how can I speed up FCPX

Question

how can I speed up FCPX

To all you frustrated FCPX users,

I am a wedding videographer, I made the transiton from final cut studio to FCPX and find it to be an excelent programme. That is until I started to produce a 90 minute complex wedding video with 500+ clips, 10 tracks of music and a substantial amount of colour correction in it. I am working on a 17" mac book pro 2.66gz intel core i7 with 8GB of 1067 MHz DDR3 Ram and a NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M 512 MB graphics card. and I am runnig Lion 10.7.2 (11C74)

This is hooked up to an apple 30" cinema display with the Project and Event filles stored on a 1TB Lacie rugged disc via FW800 I have 30GB of disc space available on the laptop.

I have prepared the movie (60hrs work already) and it has become progressively slower the longer the time line gets. I have tried using proxy media and having no other software open at the time in attempt to get some speed up, not to mention endless restarts. The events are HDV1080i50 (25 Mb/s) Linear PCM. (I am ot sure if I should convert the time line to ProRes422? which is the Codec I used in FCP Studio. I have turned off background rendering and the playback is juddering and evey few seconds the spinning ball comes to play, often for up to 30 seconds before it catches up.

I have been watching how the Ram is used and from there being 2gigs free at the start, I add a clip or two and zoom the timeline, nothing like a Colour correction and suddenly there is only 50mb of free ram and the machine speed nosedives to what we used to put up with 10 years ago!!

If anyone has a fix for this, you would be doing me a huge favour. I am already last with this movie. I was considdering going and buying a mac book pro with Thunderbolt and seeing if that was the problem.

This software is, as it says, a Pro aplication, so surely it should cope with a full length movie?

Philip

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7), I7,8gig Ram,30"screen

Posted on Feb 10, 2012 10:52 AM

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Answer 1

andynick

Level 5

4,961 points

Feb 10, 2012 11:06 AM in response to Philip Morley1

FCP X is hopeless with any project longer than about ten minutes if you have multiple tracks and effects.

Break your project into smaller chunks, hide waveforms (they take a lot of processor muscle) and move unused projects and events into new (temporary) folders so that they don't appear on startup.

Once each chunk of your project is complete, make it into a compound clip, then finally, create a new project and drop the compound clip 'chapters' into it for export.

Andy

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Answer 2

Feb 10, 2012 2:44 PM in response to andynick

Hi Andy,

Many thanks for that, I never thought there was a time limit on this software!! Apple kept that quiet??.

It take me back to the old Final Cut days when you would lose the whole timeline on a crash so you made it in chunks to limit the loss. I have followed your instruction and "presto" a massive improvement. The odd drop frame but nothing like the problems before. It would be helpful if Apple gave you the job of telling us all how it really works and gave you a cut of the proffits too!!!

Philip

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Answer 3

Feb 10, 2012 2:50 PM in response to Philip Morley1

or do like im doing, just use final cut studio 3 since it works GREAT !!! after all the reading on these forums about how awful fcp x is now that the multicam update has been added, im definitely recommending that one reconsider coding their projects in fcp x . . . stick with the tried and true and keep a winner.

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Answer 4

Feb 10, 2012 3:05 PM in response to Philip Morley1

Sorry but I would never consider cutting a project so elaborate on a laptop.

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Answer 5

Feb 10, 2012 3:15 PM in response to Paul Veronin

Paul Veronin wrote:

Sorry but I would never consider cutting a project so elaborate on a laptop.

why not paul? many people on here and from tech sales at apple say the new i7 laptops are easily up to it. i personally am setting myself up to be able to do the same thing AND i have two or three editors that freelance for my company that does over 100 projects annually and they all use macbook pro's of the i5 generation . . 100%. however, they all use fcp 7 from fcs3 NOT this new fcp x that has a history of issues since the much awaited 10.0.3 upgrade that now seems to have slowed everything rendering to a near halt.

i thought i read in one thread where a third party app will retrace a project back to fcp 7 genre and therein the project would be managable?

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Answer 6

Feb 10, 2012 4:18 PM in response to Philip Morley1

You simply can not speed up FCPX, it is slow and will be slow until someone who understand how to make decent application take over the construction. But Try Andy's advice.

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Answer 7

Feb 12, 2012 2:11 AM in response to innocentius

Hi everyone,

I just though I would report back on Andy's advice. I have now split my 90 minute movie into 9 x 10 minute projects and it has certainly improved the work flow although the playback even after render is choppy and the ball is still in play from time to time. Thanks again for that advice Andy

I have been watching the use of Ram using IStat pro. It looks to me that there is no control over how much Ram FCPX grabs. It just grabs it all (in my case 8gigs) and leavs about 50megs free at times. This causes the operating system to just slow to slug speed. So that seems the root cause of this problem. I tested this by trying to open Itunes, I photo, and safari while FCPX was running. All were deathly slow.

