Final Cut Pro dropping frames

I'm pretty sure it's not a formatting issue. It is a hardware problem. It is affecting all three external drives. Because of the way USB works, and because I don't know how you have it all connected, a failure anywhere on the bus could potentially cause this problem.

I recommend disconnecting all external drives and test the performance. You can generate a new EtreCheck report to do this. If it runs in about 3 minutes, then everything is fine.

Then, reconnect one drive at a time. Test each one.

In your EtreCheck report, each external drive should look similar to the internal drive, just not as complicated.

For example, in "Mounted volumes", your internal drive has a volume that looks like this:

Mounted Volumes:

disk1s1s1 - Macintosh HD [APFS Snapshot]

Filesystem: APFS

Mount point: /

Read-only: Yes

Used: 8.94 GB

Shared values

Size: 499.96 GB

Free: 250.03 GB

If your volumes aren't APFS formatted, then they won't show any "Shared values". You should still see the redactions. That's normal.

But if you plug in one drive and the report takes an hour to run after that, then that drive is the problem.

Make sure to connect these drives directly. If you don't have enough ports, that's fine. Do one at a time. Then, if all looks good, connect whatever hub you were using and do the same procedure. One drive at a time.

If you can't isolate the problem, then it is probably something internal to the Mac.

Some obvious issues:

disk2 - LaCie Rugged USB-C 5.00 TB

External USB 5 Gbit/s USB

disk2s1 - EFI (MS-DOS FAT32) [EFI] 210 MB

disk2s2 - L***e 5.00 TB (1.44 TB used)

The LaCie Rugged drive seems to be formatted as FAT32. To use drives with FCP, they should be formatted with Disk Utility (using Erase) with the GUID partition map and "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" Format for HDDs and APFS for SSDs. So, the former should apply to this drive. It is also a 5 Gbit/s drive, so it may be slow with certain media (you don't want multicam source footage stored on this drive). Back up any data before erasing and re-formatting the drive.

disk3 - Samsung PSSD T7 Touch 2.00 TB (Solid State - TRIM: No) 

External USB 10 Gbit/s+ USB

disk3s1 - K***2 2.00 TB (1.99 TB used)

The Samsung PSSD T7 Touch is full. You should have at least around 20% of free space on a drive.

Both the Samsung T7 Touch and the T5 drives have "Trim" turned off. That should be turned on.

It looks like you have the Chrome web browser application installed. Chrome interferes with various aspects of macOS, especially video-related ones. You should completely remove Chrome and its associated components:

chromeisbad.com

In lieu of Chrome, you might want to try Chromium or any of the Chromium-based browsers.

It might be a good idea to re-run EtreCheck after fixing those issues and post the new report here, using the "Additional text" function (in the format bar for posts).

That Etrecheck report may shed some light on the problem.

On a new mac, problems like this are often caused by old stuff migrated from the previous one.

Also: what is the drive containing the media, how is it formatted and connected?

Davis_ wrote:

Some obvious issues:

disk2 - LaCie Rugged USB-C 5.00 TB

External USB 5 Gbit/s USB

disk2s1 - EFI (MS-DOS FAT32) [EFI] 210 MB

disk2s2 - L***e 5.00 TB (1.44 TB used)

The LaCie Rugged drive seems to be formatted as FAT32.

That's just the EFI volume. It should be FAT32.

However, now that you mention it, EtreCheck should be showing the filesystem for the other, non-EFI partition, and the file systems for the other external volumes. Instead, it is showing this:

disk2s2 - L***e

Mount point: /Volumes/L***e

Used: 1.44 TB

Size: 5.00 TB

Free: 3.56 TB

disk3s1 - K***2

Mount point: /Volumes/K***2

Used: 1.99 TB

Size: 2.00 TB

Free: 9.51 GB

disk5s1 - P******L

Mount point: /Volumes/P******L

Used: 425.27 GB

Size: 1.00 TB

Free: 574.90 GB

There is something seriously wrong with the connections between those drives and the computer. EtreCheck looks in several different places for hard drive connections, types, filesystems, and mount points. Some of that is redundant, but necessary to see the whole picture. This picture is missing some important parts.

