Final Cut Pro X Spinning Beachball

I think you should go to your necessary Apple store and demand the Apple employees there tell you exactly what's going on.

I've only had this problem since upgrading to Lion.

It works fine if I am only working in FCPX but when I switch to another program and then switch back only one of the cores in my Mac Pro is being used at 100%.

Could it be a bug which is causing the energy saving to kick in?

In case anyone finds this via Google, I finally found a solution to my FCPX spinning beachball issues.

I was able to significantly speed up FCPX by only having a single "Project" in the "Project library" at any one time (i.e. the project I'm currently working on).

I found that by moving projects I'd already completed out of the "Movies/Final Cut Projects" folder, and to another location elsewhere on my hard drive, I could dramatically improve the responsiveness of the Project I am currently editing.

Hope that's helpful to somebody else!

Jonathan

That's an interesting solution. I was starting to think the same thing. It seems to take forever to read all the projects upon starting the application and when moving back into the project library from a project.

I tried creating folders (right click on project, new folder) for my projects that seemed to help moving back from the project to the project library, but I still get a drastic loss of responsiveness over a couple of hours of working... The lag on typing text on a title is a joke... It might take 2 minutes for it to catch up on a two word title.

I do find that restarting the system helps, but only temporarily. I upgraded my RAM on my i3 iMac to 16gb which did help, but

I would imagine the update is going to be a big one.

Same w/ me. 8core seems really sluggish, paid way too much for a system to do this.

From my System Information app:

• Model Name: Mac Pro
• Model Identifier: MacPro5,1
• Processor Name: Quad-Core Intel Xeon
• Processor Speed: 2.4 GHz
• Number of Processors: 2
• Total Number of Cores: 8
• L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
• L3 Cache (per Processor): 12 MB
• Memory: 8 GB

And my graphics:

• Chipset Model: ATI Radeon HD 5770
• Type: GPU
• Bus: PCIe
• VRAM (Total): 1024 MB

I have the same beach ball woes as everyone else. I got a beach ball for about three seconds just by clicking on the loop playback button.

Thx number27, I tried your solutions... its better...I mean I can edit for about 3 minutes before it plays beach ball, compared to 30sec before your tactic. Glad FCPX has a good memory system, all my edits are all there on relaunch. When I moved the completed Projects, all my Events went missing on relaunch. Had to find the 1 project that held it all together??? So my projects Lib has a couple of projects in it, current ones and the must have. Would prob be better with just 1.

Not sure why the Project Lib has to be such a big deal. Not sure whats going on under the hood but im guessing it takes up a bunch of resources...

crash crash crash... going to the beach with my $%$# ball.

Hi all!

As many of you have told I am experimenting the fantastic spinning beachball all the time, especially when I open a complex project or too many projects.

I can add some other bugs experience all very frustrating:

1) Compound clips. When I create a compound clip in the event browser to replicate the workflow of old nested timelines, often it does not save my work inside the compound clip. So I have to start again and again.

Between I really don't understand why if I modify the compound clip this does not brings the modification in the project where I had put it. It's not really the same of the nested sequences behavior. So I have ti delete and put again the modified compound clip… Boring!

2) Try this: from event browser drag a clip with only audio selected. Now make a new project. Try to copy the audio clip from one project to the new one. No way. It's impossible.

3) Audio ghosting. You can hear the audio that you have deleted.

4) Audio shifting. You can hear the audio not in sync from a previous clip.

5) Undo command sometimes disappears so you cannot undo your wrong edits!

6) If you want an immediate crash select clips from the edit list and try to copy...

In general the system becomes less responsive as many clips/effects etc. you put in a project. It crashes so often that sometimes is unusable. And worse it saves when he wants instead of when you want. Please take away the Autosave feature!

I waste my time on this software because it has many good features and it seems to bring new life to editing, but, even if it is a version 1.0, It's not serious from Apple to release a so bad code.

Hope they solve these and other problems soon else I'll have to switch to other programs.

My system is a MBP 2011 with 8gb ram and SL 10.6.8.

BRAND new iMac, 3.4 GHz i7, 8 GB RAM, Lion 10.7.1.

I'm not a forum poster, but I don't know what else to do.

I upgraded to this iMac from my 2+ year old MBP (which I loved) because Apple sold me on all this "SSD/Quad-Core/SuperFastSpeed/WowLookAtItFly!!!" stuff. I was happy to pay the money (which was substantial) on the premise (and promise) that I would have an FCP X editing GodMachine at my disposal. I feel robbed. I've been spending my beach ball time watching FCP X tutorials and seeing all these people cruise along at break neck speed has me banging my head against the desk. WHAT'S WRONG WITH MY BRAND NEW EVERYTHING!?

