Recently bought a 10 core brand new imac. Thought I would get blazing fast exports, but it seems like its not the case. Using the activity monitor to see how much CPU the FCP is using during export, I am finding that it is only using 1-2 cores and not using much horsepower at all. Why wouldnt FCP use all available cores and blaze out the exports like FAST????
iMac Line (2012 and Later)
It depends. FCP will use as much or as little as necessary.
Depending on the export setting, much of the workload may be handled in hardware by the T2 chip, in macs that possess it.
What export settings were you using exactly?
Does your computer have onboard encode/decode for H.264? If not much of the processing, especially if effects are added, is being done with the graphics processor. Don't know what JPEGmini Pro is but it's using most of the CPU.
You can see how much of the GPU is being used as well as CPU.
Control-click on one of the headers in Activity Monitor and check GPU.
But your mac also has a special chip called "T2" that in addition to its security features has hardware support for H264 encoding.
This should make encoding actually very fast...
See if you can find the BruceX - 5K processing test for FCP. Run it and see how fast the system is. It's two seconds long. It took my 2019 MBP about 27 seconds to export H.264.
Thanks for the reply. Im using footage from a standard Canon DSLR in 1920x1080 (not 4K). I will paste a picture below of my export settings. The thing is, when I use Adbobe Lightroom to export photos, it uses 100% of all my available cores and it exports like lightning. FCP seems to export at the same speed as my previous imac with 4 cores. WHat can be done to speed up FCP, maybe have it use more cores???
Hey Tom! Not sure is my imac has anything extra in the way of encode/decode for H264 unless its built in. When I bought this beast a few months ago, I did upgrade the the best GPU that apple offered.
Here are my full specs:
Thanks for the paint to the Bruce X test, had vaguely heard about it before but never tried it. As a reference this machine:
Did an export to ProRes 422 in 9.5 seconds, and an export to H.264 in 12.9.
MtD
That's a serious machine Meg. H.264 about a third longer.
Thanks, I've been very happy with it (knock wood). It really lights up rendering into Ram in After Effects.
MtD
FCP export is slow on a FAST machine
