Final Cut Pro and Spinning Beach Balls

Unfortunately on my side everything is up to date and still getting the spinning beach ball after just light task in FCPX, otherwise the computer is working correctly with other programs . Quitting FCPX and restarting it will solve the issue for a while.

I have the same machine. The first 30 minutes to an hour of using FCP everything works great but then the beach ball appears very often even when doing very basic stuff like trimming etc. Restarting FCP solves the problem for a while but definitely something's wrong there. Of course FCP and macOS are up to date.

Hope for the next FCP update to fix that issue...!

Video Editor By Profession. Just purchased MBP 2020 13 inch i7 32GB ram bla bla as my second "on the go" editing machine. Finally put it through the editing test and similarly to everyone here, I experienced the strange beach ball issue while simply trying to make minor movement or adjustments. The weird part is, up until the moment it starts drastically slowing down, it seems to be running exceptionally smooth. Exactly the way I'd want it to for it's specs. I have noticed that the issue starts almost around the same time the temperature of the computer gets quite hot. This could be a thermal throttling issue, especially due to the lack of GPU resources found in the 13 inch. However I am not computer technician so I could be wrong.

Needless to say I am INCREDIBLY disappointed in a 2020 product that works worse than my 2012 15 inch mbp. Fortunately, if you live in a region where Apple stores have yet to have re-opened up, Apple is extending their return policy to 2 WEEKS AFTER STORES REOPEN!! I live in Toronto, Canada and was pleased to find this out as all of our stores are in malls, and none of the malls have reopened yet. This allows me to take more time and wait for an update which may hopefully resolve the issue. However, if nothing is resolved until then, this $4000 dollar machine is going right back to where it came from.

I just contacted customer service from Apple. The guy one the phone said that he hadn't heard of the problem before, yeah right...

He told me to do a reset (cmd+option+P+R when booting).

I thought it had fixed the issue but after 15 minutes of (fluent!) work, the spinning ball appeared. Even when I just enable full screen mode the spinning ball appeared...

I was running Intel Power Gadget the whole time and the temperature was not over 60°C. No fans what so ever.

So my guess its just an incompatibility issue between either MacOS, FCPX or the new Intel Chipset.

Anyway, my return window ends the 22th of june, I think I will return this unit and wait for a solution.

I do not want to buy a 16inch because of the formfactor. I like the smaller size of the 13inch a lot.

It is supposed to handle even 4k. This is not acceptable.

One more thing..... You all guys are waiting for an update for FCP... but there is the same problem with iMovie.... so this is not only FCP problem... so it means what?

ppl also complain with beachball on After Effects and on Photoshop even.... Now I thinks its most likely to be the problem with hardware and there is no need to wait for an update.......

Aside from regularly checking this thread to see if Apple responded or someone found a workaround: is there anywhere else I can make my voice heard to notify Appel of this issue?

http://www.apple.com/feedback

You should probably mention this thread when you write.

Just upgraded to 10.15.6 and I haven't seen any beachballs, either. This is only after about 15 minutes of basic editing. Who knows if it's fixed completely but before I was literally having to restart FCPX every five minutes so it's an improvement, at least.

It's very possible there is something that has damaged your system, like cleaning or antivirus software. A clean install is usually the only remedy is these situations.. It seems the update works for others, which would also indicate a system conflict.

It’s most likely a graphics processing issue as none of the systems with dedicated graphics cards have shown signs of this problem.

Have you reported the issue with Apple? Have you used the links to report the issue too?

Does it clear up or crash? For how long are the beach balls up? What are you doing when this happens? I recently finished a project and got a lot of them and would immediately just pull my hands away from the keyboard and mouse and wait it out. (The hand is quicker than the processor!) Was usually some long I/O operation. Usually they wouldn't last long, but sometimes it would just hang. After a minute or two and watching nothing happening except cpu accumulating in Act. Mon. I'd force-quit it. Memory pressure was always green.

Really need some more details here.

It usually happened for me when loading a project from disk. I just assumed it was doing the needed I/O and waited it out. I can't recall what other conditions it happened under, if any. I do recall once that using the eyedropper too many times would sometimes cause an instant crash. No beach ball, no error message -- the entire FCP window just suddenly goes bye-bye. I now do seem to recall that happened (the beach ball bit) at apparently random times and sometimes cleared up and sometimes just hung minute after minute, requiring a force quit. I think maybe it did just suddenly crash at other random times.

Oh, my setup:

Various versions of FCP 10.4

macOS 10.13.6 (High Sierra)

I have just returned the MBP. I still have my old (and sadly, dying) laptop, so I'm going to use it until it takes its last breath. In the meantime, I'll start a second round of laptop search. I'm very, very reluctant to invest in 16" MBP after this terrible experience I've had so far with Apple. And you are right that they'll eventually release a fix. But for that to happen, they need to ACKNOWLEDGE the problem, and they're not there yet. To anyone experiencing these issues: I urge you to call them to speed this up.

Everything is still the same with the new update of Catalina, let us know if it solved the problem, but in my case, nothing was fixed, i still have major performance issues, beachballing and all, I have to quit the application every 15minutes or so to get the performance back, I've already sent 5 reports to Apple