APPLE DO SOMETHING!!!!!!!!!

With FCPX, as with FCP7, it is best to turn off the audio wave. 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

My current process for keep FCP X running ok, acertained mainly from these forums, is:

• Your working project should be the only project in the "Final Cut Projects" folder. I had 3-4 in there and performance was very slow. I back those up.
• Effects, information panels closed as much as possible.
• Turn off audio wave forms. This has worked wonders.
• A computer restart an hour. It takes 5-10 minutes for FCPX to shut down (Command - Q), so I try to do it every hour. I also don't run any unneccesary programs in the background.
• I'm using transcoded proxy media playback.

I still get freezes and beachballs, but its tolerable. Does anyone else have anything to add to this list?

i5 2.53, 4GB Ram MBP

Ok, my user experience is frustrating. A program that in theory is perfect for my workflow and my needs keeps beachballing and needs forced quitting.

I noticed that problems arise using H264 HD clips: a 1 hour project containing 3000 was slowing down my macbook to zero. Using proxy helped a lot, but it took a day to convert. Besides, this is not what I was expecting by a 4000 $ hardware + software prime cut combo.

No problems editing panasonic P2 HD files and a mix of other sd formats. So it seems, but I still have to start a real complex project.

I'll try to turn off wave forms, and moving projects, but this is ridicolous: i'm working... i need them in view! No way closing info panels, restarting each hour, closing background programs. This is not what my worflow was supposed to be like, Apple!

Hi!

MacBook Pro 15" 4GB RAM, MAC OS X 10.7.1 and just upgraded to FCPX 10.0.1. Got Beachball after upgrading. Experienced choppy playback on both video and audio. Audio out of sync. Etc. On one occation FCPX crashed after doing Syncronize Clips (took about forever!). The has MBP gotten VERY sluggish after that FCPX upgrade.

I had three (small to medium) projects in FCPX project folder. As many of you have mentioned I moved the projects out from the disk folder and left only the one in edit. It seems to have restored much of the responsiveness on the MBP. The beachball has almost dissappeared.

But. There still seems to be something that the programmer-dudes left in the FCPX code that is slowing my MBP. Why, why, why? Wish for them to do something about it really SOON!

Rune :-)

Similar issues here. 27" iMac i5 2.7Ghz 8GB RAM. 10.6.8

Held off on the initial release. Thought 10.0.1 might be a safer bet so I pulled the trigger yesterday.

Lot's of beachballs. Also having crashes releated to the Inspector. Certain transitions and FX crash FCPX if they are selected while Inspector is open, or opening Inspector after selecting.

VERY disappointed. Unlike the issues many of the pro editors have due to limitations of the program, the feature set is perfect for what I need, but this app is nowhere near ready for release, even as a version 1.

After wasting a day and a half with training and trying to get thru some basic simple projects, I'm DONE.

I may take another look next year if the reviews improve and threads like this don't continue to dominate this board....

Good luck,

JP

Same problems here.

The machine is a Mac Pro “Mid 2010” with this configuration:

• Processor: 3.33 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon;
• Memory: 24 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 ECC;
• Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 5870 1024 MB;
• Software: Mac OS X Lion 10.7.1 (11B26);
• HDD for media: striped RAID set with 3 HDDs scoring 353.6 MB for write and 377.8 MB for read in Blackmagic's Disk Speed Test app.

I discart an issue regarding your Nvidea Quadro 4000 graphic card.

The spinning ball freezes the app for about 30 s or crashes it after making some simple operation, like changing a clip's volume, listing clips with some keyword (even if it's just listing clips proprieties, not showing the filmstrip view!) or selecting clips.

I'm testing FCPX updated version 10.0.1, the same random slowness and stupid crashes experienced with the last version are still here! And this is after I made a clean reinstallation of Mac OS X Lion and installing only FCPX, Motin and Compressor in the system!

I'm working with a large Event, with 2300 asset and 122 hours. Nothing that Adobe Premiere or FCP 7 couldn't handle. What the point of an advanced database driven, keyword based asset organization model, if it's unusable due slowness and instability when dealing with a complex projects?

I didn't start editing yet! I'm just organizing the material. But I don't think this situation will get better when working with the complex, an hour and half long movie edit I was planing to do!