Final Cut Pro X Spinning Beachball

I slept on the fixes of last night, and found, this morning, that the HUGE wait times for low grade HD playback were back along with the beach ball. A few minutes to initiate playback.

I am going to remove all my plugins and try again.

10.0.7 has brought back the beachball for me too. 10.0.6 was great. Any way to go back?

Hiding the Inspector (cmd-4) makes 10.0.7 a lot more responsive.

turning off background rendering helps even more

Trashing my preferences worked.

We are, all of us, pathetic. We bought a product which, in my mind, should currently be nominated for "Infamous Screwed-up Software Release of All Time" in the Software Mediocrity Museum where it's already a piece of anthology next to Maps, Ubuntu 10.10, Windows ME, Vista 32-bits and Microsoft Bob.

Not only have we paid $300 for this botched piece of code (programmers should not code on acid), not to mention Compressor ($50) some of us also bought in the times of version 10.0.3 (as we were advised by some of us it could help), we have worked hours and hours trying to get version X (from 10.0.0 to 10.0.7 in my case) to work as advertised. And yes, release 10.0.6 brought some hope, but 10.0.7 killed it.

Months after months, we came on forums like this one to get some help. And we got it: "Muscle up your RAM, get some faster drives, upgrade your graphic accelerator, trash your preferences, empty the cache, turn off background rendering, hide the Inspector, repair your permissions, reboot the computer, avoid projects longer than 20 minutes, remove FCP X files from Spotlight, get Digital Rebellion App, make sure all related drives are 80 % full maximum", and so on. I did all of that (FYI, in the last eight months, I’ve “invested” over one K on my early 2008 8-core Mac Pro).

Sometimes, it would work. It would be efficient for a while. Only for a while, never for longer runs! Just like a curse! And our frustration grew and grew! But we kept using FCP X. Hey, you beat me with a club and I stay with you, gazing at your arrogance, on my knees. Do I have to love my Mac and its ecosystem to that point?

I'd say that for one hour acceptable performance which yields to real positive work - a normal response from so many software I use - I have to endure on a daily basis up to half an hour of wasted time: spinning ball, freezing, rendering not working, undo not working, drag function not working … It’s always a surprise. It’s as if some sort of draw would happen in the System to find out what annoyance would appear upon starting FCP X. And I come back here to read what you guys are saying, to get some advice, and so on. And, sometimes, FCP X works for three or four blessed hours without glitches. A true moment of grace! My mood changes, I get to be so happy. Thank you Tim Cook! And then, boom! The nightmare gets back.

What's even worst, there's not alternative, in my case, anyway. See, I started a 3-hour documentary (three 1-hour DVDs) last March. The shooting had taken place in December and January. I am not doing it for money; it’s on a volunteer basis. That doesn't change the fact that a bunch of people are really eager to watch the three DVDs. As of this morning, I’ve got two hours done, ready to be burned, kind of, and one hour needing lots of work. So I can't quit FCP X and move to Adobe Premiere Pro (I recently got a deal on CS 5.5 where it’s included) or go back to FCP 7 (where I learned editing) on another machine. I'm trapped. I’m locked in version X!!!

Knowing what I know now, never would I’ve taken such a decision upon starting editing my project last March. I swear to God I’d have chosen another piece of software. Would I have done so, I'd be working on something else now; my 3-hour documentary would be history. But, as we all know, History cannot go backward.

As soon as I get my project finally done, I'll stop using FCP X (except, maybe, for some unavoidable post-release maintenance “clicks”) as long as Apple won't have entirely rewritten it, and apologised publicly for those zillions of hours we collectively lost and for all the money some of you have seen go down the drain (remember, I’m on a volunteer basis).

But that will be the day! I'm talking about a major software company who lets posts like this one on its own forums go without acknowledgment! Not even a ******** PR response posted!

No one that really uses FCP X on a daily production beat says it's working according to standards, no one thinks it's acceptable. Everybody is looking for ways of getting the bloody thing to do what it's supposed to do. The only thing Apple seems to be doing is patching and patching and patching its awful spaghetti code instead of rewriting it totally and, in the meanwhile, issuing ways to ease our pain!

If ever Apple is doing something else, why doesn't it let us know; it's called giving hope!

Well said. Sadly, clear communication about problems and issues has never been Apple's thing.

Best summary and analysis I have seen yet ndumais.

A year ago I started experiencing these issues. After that experience and reading about the numerous issues others were posting in this thread, I swore off the product and returned to FCE, hoping that given time, I could return to find the productive and stable application that we have enjoyed for so long prior to FCPX.

After reading some positive reports, I decided to give it another whirl, only to find that issues that were resolved had just been traded for other issues, and the fixes posted in these threads are not a solution to ALL issues for ALL users, but merely hit or miss fixes that might provide temporary relief for SOME users....

