Final Cut not exporting clips — stuck at 0%. Otherwise normal operation.

Google's older Chrome auto-updating software called keystone (which is installed but not loaded) was a known culprit causing all Mac system video toolbox problems that could break FCP. The advice here was to follow the instructions at https://chromeisbad.com to remove all their files scattered across the drive. After removing all the files and reinstalling FCP, problems were solved for many users.

Google's current auto-updating software, called GoogleUpdater, which is installed and loaded on your machine, may also cause these same issues. A test would be to follow the above instructions, then reinstall FCP, reset its preferences, and see if things improve. If they do, you can try the Brave browser which is Chromium-based.

Another thing to try is to simplify the setup to basics. Install a fresh MacOS on a spare disk (preferably an SSD) and boot from that disk. Do not connect your 18TB disk. Install a fresh copy of FCP from the AppStore onto the new boot disk. Import some representative footage and see if it exports.

What drives is your media on, what drive is your FCP library on, and what drive is receiving your exported file? Your 18 TB drive has only 18% free space. That might be OK, but if you are exporting several large files to that destination, maybe each one could become slower.

Is it possible your media files, library and export location are all on that 18 TB drive?

Please run Blackmagic Disk Speed Test on each drive involved in the export, especially the 18 TB drive. Let us know both read and write performance.

This part of your description is interesting: "...spinning wheel of death rolls for almost 45 seconds before the dialogue window appears." So you mean FCP is not actually exporting at that moment, you are just trying to start a new export? IOW there is no beachball at first, but then when you try to set up a new export, the beachball happens when waiting for that dialog to appear? Please describe each step in that sequence and when the beachball happens.

Recent versions of macOS can sometimes have an issue with large HFS+ drives containing large numbers of files if a "File/Open" or "File/Save As" dialog is used on HFS+ (SSD or mechanical drive) and if there are over about 500-1000 files in the export folder. 

In one SSD test drive formatted HFS+, the delay from raising the "File/Save As" dialog to the progress wheel vanishing was as follows:

500 files in folder: 8 sec

1000 files in folder: 16 sec

4000 files in folder: 65 sec

14000 files in folder: 225 sec. 

This lag is system-wide across apps – e.g., affecting Safari, TextEdit, Microsoft Office, Adobe apps, etc. – indicating an OS-level issue rather than a single application bug. Activity Monitor often shows the process “Open and Save Panel Service” consuming high CPU during the delay. It does not happen if the drive is formatted APFS (mechanical or SSD).

Are there more than 500 files in the folder to which FCP is exporting?

I do not remember testing FCP in this scenario, but if your beachball is happening not *during* export but when trying to *start* the export, that would roughly match the above behavior.

If FCP hangs in a beachball state for 45-60 sec, please try to take a spindump during that period and send it to me.

Procedure:

• Get Activity Monitor ready. Run it and select FCP.
• When the FCP beachball happens, with FCP selected, do View>Run Spindump and enter your system password. This will take 10 sec or so. Try to ensure the spindump is captured entirely during the beachball event.
• When the spindump result is on screen, in the upper-right corner select Save and save it as a text file. Do not open it in Word or anything else.
• Send that to me here: https://we.tl/r-X3cRrZClcI

Please run Etrecheck and post its full report here. Use the "additional text" button and paste the report into the text box.

Two things that come to mind are the possibility of low disk space, and third party software causing a conflict.

FWIW, I have no problem at all running FCP 11.2 on Tahoe 26.2, on two different Macs, including a Mac Studio M1 Max.

Assuming you have plenty of disk space and there are no other obvious problems I would suggest the following strategy.

Select the clip in your timeline, copy it and paste it into a new project (timeline).

That will take about 10 seconds after which you should be able to export that clip normally.

Repeat the process with your other chosen clips creating a new project for each. Of course you may be able to copy all the chosen clips to the same project if you want to export them as a single video.

And delete all render clips, turn off background rendering.

Do as terryb suggests.

In the last few weeks someone had performance problems. They had not got Chrome installed but had remnants of it like you.

They deleted all aspects of Chrome as per the article and performance jumped back to normal.

Just FYI, I work on some quite large multicam projects. All my drives (SSD and HDD) are now APFS. I've had great performance, no serious issues.