by this problem earlier this year. It drove me nuts! I tried upgrading my 2011 MBP to 8GB of RAM, deleting prefs, and reinstallation. None of these options worked.

     

    This fixed the issue for me: In the system preferences menu, go to Spotlight. Click on privacy, and add your Final Cut Pro projects folder and your final cut events folder to the list. This prevents Spotlight from indexing files in these folders. Spotlight is constantly indexing files, and dozens of render files are constantly being created and modified. That said you can imagine your machine going pretty mad.

     

    I hope this helps!

  • by ndumais,

    ndumais ndumais Dec 4, 2012 2:56 PM in response to Luckinator
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Dec 4, 2012 2:56 PM in response to Luckinator

    Great thanks to you, Luckinator, your suggestion solved my issue. Totally !

     

    Prior to that, I had upgraded my 8-core MacPro graphic adaptor, has raised my RAM to 16 Gb, had installed faster drives, and had upgraded to FCP X 10.0.6. None of those efforts were doing any good. I was so frustrated, I was about to quit and dive into Adobe's solution.

     

    I did what you suggested and it's the first time I get to work with FCP X without seeing this miserable spinning beach ball.

     

    Many thanks,

     

    Sincerely,

     

    ndumais

  • by Luckinator,

    Luckinator Luckinator Dec 5, 2012 7:13 AM in response to ndumais
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Dec 5, 2012 7:13 AM in response to ndumais

    You are welcome ndumais! I am glad it worked. It was such a simple and obvious answer I am surprised it isn't listed as a common solution.

  • by verstaerker,

    verstaerker verstaerker Dec 6, 2012 2:55 AM in response to Luckinator
    Level 1 (5 points)
    Dec 6, 2012 2:55 AM in response to Luckinator

    yes that should be ... i've written back in march that this helped

  • by ndumais,

    ndumais ndumais Dec 6, 2012 9:51 AM in response to Luckinator
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Dec 6, 2012 9:51 AM in response to Luckinator

    @ Luckinator,

     

    I don't know how fluent you are in other languages, but in case you can understand some French, you might want to read my last article where I refer to your advice and where I question Apple's philosophy about support issues like this one. http://www.nelsondumais.com/2012/12/06/final-cut-pro-x-fini-le-foutu-ballon-mult icolore/

     

    Thank you again.

     

     

     

    @ Verstaerker

     

    I also mentionned your post. Thank you.

  • by Luckinator,

    Luckinator Luckinator Dec 10, 2012 5:54 AM in response to ndumais
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Dec 10, 2012 5:54 AM in response to ndumais

    Thanks alot ndumais! I don't speak much French, but I will read it anyway!

  • by aaronweinzierl,

    aaronweinzierl aaronweinzierl Dec 10, 2012 6:09 AM in response to churchillstudios
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Dec 10, 2012 6:09 AM in response to churchillstudios

    I would just like to add in this thread that since the update from a month or two ago 10.0.6 I've had zero issues - this thing runs perfect - I've had zero spinning balls, zero crashes and no lag time whatsoever - before that update I was crashing literally every few minutes depending on what I was doing. it doesn't matter if I'm working with media on my internal drive, attached thunderbolt or usb3 drive - everything works fine. I'm so happy cause I love this application - I can do video work so quickly and now that its actually working right I'm happy!

  • by Luckinator,

    Luckinator Luckinator Dec 10, 2012 8:19 AM in response to aaronweinzierl
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Dec 10, 2012 8:19 AM in response to aaronweinzierl

    Agreed, I am quite pleased with this new version.

  • by nolanpaulstanley,

    nolanpaulstanley nolanpaulstanley Dec 11, 2012 10:37 PM in response to aaronweinzierl
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Dec 11, 2012 10:37 PM in response to aaronweinzierl

    Anyone know if 10.0.7 fixes these issues as well?

     

    Thanks

  • by Charles Cranney,

    Charles Cranney Charles Cranney Dec 12, 2012 6:16 AM in response to nolanpaulstanley
    Level 1 (115 points)
    Quicktime
    Dec 12, 2012 6:16 AM in response to nolanpaulstanley

    I haven't had any of these problems until I upgraded to 10.0.7. Now it is spinning on me. In fact, I had to force quit it, and it start spinning when I open it again. I haven't been through this very long discussion. Is there something in there that can help me?

  • by Charles Cranney,

    Charles Cranney Charles Cranney Dec 12, 2012 2:20 PM in response to Charles Cranney
    Level 1 (115 points)
    Quicktime
    Dec 12, 2012 2:20 PM in response to Charles Cranney

    Trashing my preferences seemed to work. Nice little utility that was recommended. Now I'm experiencing hard drive preferences. Off to another discussion group to work through those.

  • by ndumais,

    ndumais ndumais Dec 13, 2012 3:36 AM in response to Charles Cranney
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Dec 13, 2012 3:36 AM in response to Charles Cranney

    Easy to do.

     

    Yes, the spinning wheel reappeared with 10.0.7. But, using Disk Utility, I checked and repaired the main drive permissions and rebooted my MacPro.

     

    No wheel any longer!

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