And as history proves, Apple will not admit it's failure and rebuild from the ground up, but only continue to issue patch after patch after patch to trade one issue for another and create the illusion that it is truly committed to making this the application that it is promoted as being.....

In the meantime I carefully analyze the status of each new release against other competitve NLE options and hope that the day quickly arrives when there is a solution with the features, power and stability that I require.

I'm hopeful that Apple can provide that solution.........

I don't think Apple will find any solution, they moved on long ago with Mountain Lion, I believe they do not care if FCP X works with 10.6.7 or 10.6.8, they will probably release a new version anyway, but only if you have Mountain Lion. So it's 20$ more to apple, when you'll upgrade. Plus the price of the newest version of FCP. The main problem is that if you do upgrade, many of your application will not work, and do not expect any patches to make it work on the newer OS, they will release a new version instead, taking money from your pockets, and render everything that worked before in snow obsolete.

No wonder why people would go on torrent sites. They are just tired of paying for software that do not work. If companies like Apple want to stop people to steal from them, they should stop releasing crapware for their wayyyyyyyyy overpriced intel machines (put yourself together the same PC with the same parts, price will be way cheaper).

Apple is becoming the big shame of the computer market. Even AMD can't compete with that level of incompetence.

The application has not been tested with 10.6.7, but it has been tested with 10.6.8.

...there are so many things wrong with your post, you must be trolling, lol.

Two things: 1) depending on what you dropped the 1k into, that may or may not of ever been a solution to speeding up FCPX. The software really uses CPU and GPU acceleration. When I used smoke, it was always recommended to use the fastest storage, since smoke really used storage speed. Here's a question: what's the speed of your hard drives? Using SSD or mechanical?

2) if FCPX still isn't working as your NLE...drop it? I mean there is nothing forcing you to use FCPX, there's a ton of editors out there. Usually good to have access to a couple, or use a really big one that's known to be widely adopted. That's how I do it. And your investment into upgrading your computer isn't exactly going to go to waste, all NLEs will use that extra power.

I think there are a lot of positives to FCPX, but I think it's clearly a new piece of software. I use it for personal projects, and expect it to become very competitive in about 2-3 years. It has the framework to be something really great. Just gotta hope they execute on that properly.

Dan-te,

I use four internal 7200 RPM hard drives for a total of 6 Tb As for the external drives, they are USB back-ups and do not interfere with FCP X. I know it could be faster, my main PC uses a Solid-State Drive for its OS!!!

As for other NLE, I've installed Premiere Pro CS 5.5 and I've started playing with it. It seems very fast and nervous in my Mac Pro. I'm told I should upgrade to CS6, but I'm not sure for now.

As soon as my current big project is done with - a matter of days - I'll drop FCP X, do a few small projects with Adobe's package, get to be productive with it and, by the end of February, use it on a daily basis for my next big project. BTW, my current FCP X project being history, I'll be able to consider upgrading my Mac to Mountain Lion.

But, as I understand, if I get to be savvy with Premiere, I won't be compelled to use FCP X anymore, even in the case of small clips. If ever it gets competitive within the next three years, I might reconsider. Of course, by then, I'll probably have become an experienced Premiere user. But who knows?

Maybe I'm wrong. But when you get to hate a software package (which in essence is absurd), change it ASAP. Life is too short to spend so many hours being ****** off.

I have a monster hackintosh (because apple is dragging their feete on making a new pro), 6 core, 32GB RAM, GTX670. I edit from RAID0 arrays that get 500MB/s R/W (the internal SSD RAID0 array is stupid fast. I was editing on a macbook pro 17" and then and still a retina (great release on the MBPr...I have to drop the resolution on my monitor and retina screen to get any kind of editing done) for when Im portable.

The bottom line is that: the program works fine until you start moving from project to project thus creating a bunch of concurrent opened projects...this slows any system down to a crawl. FCPX does a lot of things well, most of which are under the hood where is theoretically can handle crazy GPU cores in the ever changing world of hardware editing. I also like some of the organizational things that they have done; that being said if you can't use the software how it is intended then why even give us the capabilities to begin with

The FCPX team must be aware of this issue and if it doesn't fix (along with not being able to batch output!!!!) then im jumping back to adobe (wish I could punish mac for blowing it but I have no where to go...windows 8, what an embarassment that is)

chesbrougha wrote:

I have a monster hackintosh (because apple is dragging their feete on making a new pro), 6 core, 32GB RAM, GTX670.

A little off topic, but I'm building a similar hackintosh (i7 3930K) solely for FCPX because my 2006 Mac Pro is really showing its age. However, I am confused as to what graphics card works best with FCPX. I heard some mixed reviews about the GTX670 - any problems with yours? what brand are you using? how much VRAM does it have?