final cut pro x is killing my macbook pro!

Hey Johnny, welcome to discussions. In order to be able to help you better you will probably need to tell us what kind of MBP you are using. What's the processor, what's the graphics board? FCPX is pretty much relying on good system specs, so maybe if you use an older one, you will experience some problems.

Interesting. Are there any options for turning off the background rendering?

I see from your profile you're still running OSX Tiger. That could definitely be a problem. I know that FCPX is a 64-bit program...

I have a new MBP with Snowleopard and the NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M graphics card and I am also noticing the same performance issues. It really struggles to play some codecs, especially if you combine them with transitions, etc. It looks like you'll need to transcode to pro res if you want smooth playback all the time.

Try importing files and selecting USE PROXY Media. And also, uncheck auto analys while your importing. This will help relieve stress on your processor. Remember your using an Core 2 Duo so just running the program is taxing the processor.

Hi Johnny!

I can see the same problems in my MBP!, also, I have a MAC PRO 12 core 2.93GHz with 32Gb RAM and when i use FCPX it use 14Gb RAM!! and the 24 cores are working like ****!.

In my MAC PRO FCPX is REALLY FAST!! with rendering but this is because all the RAM and cores it has, so, in our MBPs FCPX take all the RAM and cores power and that results in high speed fans and other programs came slow.

The good news about the FCPX 64 bits is that take all the RAM and CORES you have to be very fast, the problem is all other programs start crying for resourses.

Thats my opinion, chao!

There are clearly some issues - maybe chipset or driver related - still to be worked out.

I have setup FCPS and Motion 5 on 2 high end Mac Pros which are are also extremely jerky, with spinning beach ball results when workin in FCPX on even 'light' loads and files; and on 10.6.8.(the MPs are 8 core Xeon, 32GB RAM, Raid 0 drives and ATI HD 5870 1GB card).

The issues slow down the whole system while FCPS is running, which shouldn't happen even under high load - and doesn't with any other issues.

Part of your issues are probably because of relatively low specs - but there are clearly performance bugs not related to actually having a bottleneck somewhere that I hope will get fixed very soon....

cheers

I'm having the same issue using my macbook pro 2.66ghz core 2 duo running 8gb ram. I never had any issues with FCP 7 but it is really getting bogged down with X.

Ditto here with my MacBook Pro. FCP7 always ran like a charm. Rendering was never lightning fast, but it wasn't slow.

FCX is just a mess on here

+1

Core 2 Duo seems to get killed.

I'll have to play around more with creating optimized and proxy media on import.

It's almost as if no testing was done on Core 2 duo machines.

My i7 is also being destroyed by FCPX.. Within 10 seconds of loading the program my fans will be at full speed and it feels sluggish all round. I have a 2.66 i7 with 8GB RAM! Certainly not a bad machine..

I have been doing great with FCP7, Premiere CS5 via dynamic link into After Effects but this is ridiculous!

I found that my i7 2.8Ghz 17" MacbBook Pro with 8gig of ram and 2 500Gig SSD drives (purchased this FEB just before the new ones came out - second SSD drive is installed where the DVD normally goes-thanks OWC!) works fine if when I import I allow it to complete all it's analyzation and import before I begin to edit. The fans don't come on and I can work full tilt for about 4.5 hours on a single charge unplugged. It is very slow to edit or do anything else when I tried before the processing was complete.

With your MacBook Pro, did you get a unit with the dual video processor? A while ago Apple started putting in two different video cards. One was for the mundane everyday stuff and the goal was to save power. On my MBP I have a Nvidia GeForce 9400M, I also have an Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT which is much more robust for graphics power. The VRAM on the 9400 was only 256, with the 9600M GT it was 512. The bigger the GPU and the fast the GPU, the faster the MBP especially with FCP.

You can select the faster processor by going to system preferences and choose higher performance. It will require you to log out and log back in to use the different GPU. Also turn your harddrive to never sleep when you do this and you will see some improvement in speed and lag.

Another thing is to set up your projects on a fast external drive. If you try to keep source files and project files on the MBP drive you are begging for slowness.

Good luck!

I am not seeing these problems on a much lesser machine. I am on a 2010 MacBook Air. It runs a bit warm, but performance is great! No jerkyness. No interference with other programs. I am really quite amazed how well it all works.

Perhaps it has to do with disc access? The Air has a solid state internal drive and I am using a 7200 RPM USB external drive.