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

17 replies

Feb 12, 2012 10:37 AM in response to Ian R. Brown

Ian R. Brown wrote:

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

gotcha "Ian R. Brown" and thanks for the input. also thanks for the defragging info. i will try to remember that one.

if anyone else has a comparison of how FCP 7 (fcs3) runs on a newer i7 processor by comparison to the older dual core machiens and/or comparison to fcpx i would love to hear it if that's permissable in this thread on how fcpx is not performing to expectations?

Feb 12, 2012 11:58 AM in response to Penn-Ohio

You would probably get more responses if you posted that question in the Final Cut Studio forum.

I would imagine that most processes would be around 4 times faster. I hope so as I'm intending to get a new iMac when the next update comes.

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how can I speed up FCPX