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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

Final Cut Pro X-OTHER, Mac OS X (10.6.7), Mac Pro w/ Dual 2.93GHz 6-Core Xeon

Posted on Jun 22, 2011 11:59 AM

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199 replies

Jun 22, 2011 12:32 PM in response to churchillstudios

I too have experienced the spinning beach ball as well as crashes. I have noticed that with each new release of new software that is supposed to just work, it usually does not until at least the first upgrade. True of Aperture, IPhoto and now FCPX. Ultimately it gets done but not the way we expect it from Apple. Perhaps that what happens when the price for the previous software is so reasonable. We the early adapters are the beta testers. I'm sure it will all work out but a bit disappointed.

Jun 23, 2011 9:51 PM in response to churchillstudios

Same here.

Ugh. I am on a Mac Pro with 32GB, 8 Cores and ATI HD Radeon 5870 card.

And literally the whole system freezes up with beach balls. If I have Motion 5 on too, I can walk away for a minute. Horrible.

I had no issues with previous FC - it seems there must be a bug here. I don't see it using much of my 8 (nee 16) cores either, or memory; It's pretty pathetic 😟

Jun 23, 2011 10:14 PM in response to churchillstudios

I know this isn't much help but I'm having the same issues as all of you. And now I can let out a big sigh of relief as well. I'm actually running FCX on my 13" Macbook Pro 2.26 Dual Core 5GB RAM. So knowing even the superest of super macs are having issues makes me feel a bit better. I have also never had issues before as I've been able to run FCP, Motion, Photoshop and AE all at once and had no problems. I have decided to forego my FCX training and spend more time in Motion 5, which so far I'm loving! What Apple messed up with FCX they definitely got right with Motion 5.

Jun 23, 2011 11:36 PM in response to moxytom

well, it's some help 😉

I assume, as the outcry isn't uniform, there is something we all have in common - a chipsept, a Graphics Card manufactuer, something - that is making FCPX choke. It's literally slower than molasses, and slows everything else down as well (usually even the most demanding programs - especially on a high end Mac Pro - will not slow down thing overall).

My hope is that this will be fixed pretty quickly; I have now experiences it on 2 Mac Pros - so while maybe not universal, I assume it's not 'really rare' either.


Cheers

dan

Jun 25, 2011 5:51 AM in response to churchillstudios

I have downloaded FCP X right after it was available from Appstore. I was testing it and started a new project. I have worked with it for about 24 hours. However, since today I had several issues with spinning beach ball forever. The app simply crashes when importing a clip into an event, applying an effect or for any other reason. It didn't happen right from the beginning when I purchased it yesterday and it did not have anything to do with software updates I installed right after the purchase. I can't tell why and when it happens, but it does crash frequently. Updating to MacOS X 10.6.8 didn't help either. I am absolutely clueless.

Jun 25, 2011 7:20 AM in response to churchillstudios

This is a relief to me also. I'm running on a 15in MacBook Pro Dual Core 2.53ghz w/4gb ram (soon to be upgraded to 8). While i'm not expecting things to render with unrelenting speed, i've never had an issue with FCP7.


It seems that the more complex the timeline gets, the slower things become. If Apple could fix this, I would be very happy... for now anyways

Jun 27, 2011 11:17 PM in response to churchillstudios

I also have the same problem. I have an hour long iMovie project that I imported to FCPX

and it is soooooo slow. The spinning beach ball pops up if I even move the cursor. It takes probably about 10 minutes just to load the project from the project library. It has crashed twice in the 4 hours I have had it and I have had to fore quit half a dozen times. For being advertised as BLAZING SPEED, it is almost non usable cause its so slow.

Jun 28, 2011 12:34 AM in response to churchillstudios

While this probably won't fix your problem I would suggest updateting your operating system to 10.6.8. Of course you posted this 6 days ago so you might have already tried that by now. I'm on a Macbook Pro with 2.53 Intel i5 and 4 gigs of ram and having the same problem. What kills me is even though it's rendering in the background it seems to take a long time to do basic color changes on stills with a few cross dissolves thrown in. It bogs down my whole computer while rendering in the background. Seems that it would be easier for me to just let it render in the foreground ten times faster.

Jun 28, 2011 3:15 AM in response to Casciari

If it's your first lauch of FCPX, it may be busy constructing an index of all applicable media on the volume. Somewhere I read an Apple note that - at least for audio files - that may take a couple of hours, depending on your machine. I'd suggest to let it finish its background processing (use Activity Monitor or another suitable app to gauge disk activity), then quit and relaunch. Just my humble 2¢

Jul 4, 2011 5:37 AM in response to montywent

The system I am testing FCPX on is a MacBook Pro mid 2010 i7 2.8Ghz with 8gig of ram and 2 500GB SSD drives (one installed where the DVD should go.) It is not fast and does crash whenever I apply an effect or try to adjust a previously applied effect. However, it was much worse at the beginning of the test while importing all the files during transcode and analyzation. I decided to stop editing and let it sit over night to do it's thing and it crashes less and is much faster, though not as responsive as FCP7.


My biggest frustration is the audio ghosting I have where I can still hear deleted audio, even after closing and reopening the software. I am guessing it is playing back the render of the former file and will not be able to play the audio back clean until it has completed a new render. Just a guess.


This is frustrating but it is a version one software. I always run into strange bugs like these with every new release which is why I never switch, (for professional purposes,) to new software or UPDATED software until the forums and my tests reflect the stability.


I am really hoping these bugs or workflow errors can be ironed out in the next few months, especially with the release of Lion. It will be difficult to tell wether the bugs are Lions fault or FCPX in the mean time.

Final Cut Pro X Spinning Beachball

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