Final Cut Pro version 10.6 extremely slow!!!

Find a Mac running Catalina, login with your AppleID you used to purchase FCP. Launch the AppStore, click your name in the bottom left to see your previous purchases. Click on FCP to download. You'll likely get a warning saying that the current version won't run on Catalina but you can download the last version that will, which is 10.5.4. After it's installed, make a zip archive and copy it to your Mac.

OK… here is the simple answer to my problem: For FCP 10.6, Apple recommends a minimum of 4G Video Graphics memory and the 2015 MacPro I have maxes out at 2G. So my 2015 is headed off to the Big Recycling Place in the Sky after my tricked out new 16” MacPro arrives next month. My advice to others in my situation? Bite the bullet and buy more horsepower. It is 2021 and a major tribute to the entire Apple team that I have been able to use FCP for 6 years on the same machine thru numerous app and OS releases! It was a great ride on this old thing! Onto the new!

UPDATE: Yes, Terry, rolling back to FCPX 10.5.4 is the best advice. After I did that (and luckily my most critical Library had not been updated to 10.6 yet), everything worked as fine as before, even with it running on Monterey 12.0.1. So it looks like the issue is with FCPX 10.6 and not Monterey. But as I said before, it could be a problematic combination with both of those in play at the same time.

Is anyone from Apple Engineering listening in?

Friendly obvious advice: please make sure you backup to Time Machine regularly and before any updates — it's a life saver, especially in reinstalling an earlier version of FCPX. Also, save a copy of your Library in the current FCPX version before updating to a newer version. Once the Library is updated, there's no going back to an earlier version unless you have a backup Library from that version.

Good luck to everyone here in trying to work around this! "Frustrating" hardly begins to describe it.

Glad it worked out @MoonMike! By default, FCP backs up libraries (no media, just the database) inside ~/Movies/Final Cut Backups/ every 15 minutes, so you could've opened a pre-10.6 version of your library in a worst-case scenario. Glad you didn't need it though. Very good advice on having a backup mechanism in place! Usually it takes a painful loss of data to learn that lesson.

Burnes Hollyman wrote:

is there a good YouTube vid or somewhere which explains how to re-install 10.5.4? And where to get the download? I missed backing up with Time Machine throughout this release version of FCP (Bad dog :-)

Do you have any backup from the last few months? That will have Final Cut Pro 10.5.4.

Same problem here. Horrendously slow to load, audio wave-forms take minutes to draw after every cut, and hard-crashing after adjusting audio levels and zooming-out of the timeline.

Deleting all 3rd party effects and transitions from Final Cut helped reduce the number of crashes, but the problems still exist.

Same problem and from me. Too slow in transconrding and analysis any file. I have a MacBook pro late 2019 with 16gb memory and GPU with 4GB. I try a lot of things (delete the library etc).

Finally I try to do a video with the same files in iMovie, no problem, everything goes fast and smooth.

To all of us who have old ProMac 2015 models with only 2G of video memory and the FCP crash problem, Apple states that the newest version of FCP requires a MINIMUM of 4G but recommends higher than that for proper functionality. In short, the latest version doesn't run well on 2015 models. I have ordered the new mega powerful machine. Not to wax tech philosophical, but FCP doesn't run at all on the first Mac ever made either :-) We just need to realize that at some point we need to upgrade our machines. That's life. My original Mac is in the attic, my 2015 Pro to join it soon. Otherwise, your only option, as has been pointed out numerous times in this thread, is to downgrade to the previous version. You will shut out of any future FCP upgrades (which are automatic) if you don't.

Excellent perspective, Burnes! I would add: my 2020 iMac is fully tricked out, 128G RAM (see my earlier post), and I'm still having these problems. So while you're correct that having a newer machine is preferable (that's why I got my iMac), please know that the 10.6 issues are also occurring on newer, maxed-out machines like mine.

Yes, absolutely correct, Currawong! That's why I posted this earlier:

Please make sure you backup to Time Machine regularly and before any updates — it's a life saver, especially in reinstalling an earlier version of FCPX. Also, save a copy of your Library in the current FCPX version before updating to a newer version. Once the Library is updated, there's no going back to an earlier version unless you have a backup Library from that version.

terryb had also posted:

By default, FCP backs up libraries (no media, just the database) inside ~/Movies/Final Cut Backups/ every 15 minutes, so you could've opened a pre-10.6 version of your library in a worst-case scenario.

With all that can happen with an update, we need to be wise and vigilant in how we backup and restore! : )

Thanks, Everyone, for sharing advice and best practices. Now let's hope Apple is working on a fix.

@Currawong - Depending on how much work has been done since the library was updated and therefore how much work you'd have to re-do, you can open a backup of the library (the library database only, no media) that was created prior to the update. By default backups are created every 15 minutes and stored in ~/Movies/Final Cut Backups/

Currawong wrote:

This will not work. Once you open a library in 10.6, it upgrades the library, and 10.5.4 will refuse to open it.

One alternative is to open a backup version of the library, as already suggested.

Another is to open the library in 10.6, export XML of the library using version 1.9 XML, and then opening that XML in 10.5.4.

@MoonMike: Wow! Now I am freaked out. Is yours M1? Is this an FCP-not-working-on-Intel-chips issue? It should be. I just dropped $4500 to get a tricked out (max everything) newly announced M1+ 16" 2021 MacPro (not arrived yet) specifically for FCP. What you are saying is that, for all intents and purposes, the latest version of FCP is not functionally usable on even the new platform. I wonder if others with the latest tricked-out M1+ machines experience this as well?

If anything, it seems that the problem affects the Apple Silicon macs the most - or at least most of the people affected that I have seen around here seem to be using Apple Silicon.

A fix will surely come in an update, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Hi, Burnes! No, mine is a 2020 iMac with a 3.6 GHz 10-Core Intel Core i9 chip — bought it right before M1 was announced (pooh!).

But you pose an interesting question: is this only happening on Intel chips, or also happening on M1?

To All: please chime in on what chip you're using, so we can get an idea of Intel vs M1 FCPX 10.6 issues.

But either way, FCPX has to work regardless of the chip. We're not all rolling in Silicon Valley money, able to buy a new computer every 6 months.