Troubleshoot FCPX 10.3 on a MBP 8,2

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Troubleshoot FCPX 10.3 on a MBP 8,2

On a favorite old laptop (MBP 8,2 running 10.11), my FCPX 10.3.4 has quit the share function. I can get the drop-down menu of destinations, but none of them response for a request to share. Except for that, everything else on this app runs fine.

Is there some preference file which has gotten corrupted and needs replacing?

I do have the option of a new installation of the app, as outlined by Luis Sequiera1

There's another possibility: Most of this app's work has been on a long-running, continuous run of additions to several libraries. Maybe the sheer number of these is clogging up the available RAM. I have shared all the existing projects out to either DVD or Master File, so tossing all these libraries would not be a disaster.

TIA

Earlier Mac models

Posted on Aug 5, 2023 12:36 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Luis Sequeira1

Level 9

64,682 points

Aug 5, 2023 1:33 PM in response to mrbl

Resetting the preferences, as Tom suggested, is easy. Hold down Command and Option while starting FCP and in the window that appears click Delete Preferences.

An Untitled library opens. Close it and open the library that you want to work with. Regarding other libraries: you don’t need to have them open. They won’t be using any RAM then. But if your drive is nearly full you will feel performance degradation.

Where are your libraries? In the internal drive? How much free space?

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Answer 2

Tom Wolsky

Level 10

151,064 points

Aug 5, 2023 1:04 PM in response to mrbl

Did you try trashing your preferences?

Can you use Add Destination?

If you have multiple libraries open, close them all except the one you need to export. Reboot the computer and open to the one library.

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Answer 3

mrbl Author

Level 1

10 points

Aug 6, 2023 7:10 AM in response to Luis Sequeira1

Many thanks to both you and Tom Wolsky. Trash the prefs and my FCP is well again! I also trashed all but the most recent lib (holding them in Trash until I'd reopened FCP to see if my current project was intact — it was).

1.) My (one) lib is in User>Movies. The source media is on an external HD. Before trashing the libs, it barely had 50Mb/2Tb free. Now that external has 783Gb free.

2.) As far as the internal HD, my User Account has 152Gb/236Gb free.

One of my problems may have been that the source media had some 4k files in it. I think on this old machine, that may have been too-rich data for its computing power.

Thanks to both of you guys for the needed first-aid tip. I'd be grateful for any further comments, based on the above storage info.

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Answer 4

Aug 6, 2023 1:08 PM in response to mrbl

Having only 50MB free on a 2TB drive was certainly a big issue. All drives need some "breathing room", and that was way beyond full. Try to keep at least 10%+ free on all drives, and at least 15-20% in the system drive.

You should be able to handle some 4K media.

In recent versions, one could make proxies of only some of the media, but alas in 10.3 it was all or nothing, so you'd have to make proxies of everything. Not good.

Instead, you could either try to work with that 4K media, or convert it to 1080 using the Finder, or Quicktime Player.

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Answer 5

mrbl Author

Level 1

10 points

Aug 8, 2023 6:59 AM in response to Luis Sequeira1

"Having only 50MB free on a 2TB drive was certainly a big issue. All

drives need some "breathing room", and that was way beyond full. Try to

keep at least 10%+ free on all drives, and at least 15-20% in the system

drive."

Good advice. The above 2TB drive is an external, and I can free up space on that. The laptop itself has a 750GB internal, with two volume (500GB for OS Mountain Lion, and 250GB for El Capitan). That I can easily restructure (with the 10.8 only for those legacy apps which still work and docs openable only by them).

The only remaining question, all other things being equal (ie., scratch area on any of these disks), do I get the best performance with the files and libraries being on the boot-up disk, or does that matter?

TIA

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Answer 6

Tom Wolsky

Level 10

151,064 points

Aug 8, 2023 7:06 AM in response to mrbl

It depends on the specifications of the drives. Give details or post an EtreCheck report.

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Troubleshoot FCPX 10.3 on a MBP 8,2

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