When will Apple resolve the FCPX Crashes when Effects are added to a clip in timeline.

Go on some of the FCP X facebook sites and the crash complaints are mounting - it's not a little problem, it's a major issue and I agree with you

Yep! REALLY annoying isn't it!

I mean the way everybody blames Apple instead of taking a little time to find out why things are going wrong.

First, check the spec of your iMac against the system requirements:

http://www.apple.com/finalcutpro/specs/

Particularly your graphics card. If it's listed here, it's not suitable:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4664

If you are getting crashes, there is some conflict on the OS. Create a new (admin) user account on your system and use FCP X from there - if it runs a lot better, there's a conflict and a clean install would be recommended.

Other ways to improve performance:

Create optimised media.

Hide Waveforms at all times when you don't need them (both in Browser and Storyline / Timeline. They take up a lot of processor power.

Create folders in the Project library and put any projects you are not working on currently, in there. (Twirl it closed to hide them).

Move your projects to the external HD and run from there.

It's also worth Trashing your Preferences.

Faults like this can often be fixed by clearing out FCP X's preferences (for some reason, they get knotted up from time to time).

Download Digital Rebellion's Preference Manager (free, simple to use, and quite safe).

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

With Pref Manager, you can backup the Prefs first, then if trashing makes no difference, you can restore all your settings.

If you trash them and don't restore them, you will need to go over your FCP X settings again, so it's a great idea to backup Preferences from time to time when FCP X is working well, then you can ditch the bad prefs and restore from your (Digital Rebellion) backup.

Andy

Andy, all your suggestions are good ones, but I've done all that and it still happens - see my other recent thread here about the Inspector causing crashes. And, it's not really a matter of performance, but things just not working as they should, even on a totally clean OS/FCP install on supported hardware.

Please can you give exact and specific instances of the media you're using and what exactly you are doing when the system crashes. I have used every effect in the application and have not crashed any of them using an i7 MacBook Pro with AVCHD media not optimized.

Here we go - I have another thread that I started the other day, but thought I'd continue this here. I just did an extensive test. Fred, you may be on to something here. I'm beginning to think some of this is only happening if you are:

(a) running the Trial version

(b) Motion is NOT installed

(c) and it may be that the 10.0.1 update has created this problem, although surely Tom and Andy are running that update...

...or some combination of the above. Anyway...

New iMac i5 quad-core 12mb RAM - new machine with total stock config - only Apple software except for Office 2011.

FCP X Trial version, Motion is not installed

I've tried a variety of clips, but to eliminate variables, for this test I just used clips from a Canon 60D. They were imported from the card and converted to ProRes by FCP X.

Again, these crashes only relate to using the Inspector with certain Effects. If the Inspector is closed, I can apply these Effects and they play back flawlessly. However, once I've applied them and selected the clip, clicking the Inspector button causes an immediate Quit of FCP. And, if the Inspector is already open, just applying the Effect to any clip causes an immediate Quit.

These are the Effects that cause the crash (for me) by category:

Blur - Radial, Zoom

Distortion - Earthquake, Fisheye, Fun House, Glass Block, Mirror, Scrape, Water Pane

Keying - Image Mask

Lighting - Highlights, Side Lights, Spot

Looks - amazingly enough, all work except for Glory

Stylize - Censor, Halftone, Line Screen, Photo Recall, Pixellate, Vignette

Tiling - Kaleidoscope, Kaleidotile, Perspective Tile (but strangely just plain "Tile" DOES work)

So, this is approximately half of the supplied Effects. Interestingly, there is not a single category in which ALL of them work, nor one in which NONE of them work. And, by the way, doing this gave me a chance to check out every Effect - wow are there some cool ones I can't wait to work with. And, I got into this routine of highlight clip, make sure Inspector was open, double-click Effect, if no crash just CMD-z and repeat. I threw a lot of changes at it in quick succession and it handled it beautifully, except for the list above.

There is also a third party free effect from Alex4D called Smooth Move. It looks fantastic! It allows Ken Burns-like scaling which somewhat alleviates the weird animation that results if you scale and move at the same time with keyframes, BUT it allows the flexibility to NOT have the move span the entire clip like Ken Burns does. Oops, sorry, that Effect ALSO crashes the Inspector, so I can't access the controls. And, to keep this test pristine, I didn't try the Alex4D Effect on this test iMac, just on my Mac Pro on a clean system install.

Now, if Apple said (or says later) oh, wait, in the Trial version some of the Effects are not adjustable, but they are flawless in the paid version, I'd be fine with that. And, if you guys with the paid version and/or Motion installed say it works fine for you, I believe you :-). It's just that several of us were excited to get the Trial. I've been using FCP since 2003 and LOVE this new version. But, until you figure out that you can't use the Inspector with half of the Effects if you are using the Trial version, it just seems like the thing is unusable and crashes constantly - because it does.

Now that I know this, I don't think I've had a SINGLE crash otherwise - even on my "wrong" install on my MacPro with FCP7 and FCPX both on the boot drive.

David

Please send this to feedback. I can't make any if this happen. I do have Motion 5 installed, but I would be very surprised if this were the problem, because there are no hooks between the two applications.

What might be your issue is something others have experienced where the screen would turn blue and then FCPX would crash. You can find the current workaround here in this thread.

Re: FCP X placeholder trouble

TOnyTOny

Tom - I have posted a shorter version of my long message to Final Cut Pro feedback.

TonyTony - I agree that at first that seemed like a related problem, seeing as how it concerned Effects and the Inspector. However, the fix you posted in that discussion said to delete a certain folder that was created when Motion 5 was installed. Since those of use having this problem do not HAVE Motion 5, we also do not have that folder to delete. So, this is something else. Please let me know if I have misunderstood that thread. I still think that somehow the Trial of FCP X is just missing something that is required for these Effects to work.

Another question. When you purchase FCP X, is there a real installer? The trial is just a .dmg that includes the app package. There is no installer, you just drag the app to Applications.

And, since the paid version doesn't seem to have the problem, you may be wondering why I don't just buy it. Well, FCP (and maybe Motion as well) is being bought for me through a work source sometime very soon, so I'm not paying $350 if I don't have to :-)

Hi David,

As promised in your other thread I would go for extensive testing of the effects as well. I can confirm that I find exactly the same effects to crash (when opening the inspector or when the inspector is already open). I just sent that list to the FCP-support team.

With the inspector closed the clips will render, but also after rendering the same problem. (but you already knew that)

All other effects work fine.

My source material is full HD-tape based clips, rerender them in 1080P doesn't make a difference.

As mentioned earlier SD-material and Photo's from Aperture (via the media browser) same problem

Ben

It's installed through the App Store application so it's much different then dragging from a disc image. Some users were deleting their Motion 4 templates also but as always back up anything before deleteing it.

TOnyTOny

The trial absolutely should work. There is no installer for the paid version. Straight download to applications.

When you first ran it, did you get option to update additional material? What happens if you run software update?