FCPX very slow, consistently shows beach ball

Same problems here

Same issue. FCPX is unusable and I am ready to move on....

I've been a forum member for a long time and I have rarely complained.

I'm not ready to leave apple yet, but had to express my dissapoinment in the software.

Experiencing all of the above. Also I've never seen such terrible audio waveforms in any software.

Unusable.

Second day with FCPX . ..

Beach ball of doom has taken over.

When I upgraded FCPX through the app store, I had much less of the beach ball and system slow down.

Launch Activity Monitor to find out where the bottleneck is - CPU, RAM, or HD. My bottleneck was HD - even though I was on FW800, my nearly-full Drobo was slowing it down and causing lots of beachballs. Once I figured that out things got a lot better. Things still slow down when accessing events on slower drives, but a Thunderbolt RAID has really helped.

Now my biggest issue is slow rendering.

I just spoke to an apple rep about the slowness. Check software update and there should be a Final Cut X Supplemental Content update that should fix the issue. Same with downloading compressor. I'm on Mac OS Lion.

Didn't address the problem. Still just as bad as before.

Processor 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7

Memory 8 GB 1333 MHz DDR3

Graphics AMD Radeion HD 6970M 1024 MB

Mac OS X Lion 10.7.1

Same here. Please fix that!

Greg

I'm a very new FCPX user, so forgive me if this is a niave suggestion. At the suggestion of a mac user, I dumped all my user preferences and this completely cleared up the issue you were describing.

OK, I've spent the best part of a week reading forums, trying new things and generally going mad looking for a fix to FCPX's sudden lack of speed, constant hanging and beach ball of doom. I've had a looming deadline to deliver a three-minute 5D-media video to a client and just when I was about to give up, I found the answer. This worked exceptionally well for me and I hope it does for you.

Don't use compound clips

Blade cut as little as you can

Turn off background rendering

The major change happend when I took out all my compound clips and instead broke apart clip items. Counterintuitive and non-logical in some resepcts but now I'm back to 'normal' speeds again. Looking back, I see that the sudden failure of FCPX to do anything other than hang coiincided precisely with my creation of a new project which included many more compound clips than usual.

You can live without these until we see a fix. It's a pain but I got back to editing, met my deadline and didn't need to move back to an earlier FC.

Here's the thread I found: http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/335/21442

Kudos Simon Ubsdell

You have a high end machine ( I have MacPro 1,1 2006 and it seems to work much better). But your situation is totally unacceptable. Next update must be more than a update, not small fixes here and there. I would welcome an upgrade, FCPXI, if not, I am afraid that many will simply abandon this product for good. I have never read a forum about a single "little" application with so many complains about basic functions of the program.

I was experiencing this problem and it was getting worse as I continued to edit.

I actually called apple. Here was their solution.

Sometimes, project files get corrupt. The fix is simple: in your current project, select everything (command A) copy everything (command C)

Next, go to the project library. Create a new project. Open it, and paste everything into it (yep, command V). This may resolve your problem. It seems to have worked for me. For now.

Apple also recommends making a duplicate of your current project once every few hours in case it gets so corrupt you can't open it. That seems to be an issue for some poor souls. And then even the backup won't open it.

My guess this "corrupt project file" issue is big and something they are working on given how quickly the service tech offered it as the potential solution. And it is working so far.

Guess that's why some folks never work with a .0 app. Hopefully they solve this (or reduce it) in the next update.

Good luck!

Hey sitefire,

Great solution! Worked for me. Thanks for posting it here. I hope they solve this problem soon.

sitefire wrote:

I was experiencing this problem and it was getting worse as I continued to edit.

I actually called apple. Here was their solution.

Sometimes, project files get corrupt. The fix is simple: in your current project, select everything (command A) copy everything (command C)

Next, go to the project library. Create a new project. Open it, and paste everything into it (yep, command V). This may resolve your problem. It seems to have worked for me. For now.

I tried this and sadly FCPX crashes every time I pasted into the newly created project. So I am stuck with a very very slow project.