FCPX very slow, consistently shows beach ball

Sorry to hear that. Here's something I discovered that really improved performance (although I still do get crashes).

Previously, I had understood it was okay to keep the project and event on the same external volume. However, I made a backup and mistakenly put it on my internal system drive. My performance improved dramatically, to the point where it is tolerable (although still get hangs and crashes all too frequently.)

So one thing I would recommend is to keep your project on your internal system drive and your event/media on an external (non-system) drive, just like the old days with FCP7.

Oh--and I think from now on I'll be making both proxy and optimized everything to speed the plow.

sitefire wrote:

So one thing I would recommend is to keep your project on your internal system drive and your event/media on an external (non-system) drive, just like the old days with FCP7.

Oh--and I think from now on I'll be making both proxy and optimized everything to speed the plow.

My project is on an internal SSD drive, Event library on second internal (SATA).

My system is an iMac 3.4 GHz i7, 16GB RAM, I don't think I should be getting such slow performance. If I move a clip by 2 seconds, I then have to wait about 90 seconds for rendering and the beachball to go away. Luckily I don't have clients in at the moment.

Hmm. Yeah. That's terrible performance. Assume you have "Better Performance" checked in playback prefs, have proxied and optimized your media? What kind of source media are you dealing with?

Have you trashed your FCPX preferences? That could help.

Here's a great free app that makes it easy:

http://www.digitalrebellion.com/prefman/

Have trashed preferences, but I have no idea what you mean by proxies and optimising media.

Well, Pete. Time to crack the manual. During ingest, or at any other time, FCPX provides the option of transcoding your original source media to .MOV flavors the FCPX would prefer to work with (essentially low and high res versions of Apple Pro Red codec). These should definitely improve your performance as it requires less computation on the system:

http://help.apple.com/finalcutpro/mac/10.0.3/#verb8e5f6fd

Note that WHILE your footage is being transcoded, best to walk away as the act of transcoding uses a lot of system resources.

Also, switch your playback prefer to better performance and proxy (once you have created proxies).

http://help.apple.com/finalcutpro/mac/10.0.3/#verb8e60ab7

Hope that helps.

sitefire wrote:

Well, Pete. Time to crack the manual. During ingest, or at any other time, FCPX provides the option of transcoding your original source media to .MOV flavors the FCPX would prefer to work with (essentially low and high res versions of Apple Pro Red codec).

Ah yes, thanks for those links,I did read about that a while back but found it so confusing I forgot about it.

(1) I tried Optimised, and things are a bit better, but it makes some files in the event folder about 100 times larger. I'll obviously need to buy another drive.

What confuses me with this is you choose "Original or Optimised". How do you know which of those ot is using? How do I know I'm getting the best quailty for export?

(2) I tried Proxy. I don't mind the lower quaility in playback as I do get better performance, but the exported file is also very poor quaility. I tried setting preferences back to original or optimised, wait for rendering, but then I get all the beachballs and slowness. When I finally export it is still very low quality. Completely unusable.

I'm at a bit of a loss. It used to work fine, not sure if that was before updating FCPX or Lion or what is causing it to be so slow and almost now.

Pete Thomas wrote:

(1) I tried Optimised, and things are a bit better, but it makes some files in the event folder about 100 times larger. I'll obviously need to buy another drive.

What confuses me with this is you choose "Original or Optimised". How do you know which of those ot is using? How do I know I'm getting the best quailty for export?

(2) I tried Proxy. I don't mind the lower quaility in playback as I do get better performance, but the exported file is also very poor quaility. I tried setting preferences back to original or optimised, wait for rendering, but then I get all the beachballs and slowness. When I finally export it is still very low quality. Completely unusable.

Regarding (1): it is actually quite simple, FCP X will use optimized media if it exists, otherwise it will use original. Remember that it is up to you to decide if and when to create optimized media. As you noticed, it takes a lot of disk space.

Regarding (2): proxy is lower quality, and you were right to try to switch back to optimized before final export. You DON'T have to wait for rendering, though. FCP X will export even without rendering. It should not be very low quality, either way.

Luis Sequeira1 wrote:

Regarding (1): it is actually quite simple, FCP X will use optimized media if it exists, otherwise it will use original. Remember that it is up to you to decide if and when to create optimized media. As you noticed, it takes a lot of disk space.

Regarding (2): proxy is lower quality, and you were right to try to switch back to optimized before final export. You DON'T have to wait for rendering, though. FCP X will export even without rendering. It should not be very low quality, either way.

(1) Surely though, if I am working with optimised files, I would then want it to export using the original files, how would I get it to do that? Delete all the optimised files before each time I export?

(2) But the problem is after turning proxy off (ie ticking Optimised in preferences) the xport still exports the low quality. I did some tests and compared:

(a) An export which was done with Optimised/Original = good quality

(b) An export done with proxy = very bad quality (as you would expect)

(c) An export done after Optimised was reticked (and waited for rerendering) = still very bad quality

OK, have done some more testing. In my case it seems all the problems are due to having still images. It makes no difference what format or size.

If I delete all still images form the project, it seems to work fine. as soon as there are still images, proxy or optimized, then it all goes wrong.

Rendering takes forever, it's impossible to view or do any edits while rendering is taking place. e.g just adding a 1 second transition means waiting aboyt a minute for that to render before you can do anything. Moving a clip by two seconds, same thing.

Aftyer a while (e.g. 5 or 10 minutes) the whole app slows down, beachballs, unable to drag clips from browser, unable to move playhead etc.

Trashing prefernces fixes this for a while, but then it happens again ten minutes later.

I've also noticed that FCP crashes if you try to import an iMovie project that has still images.

One thing to try is making a movie from still images using Snapzpro (maybe Photoshop?) and using those as clips instead. A clunky workaround but might be the only way until the bug is fixed.

Although it may sound obvious, make sure you have plenty of hard drive space free, I found FCPX needs about 1/4 free to do its thing.

I also had loads of same issues while using Still photos in a project.

So it is repeatable on more than one system.