I wonder if there is something under the hood of FCPX that can be tweeked to limit this Ram grab? way back we used to be able to assign Ram to different aplications.

I have spent weeks learning FCPX and, if it could just have this problem solved, it would be a quantum leap forward in speeding up workflow. I really like it. I have used FCP from its very beginning right up to the last version of Studio so I speak from many years experience. I like it so much, that if it means buying a new more powerful mac to solve the problem I would do it. But I don't want to invest in such if the problem persists. If anyone out there is using the latest Macbook pro with Thunderbolt connection and a Matrox MX02 Mini MAX with FCPX it would be interesting to know if there is still a problem with the longer projects?

Philip

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Answer 8

andynick

Level 5

4,961 points

Feb 12, 2012 2:24 AM in response to Philip Morley1

Did you hide the audio waveforms (use the switch icon to the bottom right of your timeline and choose a configuration with no waveforms if you're not editing audio) and move unused projects and events into new (temporary) folders so that they don't appear on startup?.

Is your original camera footage on the external drive?

Andy

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Answer 9

Feb 12, 2012 2:41 AM in response to andynick

Hi Andy

Yes, I hid them in the event library and the project in the way you suggested and set up the temporary folders to avoid loading other projects and and events on start up. The camera footage, events library and projects folders are all on a 1tb hard drive (Lacie Rugged up to 800Mbits/s) connected by a FW800 (short cable) to the laptop.

Philip

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Answer 10

andynick

Level 5

4,961 points

Feb 12, 2012 2:46 AM in response to Philip Morley1

And the Audio Waveforms?

They take a lot of processor power and are best hidden if you're experiencing dropped frames etc.

Andy

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Answer 11

Feb 12, 2012 3:20 AM in response to Philip Morley1

I don't know whether this will help, but I have always reckoned that the less you have on the system hard drive, the better your editing app will work.

You say you have got 30GB free but it depends on the size of the HD and how fragmented it is.

I have always suggested never filling a system drive more that 75% and I personally feel uneasy if mine gets above 50% full.

If you have been using the system drive for a year or so it may also be fragmented. OS X is supposed to automatically defragment but it doesn't do it very well according to the many articles that have been published on the web.

You can always test the amount of fragmentation by using an app like

The easiest and safest way to reduce the fragmentation is to copy as much as possible to another drive, delete the originals of the files you copied and then copy back the files which will now be fairly unfragmented.

Another thing that could cause problems with pro-apps like legacy FCP was upgrading the OS from Leopard to SL or SL to Lion etc.

Legacy FCP did not always like it and many pros would erase and do a fresh install of a new OS.

This took time but often saved heartaches later on.

I don't know whether FCP X will be affected in the same way but every year or so it is a good idea to return your computer to its "as new" condition if you can.

Message was edited by: Ian R. Brown

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Answer 12

Feb 12, 2012 3:30 AM in response to Ian R. Brown

Sorry, I omitted the link for the fragmentation testing tool:-

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/18451/showvolumefragmentation

I also find that shutting down the Mac at night helps refresh it as does occasionally restarting after a particularly intensive session.

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Answer 13

Feb 12, 2012 9:19 AM in response to Philip Morley1

Philip Morley1 wrote:

Hi everyone,

I just though I would report back on Andy's advice. I have now split my 90 minute movie into 9 x 10 minute projects and it has certainly improved the work flow although the playback even after render is choppy and the ball is still in play from time to time. ..... Philip

so "Phillip Morley1" how does a similar project run on fcp7 on the same machine? with this small percentage of HDD space left you are talking about?

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Answer 14

Feb 12, 2012 9:22 AM in response to Ian R. Brown

Ian R. Brown wrote:

I don't know whether this will help, but I have always reckoned that the less you have on the system hard drive, the better your editing app will work. . . . . Another thing that could cause problems with pro-apps like legacy FCP was upgrading the OS from Leopard to SL or SL to Lion etc. . . . . Ian R. Brown

so "Ian R. Brown" how would one correct the fragmentation issue if Lion is supposed to do it but not doing it very effectively and/or you have LOTS of frags out there?

also, on your machine how did fcp7 run compared to fcpx after the 10.0.3 update with a multicam projects in both applications respectively?

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Answer 15

Feb 12, 2012 10:27 AM in response to Penn-Ohio

As I explained, you copy as many files as possible across to another HD, delete the originals and copy them back.

I can't compare them because I have rarely used multicam.

Incidentally I have FCP 7 along with all the FCS 3 apps working alongside FCP X 10.0.3 but as an amateur I am only a comparatively "light" user.

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