Can a newer Mac with M4 processor significantly improve performance in Final Cut Pro 12 on an iMac Pro with Intel Xeon?

I had a 2017 10-core iMac Pro with 64GB RAM, and did a lot of FCP work on that. I now have an M1 Max MacBook Pro and an M1 Ultra Mac Studio.

The iMac Pro was a good machine in its day, but M4 Max machine is vastly faster. In many workflows, a lower-end M4 Mac Mini is a lot faster.

An M4 Max Mac Studio in a roughly similar config to your iMac Pro is about 1/2 the price and is roughly 3x the performance on most metrics -- single-core CPU, multi-core CPU, GPU.

For the increasing % of machine-learning tasks like Magic Mask, the M4-series is vastly faster.

Since the Intel Xeon had no QuickSync hardware acceleration, as a stopgap, the iMac Pro had an accelerator on the T2 chip, but this was more limited than current Apple Silicon accelerators, especially if handling 10-bit 4:2:2 H.264 and HEVC.

You may be able to solve your current performance issue on the iMac Pro but there are much faster Macs available at half the price you paid for the iMac Pro. Also, macOS Sequoia will be the last supported version on the iMac Pro.

If background tasks are constantly running, you can try turning off background rendering, import media using only "Leave files in place," not "copy to library." In FCP Settings > Import, turn off all options for Analyze Video and Transcode. Manually delete all cache files: Select Library in left-hand sidebar, then Files > Delete Generated Library Files > Delete Render Files > All.

If that doesn't help, reset FCP preferences by pressing OPT+CMD when launching FCP. This also adds a file named “VideoAppDiagnostics-FinalCut” to the desktop, containing a record of your previous settings.

While an M4 or most any Apple Silicon mac would likely be faster (in some cases much faster) than your iMac Pro, I concur with Ian: a sudden slowdown could perhaps be explained by causes outside FCP, and that Etrecheck report may well help us help you.

There could be many causes, and that is why seeing the report is better and quicker than a long back and forth of questions and guesses.

As joema suggested the Mac M4 Max Studio will be around 3 times faster than your iMac but even the humble base model M4 mini (c. £530 on Amazon) will be 50% faster.

Such is the improvement in performance with the M-series chips.

I can't answer your specific questions but I would be tempted to try troubleshooting your iMac as I don't think FCP 12.2 should be causing a noticeable deterioration in performance.

Download etrecheck, run it and post the report here.

https://etrecheck.com/en/index.html

Ian R. Brown wrote:

joema wrote:

If that doesn't help, reset FCP preferences by pressing OPT+CMD when launching FCP. This also adds a file named “VideoAppDiagnostics-FinalCut” to the desktop, containing a record of your previous settings.

I have always wondered about the purpose of the VideoAppDiagnostics-FinalCut file.

Can it be used to reset the custom preferences you had before deleting them?

Yes, it can!

If you expand this file, by double-clicking, inside you will find a file called

com.apple.finalcut.plist

and other files with similar names.

NOTE: if you had corrupted preferences, it would not help to put them back!

Instead, here's how you could get a clean preferences file:

After resetting preferences, set everything the way you want; and THEN reset the preferences AGAIN.

This ensures that you get a VideoAppDiagnostics... file including a plist file that:

a) is not corrupted; and

b) has all your settings just the way you want them, and not just at default values

Then whenever you need to reset preferences later, you can just put those clean by personalized files back in place. The files under Preferences should (not surprisingly) go into ~/Library/Preferences

You will also find in the same VideoAppsDiagnostic... folder your Workspaces (if any). These should go

into ~/Library/Application Support/Final Cut Pro/Workspaces

joema wrote:

If that doesn't help, reset FCP preferences by pressing OPT+CMD when launching FCP. This also adds a file named “VideoAppDiagnostics-FinalCut” to the desktop, containing a record of your previous settings.

I have always wondered about the purpose of the VideoAppDiagnostics-FinalCut file.

Can it be used to reset the custom preferences you had before deleting them?

Thanks Luis but for a moment I thought the file might save using a third party app like Preference Manager.

Unfortunately (or fortunately) Preference Manager does the job perfectly so long as you have remembered to activate it after making custom settings.

https://www.digitalrebellion.com/prefman/index

There is no straightforward way to auto-restore the saved preferences. You probably would not want that anyway, since the very reason for resetting preferences is that something was wrong.

In my case it's typically only a few things to manually re-enter in FCP Settings and the menus like View > Browser > Skimmer Info and also Continuous Playback.

However it's possible to dump the saved PLIST file using the macOS built-in command   plutil -p and give the complete pathname to the com.apple.FinalCut.plist file within the video diagnostics package. However this includes many items of little interest to the average FCP editor.

Below is a simple terminal .zsh script that extracts the items you'd normally want as a "memory jogger" to manually change. This writes nothing to the disk, it only reads from the video diag package generated by the reset prefs command. To use:

• Flag as execute permissions: chmod +x fcp_prefs_jogger.zsh
• Run: ./fcp_prefs_jogger.zsh
• It will prompt for the pathname to the video diag package. Just drag/drop that from Finder to the terminal window

Example of output:

"FFAutoRenderDelay" => 0.3

"FFAutoStartBGRender" => false

"FFDefaultAudioEffect" => "AudioUnit: 0x61756678000000ec454d4147"

"FFDefaultColorCorrectionID" => "FxPlug:52A68C6D-B49C-41AA-B3EA-03945D0C8EB4_wrapper"

"FFDefaultGeneratorEffect" => ".../Generators.localized/Elements.localized/Placeholder.localized/Placeholder.motn"

"FFDefaultLowerTitleEffect" => ".../Titles.localized/Lower Thirds.localized/Basic Lower Third.localized/Basic Lower Third.moti"

 "FFDefaultStillDuration" => 4

 "FFDefaultTitleEffect" => ".../Titles.localized/Bumper:Opener.localized/Basic Title.localized/Basic Title.moti"

 "FFDefaultVideoEffect" => "FFColorCorrectionGroupEffect"

 "FFDefaultVideoTransition" => "FxPlug:4731E73A-8DAC-4113-9A30-AE85B1761265"

 "FFDisableSnapping" => false

 "FFEnableClipSkimming" => true

 "FFImportCopyToMediaFolder" => false

 "FFImportFoldersAsKeywordCollections" => false

 "FFImportRemovePulldown" => true

 "FFOptimizeMediaCreateOptimizeMedia" => false

 "FFOptimizeMediaCreateProxyMedia" => true

 "FFOptimizeMediaProxySizingMode" => 3

 "FFOrganizerContinuousPlayback" => true

 "FFOrganizerShowHiddenClips" => true

 "FFPlayerBackground" => 0

 "FFPlayerLoopPlayback" => true

 "FFPlayerQuality" => 10

 "FFScrollDuringPlayback" => false

 "FFSequenceTransDefaultDuration" => 0.3

 "FFShareDestinationsDefaultDestinationIndex" => 0

"FFShowUsedMediaRanges" => true