Q: Final Cut Pro X Spinning Beachball

intrestingly i don't get the spinning ball anymore ... i created a 1h project, with lot's of different footage, copundclips, edits, filters ... it keeps running smoothly ... probably my spotlight exclude from the FCP media folders was helpful  and the additional ram (now 8GB in my MBP)

For all those out there who think the solution is to go back to Snow Leopard - I have exactly the same issues on my 2008 Mac Pro (12Gb RAM, Radeon HD 5770, 2Tb HD), running... Snow Leopard.

There doesn't seem to be any particular thing that sets the beachballs off - but once they start, you have to restart the Mac to get rid of them. Grr.

did you try typing

purge

into the commandline when the beachball appears?

Nope - the thought had never occurred to me before...

However, I will give it a go - what is it supposed to do? (I'm presuming it purges a buffer or cache of some sort, but it looks as if it does it for the whole system, not just FCP X.)

it actually clears all systembuffers and sets the system basically back to the state like after a restart (just memorywise)

Neat - I can think of many other situations where this might come in handy. I'm surprised I hadn't heard of it before. Thanks.

Hi Sudio Engenier thanks for your posting .

I run an 8 core MacPro, Lion ,FCPX 10.3 editing is impossible the beachball is spinning constantly .

So I installed SL on a different partition and editing is like a charm .

Yes I see the beach ball once in a while but only for seconds not for 15 minutes like before .

Thanks a lot  ;-)

This might help:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_6SfMZxoLc&feature=youtu.be

Oh no...

Please I don't wanna hear this.

It kinda reminds me of an old nightmare... When Microsoft users had to delete their Vista os to go back to XP.

Apple, pleeeease don't do this to us!

Let's fix Lion! (we can do it!)

Its really bad that Apple are leaving us in the dark. I really am starting to dislike this company. Its simply not the way to do business and keep happy customers.

Its about time they told us there plan with FCPX...

My latest beachball experiance lasted more than 8 hours.

As I imported 2891 jpgs of 1920x1080 72dpi apr 800kb per size.

Apr 1 hour to pull them on to my timeline (PRO RES 422, 25frames/second 1080p)

Apr 5 minutes to select all

Apr 2 minutes to open the dialogue where i can change the duration (ctrl+D)

Apr 1 hour to change the duration from 10 sec to 1 frame duration.

Playback was terrible. Even after restarting.

This process, is tough I know. 2891 jpgs all ready sized and everything is demanding, but come one. If I cant do this???

So now I opened up Final Cut Pro 7.0.3

All exact steps done in less than 15 minutes and playback on the timeline is smoooooth...

Need I say more?

MacbookPro Mid summer 2010, i7 core 2,6Ghz, 8GB ram, 7200 rpm disk and eSata Sonnet Tech Fusion F3 raid 0.

OSX Lion 10.7.3, FCPX 10.0.3

Argh!!! I'm getting the spinning beachball every single time I try to edit a FCPX project. I'm running the latest version of everything, OSX, FCPX, maxed my MacBook Pro memory at 8GB, don't have any big apps running at the same time. This is completely unacceptable. I should have just bit the bullet and gone to Premier

you ever worked with premiere? i promise this has also some problems

check that document here

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3893

especially steps 7&9 are worth trying

additionally i'd try excluding the the fcp project and event folders from spotlight and restart machine

also i'd write feedback to apple  about your problems - if they know about existing problems they can do something about it

thanks for sharing this - all the first ones are obvious and 9 I already have done a few times. but number 7 - hiding all the events and projects worked for me so far. I didn't go thru each one to test since I have a bunch. so instead I just hid all projects and all events and started a new one. It was a simple edit - simple or complex edits in this don't seem to be the problem - you can do something very simple and lock it up. so anyways everything worked smoothly and zero lag, zero beachball, quick scrubbing, quick opening of different browsers. I even applied a couple audio filters like limiter and it didn't screw up the waveform like it usually does.

so at this point I'd like to surmise that FCPX is having a hard time keeping events / projects from corrupting. I've never force rebooted during use or anything. so who knows what is causing things to go bad in the first place but that must be the issue.

honestly I'd be happy to hide everything I'm not currently working on and simply move these folders around as needed if this fixes the problem for now. I've thought about switching to Premier but I really don't love Adobe and I really like FCPX when it works right - still holding out I guess for Apple to fix it. I do however think they owe $100 or more gift cards to all the early adopters for putting up with this for so long - totally unacceptable to pay $300 for a program that doesn't work properly - as if we are guinea pigs paying to be tested on (all the while trying to keep our professional work going

actually the price for such a software is pretty low - but i wish apple would be a bit more communicative/responsive regarding development and bug-fixing

what i keep doing is writing feedback to apple - i believe they are reading it, but unfortunately they neve respond

additionally i'd like to recommend a little tool that shows you your free memory - you'll be surprised how much memory is used for programs you might not need during editing  for instance a browser

http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/menumeters/