FCP Runs Slow on iMac Pro

You have many external drives connected.

Several of your drives, particularly rotating hard drives, are essentially full.

This causes them to slow down considerably.

If you can, try a test: disconnect your rotating hard drives, and open one big library from the external SSD.

Do you still see the same slowdown?

If you have lots of projects or project snapshots it can cause slow behavior when navigating between libraries. In each library, select the Projects smart collection in the top folder, and see how many projects and snapshots you have. Please report the total number for each library.

There is a separate issue if you have imported "bare" AVCHD clips using "leave files in place." Those usually have an .MTS file extension. Those can cause extremely high I/O rates which is noticeable when changing libraries or events, if the viewer is in "filmstrip" mode. Even if just a few of those clips are imported to a library that mostly contains other types of media, the AVCHD clips can "poison" the I/O capability of the entire library. That media type should be imported using "copy to library" or, ideally, rewrapped externally before import using EditReady.

Please investigate these areas and report back. If none of these apply, the next time you have a 60-sec beachball, please take a Spindump using Activity Monitor. Procedure:

• Run Activity Monitor
• Select the FCP process in Activity Monitor
• In FCP reproduce the beachball behavior
• While it's in a beachball state, in Activity Monitor, do View>Run Spindump, or else use CTRL+OPT+CMD+S keys (all at once).
• After the Spindump is generated, in the upper right corner, click the "Save" button and save it as a .txt file.
• Upload the text file somewhere I can see it. That text file will be about 8 megabytes, likely too large for an attachment on this forum.

Tom -- Do you have any other suggestions for how I can get this file? I tried posting a link to a WeTransfer upload folder, but I was warned against that.

Thank you for giving plenty of information up front; it saves a lot of back and forth.

Right off the bat, the issue is surely with I/O, not the processor or memory, which are plenty fast enough.

If I/O is the bottleneck, a new Mac is not likely to help that much.

I will have a look at your report.

In the meantime, you may run Blackmagic Disk Speed Test on those external drives. What does it say?

I can see that you have a lot of files, obviously requiring a lot of space.

I think this all depends on how much media you need to access for the same work.

If you can fit a production in, say, 4TB, or 8TB (as opposed to, say, 24TB), I'd do all the editing on an SSD, and

keep the big fat rotating hard drives for backup and archive.

You could get yourself one or two external SSD, or even a RAID.

You can even get a RAID box (e.g. from OWC, a company providing Mac peripherals for a long time) with empty drive bays, which will allow you to grow in time, and support either HD or SSD.

Using SSD, a RAID will probably not add much speed, if any, but will allow you to make a BIG SSD out of a few smaller ones.

FWIW, I would only edit from a rotating HD if I absolutely had to. SSD are so much better.

I have been over the TOA many times, but the listed items apparently are different from the actually applied items. I can't tell what is permitted and what's not. Is there some other list you could send me which would help navigate this?

To the best of my knowledge there is no prohibition in the terms of use against links to file sharing sites such as WeTransfer. I know the links are almost always removed shortly after posting, probably by a bot. The link will appear in the autogenerated email that does to anyone following the forum, a particular thread, or who posted on a particular thread. I understand why Apple is wary of file sharing links posted on their forums, but again, there is no explicit language that I can see in the TOU that prohibits it. I can't speak to other Apple forums but certainly in FCP and Compressor they are used fairly frequently.

I just tried posting a WeTransfer link to accept errorlogs and that was not OK. I'll be happy to use whatever the approved procedures are, but we absolutely must know what those are. They aren't in the TOU. When dealing with FCP, there is a significant class of problems that require us to receive various logs and other troubleshooting files, and sometimes send customers files as well.

I don't know what the limit is for the Additional Text button, but logs and crash reports should fit in there. I don't think it would take a spin dump, but I've not tried. Obviously it's not a solution for sharing media files.

An FCP spindump is about 8 megabytes of text. That might be too big for an attachment, but the main thing we want to see is from the top of the spindump down to the bottom of the main thread -- the first thread listed. If the users could just use TextEdit (in plain text mode) to copy that to another file, it is only about 60-70 KB. It could be attached to a post.

But that is only one case. We really need a way to exchange troubleshooting files.

I can't speak to other Apple forums but certainly in FCP and Compressor they are used fairly frequently.

I only participate in the FCP community on the US site, but I can compare it with the Japanese site. I feel that only the FCP community on the US site has "special" deletion criteria.

We may have direct discussions with the Japanese site administrator and users. It has been pointed out for some time that the removal criteria for each site is inconsistent and tends to be based on personal feelings. Administrators in Japan rarely delete links unless there is an advertising or sexual purpose. I am always grateful for their kindness.👍

The most important purpose is to "solve a problem". I think we users are working very hard for this purpose. You need to directly validate the file to serve your purpose. Is it really a good thing to take away the means to solve a problem?