Either these drives are connected through a faulty USB hub, one or more of the USB drives is bad, or the Mac's internal logic board has failed. That would definitely explain the 92 minute EtreCheck runtime.

Your system has been destroyed for pro apps by CleanMyMac. You will need to do a full wipe and install of the OS from Recovery. During system installation migrate only the users, nothing else, no system or application content. Reinstall applications from source. Do NOT install CleanMyMac. Do NOT install Chrome. I see you still have Chrome's keystone daemons running on the system. Not sure if the unsigned RedGiant extension should be running.

Please post an EtreCheck report https://etrecheck.com giving the application Full Disk Access in Privacy System Preferences. Copy the report and use the Add Text button to paste the result into reply box. 

You’re still running Chrome.

Do a complete uninstall of Chrome as explained here

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95319?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en

1. Right-click Chrome in the Dock and select Quit.
2. Open Finder.and go to the folder containing the Google Chrome application, usually the Applications folder
3. Drag Google Chrome to the Trash.

• • In the Finder at the top of the screen, click Go>Go to Folder.
  • Enter ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome and click Go.
  • Select the Chrome folder, and drag it to the Trash.

1) Drag the application to the trash and empty it

2) Drag the following to the trash as well:

/Library/LaunchAgents/com.google.keystone.agent.plist

/Library/LaunchAgents/com.google.keystone.xpcservice.plist

/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.google.keystone.daemon.plist

Then give EtreCheck Full Disk Access in Privacy System Settings.

Run the test again.

To start you need to do a complete uninstall of Chrome and its launch daemons and reinstall FCP.

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95319?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en

1. Right-click Chrome in the Dock and select Quit.
2. Open Finder.and go to the folder containing the Google Chrome application, usually the Applications folder
3. Drag Google Chrome to the Trash.

• In the Finder at the top of the screen, click Go>Go to Folder.

• Enter ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome and click Go.
  • Select the Chrome folder, and drag it to the Trash.
  • 
    

1) Drag the application to the trash and empty it

2) Drag the following to the trash as well:

/Library/LaunchAgents/com.google.keystone.agent.plist

/Library/LaunchAgents/com.google.keystone.xpcservice.plist

/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.google.keystone.daemon.plist

Have you used the additional content installation from the FCP menu? I don't see a Pro Video Formats install.

It is not enough to delete chrome. You still have the google keystone agents. You need to get rid of them, as already noted.

In addition, you also have the creepy cleanmymac. Completely remove it following their instructions. Again, it is not enough to drag the application to the trash.

Once you have gotten rid of these two evil entities, drag FCP to the trash and download a new copy from the App Store.

There is a bug in the web forum software that sometimes makes these reports inaccessible like this. I'm attempting to re-post:

Edit: Nope.

My guess is one of those external hard drives is faulty. It took 92 minutes for your EtreCheck report to run. There is absolutely no indication of any problem that could cause that. The speed for your startup drive is excellent. The only explanation is that some other low-level routine that EtreCheck runs is locking up for 30 minutes or an hour. That's crazy.

I think you can go ahead and take the Mini to an Apple Store or Authorized Apple service provider. They will run low-level diagnostics and most likely replace the logic board.

Just don’t mention EtreCheck to Apple. They don’t trust 3rd party tools, and for good reason. Many are simply scams. Focus on the Final Cut Pro problems instead.

Did you optimize the footage?

Create a new discussion thread and post an https://etrecheck.com report. Be sure to give it Full Disk Access and then include the report in your reply by using the "Additional text" button below.

It's not a restore. You can't just remove CMM and overwrite the OS. The damage has already been done to system components. You should do a clean wipe of the drive and system and applications reinstallation.

The playback lag is not a function of the software and reverting to a previous version will make no difference.

The Etrecheck report might give a glue.