Does anyone else experience FCP X CONSUMING ALL AVAILABLE RAM with simple tasks?

I do not know much about iCleanMemory, but I assume that it displays the "free memory" or the counts inactive memory to the used memory. The "inactive memory" can be a lot, but in effect you can count it as free: it is released as soon as the demand for memory rises by the active applications. Inactive memory is not freed up up but reserved for a recently closed application in order to start up faster. But that only when it is not needed.

I would not trust iCleanMemory, but use Activity Monitor instead, that shows all there is to show.

You will see that for very short periods the memory used can be extremely high (reading/filling buffers, reading large parts of other routines in the app, and that sort of things), but will be released rather quick, when you count free and inactive memory together.

An then disk accesses: when you have not much free space on you disk, you get a very high number of disk accesses (reads and writes) that slows down everything. You can see that also in Activity Monitor.

The "inactive memory" can be a lot, but in effect you can count it as free: it is released as soon as the demand for memory rises by the active applications.

That's what happens in theory. What actually happens for applications like FCP is that there will be about 1G of free memory with 6G inactive memory (on an 8G system, the numbers are different but basically the same proportions on a 16G system). You'll add a couple of still images or try to do an effect and the free memory will plummet to a few MBs. The application will grind to a halt and become almost completely non-responsive, and the inactive memory will not release any more RAM. You can close the app and start up again, but it will still slowly wind down until you reboot or flush the inactive RAM with a utility. I have seen this many times in the Activity Monitor, and reported it multiple times, but it is an OS issue that Apple simply refuses to address or really even acknowledge.

Here are 4 screenshots, I had to close and reopen FCPX. I do this untill the render is complete. ;(

FCPx basically needs 10x the amount of CPU for the same tasks as other applications. It is tuned to provide you with eye candy rather than stellar performance. I love and use the app and would not think about using anything else. But performance wise the app is bibbing baby that is in serious need of performance-optimization.

Example:

FCPx needs 200-250% of a Retina Mac Book Pro CPU to playback a "simple" H.264 Movie (FullHD) and it is heavily jerky about it if you habe Playback set to high quality. (Only thing that really works is proxy)

Premiere Pro for the identical task needs 20-30% of the CPU

QuickTime Player needs 9%

This is NOT just on a Retina but the ratios conform to all the computers I have tested it with.

This is a very serious and might I add embarrassing problem for an app which sole purpose is to cut motion pictures. And it is very very far behind the competition.

Still... Just have FCPx create proxies for you and you should see immediate remedy

PS -- You dont really need to roundtrip to motion no more. Motion is like a plug-in for FCPx. All you need to do is a little reading about creating FCPx templates from within motion. I am sure that you will love it. I do ;-)