Green flashes in Final Cut Pro X

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Level 1

8 points

Green flashes in Final Cut Pro X

I am working on a music video project in FCP that involves multiple video clips on the screen at once, many of these clips with some modest video effects on them. When there are many clips on the screen at once, various clips flash green. It seems the more clips, the more green flashing. I have no reason to believe these clips are corrupted, because they play fine when there are only one or two of them on the screen at a time.

I exported a finished movie from my project to see if the issue was just one of playback, but the green rectangles are in the exported movie as well.

I have an 8-year-old 27-inch iMac (Late 2012) with only 8 GB of memory. I am trying to decide if I just need to upgrade to a new machine now or delay that purchase by adding memory to my current machine or troubleshooting the problem in another way. I had been having some other issues with my computer including randomly crashing, and some other stuff—snazziness with the screen that make me wonder if I have a hardware issue. In any case, my questions are:

1: is this potentially fixable with my current configuration or do I just lack the processing power? If so, how?

2: is this potentially fixable if I add more memory to my 2 open slots? If so, how?

If the answer to both is “no” then it may just be new computer time.

Thanks in advance for your help!

2.9 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i52.9 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5

Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M 512 MB

iMac 27″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Aug 27, 2020 6:05 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Luis Sequeira1

Level 9

73,494 points

Aug 28, 2020 2:29 AM in response to Billzzzz

Your mac’s graphics are underpowered for this and cannot be upgraded, so for the future a new mac is the solution.

In the meantime, some people doing this sort of work on similar macs have been able to work around the limitations. The strategy is to divide into smaller parts with less clips. For example, make a snapshot of your project and rename it Left; another, Right.

In the Left project, disable everything not on the left. Export as ProRes 4444.

Likewise for the Right.

Then import both files and make tge final project.

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Answer 2

Tom Wolsky

Level 10

152,809 points

Aug 27, 2020 6:15 PM in response to Billzzzz

What’s the media you’re working with? The graphics is quite underpowered for what you’re doing, and it sounds as if the machine does have graphics problems. I don’t think the graphics card can be updated. Is your media stored on an external drive? BTW what OS and software version are you using?

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Answer 3

terryb

Level 4

3,394 points

Aug 27, 2020 6:31 PM in response to Billzzzz

Where is the footage from? If it's from a recent iPhone you might try optimizing to see if the green flashes go away. Note that these optimized files will be much larger than the originals so make sure you've got the disk space available.

Or get a new iMac! The specs look pretty great and I'm sure you'll really feel a performance improvement.

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Answer 4

Billzzzz Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 28, 2020 6:33 AM in response to Tom Wolsky

Footage is from Canon VIXIA HF R800 (MPEG-4, 1920 x 1080, 24P) . OS is Catalina (10.15.5). Media is stored on the local internal drive, not externally.

As for the other issues, the machine has been crashing less in the last few weeks, but I've had some weird stuff like the screen image below happen to me in the last couple months.

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Answer 5

Aug 28, 2020 6:44 AM in response to Billzzzz

In System Preferences->Accessibility, make sure that “Reduce Transparency” and “Increase Contrast” are NOT checked.

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Green flashes in Final Cut Pro X

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