Final Cut Pro X Spinning Beachball

Hi folks outside of noticing all the missing features everyone's discussing, my first experience with Final Cut Pro X has also been plagued with slow, unresponsive hang-ups, usually accompanied by the spinning beach ball. Most of the time the app recovers... takes about 30 seconds or so ... but other times the ball keeps spinning and will freeze the app, crash the app, or in rare circumstances freeze my whole workstation.

This is counter to the "no wait while rendering" I keep hearing about and is certainly not like what I saw from the NAB demo. So I have to wonder if it's something to do with my system, a brand-new Mac Pro - not a month old - with dual 2.93GHz 6-Core Xeons, 32MB RAM, and Nvidea Quadro 4000 graphics card. All drivers are updated and I'm running on OSX 10.6.7. Meanwhile all my other apps (CS5.5 Production Premium, Boris CC, Colorista II, Lightwave 10) are extremely stable and practically scream with speed. None of these were open in the background when testing Final Cut, by the way.

I've researched the spinning ball even more by manually pausing the background renders. When I do the app seems to free up and I can move around ... That is until I apply another effect that requires a render... then processing kicks back up, and I get more beach balls.

As for crashes, here are two quick observations: The app seems to consistently crash when I try to change the curve style of a clip’s opacity. The other (more sinister) computer freeze has happened twice as I recall while simply accessing a pull-down menu.

Any thoughts? I suspect it could be conflicting software or my Quadro graphics card? Any help is appreciated.

- BC