Persistently stuck rendering

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Level 1

57 points

Persistently stuck rendering

I feel like I've been wrestling with this for months -- it happens intermittently, but when it strikes, it strikes bad. This is across both Catalina and Mojave on the latest FCPX.

A project gets into a state in which its background processing > render gets stuck at zero. This leads to spinning beach balls that never resolve and require force-quitting.

Temporary workaround that seems to work: switch to a different project in the same library, stop all background processing, quit or force-quit as necessary, select the problem project, delete generated render files, quit, relaunch FCPX, switch to problem project, and then it naturally starts new render files that do complete normally.

But this only works for a bit -- then the same thing happens again.

Any suggestions? I already trashed FCPX prefs.

This is really annoying that it persistently gets hung up on rendering files for inexplicable reasons.

iMac 27″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Aug 2, 2020 11:45 AM

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Answer 1

David Das1 Author

Level 1

57 points

Aug 2, 2020 6:31 PM in response to David Das1

Update: after much (MUCH) trial and error, this was finally fixed by creating optimized media (which wasn't originally done when the project/library was created and media imported). After forcing the creation of optimized media, all the beach balls and the export problems went away. (I didn't mention it above, but the same project would continually get stuck during export, always at a different % completed.)

I'd love to understand WHY this happened. The original footage was a screen capture from an iPad. Why would FCPX behave so erratically with original media?

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Answer 2

Tom Wolsky

Level 10

152,777 points

Aug 2, 2020 6:37 PM in response to David Das1

iOS and iPadOS video is very problematic in FCP. Most likely because they seem to have unstable frame rate. It’s usually recommended that video from these devices be optimized for use in FCP or batch converted with another application.

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Answer 3

David Das1 Author

Level 1

57 points

Aug 2, 2020 10:35 PM in response to Tom Wolsky

That's very helpful to know. It's pretty odd, though, that in Apple's tight-knit ecosystem, one major platform would output something as universal as video in a format that another couldn't handle.

Also, I googled for "iOS unstable frame rate" and didn't find much. Seems like an odd omission given that SO many videos are being made by Apple devices nowadays...

Anyway, for now, guess I will be making Optimized versions of everything to keep FCPX happy.

(And FCPX engineers -- it sure would be nice if you showed an error message instead of hours of a spinning beach ball and erratic behavior...)

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Persistently stuck rendering

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