final cut pro x is killing my macbook pro!

Yeah, that's going to speed things up nicely too! I haven't went the solid state way yet. I have to wonder what would happen with the flash memory drives as well.

If you find a solution please let me know. I kept problem solving until I eventually just put a clip I was trying to play in FCP X in iMovie and it played flawlessly.

Not happy with FCP X right now.

Are you running FCP X on your system drive? If so, how much free drive space do you have. Of course a big difference between FCP7 and X is that X does the background rendering ... FCP 7 rendered only when you told it to. You can open the background process monitor window in FCP X and pause certain tasks and see if that gives your computer some breathing room. If the monitor window shows transcoding progressing painfully slow, you have given X a lot of clips to work on. Then you could ask yourself if you really need all that material for your project, or are you just using the event and files like you would folders in Finder. I got around a 400% increase in response and usability when I simply removed large amounts of clips I really was not using and their associated events. Maybe my understanding is not perfect in this area, but it really helped me. If you have imported entire directories of clips to events in X, transcoding and memory can take big time hits. This uses everything your processor can give ... thus slowing down all else that is running on your computer. Just thinking ... I use FCP X on a 21" 8GB iMac (new), a 2010 MacBook Air with only 2GB and a 2010 MacBook Pro with 8GB. No problems. All are running Lion now, but had been on Snow Leopard 10.6.8.

stephen

I have the same problem even if I am only using one clip. I load it. Render it. Then put it in the player and it does not play smoothly.

Just confirming the same annoying issue on a Macbook Pro 13" C2D 2.4, 4Gb ram, nVidia 320M.

I'am working in multiple short projects (1-5min each), with with autorender turned off, and with proRes proxy media from internal hd to avoid even more sluggishness.

Nevertheless, since start the interface has been VERY sluggish, and it has gotten worse the more I edit on. Some clicks can take mora than 10 seconds to performs, freezing entire app, there are frequent crashes and LOTS of colorful spinballs...

At start I though it was the cpu being too slow (or ram to small) to manage fcpx. I was even considering upgrading to a iMac i5 Quad. But as far as I've read, there is not much better chances with a faster mac... it's a software related problem. In fact, I used to use FCE 4 and it worked flawlessly. Encoding was relatively slow but you could cut and apply transitions and effects on a fly, without noting anything to become slow as you grow your project.

With FCPX, I expected enconding to be slow coming from a C2D CPU. What I wasnt expecting is the WHOLE interface to be such a pain... even other applications get slowed down when fcpx is running.

I hope Apple resolves this issue as soon as possible. It is very frustating trying to get the work done on an app that seems as instable and slow as a beta open source video editor (pitivi, kdenlive, maybe?)

Similar specs, same problem. FCPx is literally unusable on my 15" Macbook Pro. Apple owes us all an update.

I gave up and got my $ back. I want them to be successful with the new version, but if it doesn't work, it doesn't work.

With FCPX, as with FCP7, it is best to turn off the audio wave form when being used on iMacs. I have been using FCP since 3.0 and have found the audio wave form brings most, but very high end, systems to their knees.

Go to the clip appearance button on the bottom right of your project timeline and select the 2nd from right track option. Doing this has greatly increased the speed of the program and I hardly ever see the spinning beach ball of despair.

When needed the wave form can easily be turned on then off agai

what aussiearn said!!

I came here to the forum to moan over the fact that FCP X completely froze my iMac, but the trick of disabling audio waveform made FCP a different beast to handle 🙂

I miss having visual control over the audio in my clips though, hope Apple can whip out a fix...

Aussiearn, your my hero !!

I had performance issues too on my Mac Mini while it fits the specs needed for FCPX.

2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

4GB DDR3

NVIDIA GeForce 9400 256MB

Mac Os X 10.7.1

It also slowed my mac down driving me crazy !

The Clip appearance button change did the trick !

It's not running as smooth as iMovie '11 but now i can finally work with a product that costed me a lott of money.

Thank you for sharing this trick !

Greeting,

al the way from The Netherlands !

HI

I have the same problem wit FCP X and my Mac Book Pro It takes "hours" to do anything using COMPOUND CLIPS or just to make a transition and play it... it's really frustrating. It crashes every now and then and the system get really slow (not to mention when Time Machine is running) IS THIS NORMAL OR SHOULD I CHANGE MY MAC BOOK PRO?

MacBook Pro

Identificador del modelo: MacBookPro6,1

Nombre del procesador: Intel Core i5

Velocidad del procesador: 2,53 GHz

Número de procesadores: 1

Número total de núcleos: 2

Caché de nivel 2 (por núcleo): 256 KB

Caché de nivel 3: 3 MB

Memoria: 4 GB

Velocidad de interconexión del procesador: 4.8 GT/s

Versión de la ROM de arranque: MBP61.0057.B0C

Versión SMC (sistema): 1.57f17

NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M:

Modelo de chipset: NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M

Tipo: GPU

Bus: PCIe

Anchura de canal PCIe: x16

VRAM (total): 512 MB

Fabricante: NVIDIA (0x10de)

ID del dispositivo: 0x0a29

ID de la revisión: 0x00a2

Revisión de la ROM: 3560

Versión gMux: 1.9.22

Christian.

Hi

I just came across this post and I'd like to add to it. I have a new 27inch iMac, 3.1 i5, 4GB Ram. I have switched off background rendering and am working in proxy mode but yet I still find that Final Cut Pro X kills my harddrive. My system monitor shows my CPU and Ram are fine but the HDD is working full pace all the time. It's impossible to work with this. Has anyone else experienced this? I see that others experience slow downs from CPU overload or RAM overload but I'd like to know if anyone else has a problem with their HDD keeping up.

I've been looking all over for help on this so any input would be very appreciated. Currently I am very frustrated and discouraged by all of this.

Kind regards

Nick

nicholasds wrote:

Hi

I just came across this post and I'd like to add to it. I have a new 27inch iMac, 3.1 i5, 4GB Ram. I have switched off background rendering and am working in proxy mode but yet I still find that Final Cut Pro X kills my harddrive. My system monitor shows my CPU and Ram are fine but the HDD is working full pace all the time. It's impossible to work with this. Has anyone else experienced this? I see that others experience slow downs from CPU overload or RAM overload but I'd like to know if anyone else has a problem with their HDD keeping up.

I've been looking all over for help on this so any input would be very appreciated. Currently I am very frustrated and discouraged by all of this.

Kind regards

Nick

Nick,

Apple's machine specs for FCPX are misleading...(that's being kind)

It might be fine for a short youtube clip if you keep it simple.

With 4GB of RAM your system is paging out memory to the hard drive, OSX Lion is a memory hog to begin with and between FCPX and the OS your hard drive is being beaten to death.

You will be much better off adding another 4GB RAM (or more) and if possible, an external Firewire 800 drive for video projects.

Wow, thank you for the great advice. That is really interesting. I'm currently bidding on another 8gb RAM on eBay so that will bump me up to 12GB. Thanks for the explanation of memory paging.

Once I get more RAM I'll post my review up here. I'm sure there are many who have this same issue without realising it.

Kind regards

Nick

What is interesting and discouraging is this post demonstrates the slow performance and memory hogging aspects of FCPX have been know for many months, were not addressed in either of the updates. So it must be fairly fundamental and difficult ti correct. Otherwise Apple would have fixed it, unless it is just a ploy to sell iMacs with 16 GB of RAM for big bucks.

I thought about buying a new 27" iMac with 16 GB of RAM, but first they have to fix this problem and some others in FCPX.