FCPX is sooo sloooowwww !!!!

Question

FCPX is sooo sloooowwww !!!!

Hello everyone,

I have a quad core 15" Mac Book Pro with 500gb HDD and *gb RAM.(Bought it last April)

I bought FCPX, Motion 5 and Compressor.

i quickly figured out that if you want to make videos that are full HD at 60 fps, to expect life to move very slowly.

So I reduced the resolution - but even at 1280 x 720 x 30fps my machine just chugs with the beach ball of death sitting there for minutes on end every time i click in my project to move a single clip. Surely this was meant to be a fast computer and the software said in all the previews that it was fast to work work - sorry guys, not happenin ghere.

Any tips for speedin up the performance of this beastie ??

(Moption 5 and Compressor seem ok - I repeat - my 2m:13s clip using Quick Time Animation in comresoor made an 8Gb file.... took a loooooooong time... ie: 12 hours to render and export....) 😮

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Regards,

Craig

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.7), 8GB RAM, 2.2GHz I7, 1GB Radeon

Posted on Feb 20, 2012 2:32 AM

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Answer 1

Feb 20, 2012 2:33 AM in response to slobberingdog

that would be 8gb of ram 🙂

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Answer 2

Tom Wolsky

Level 10

150,974 points

Feb 20, 2012 2:40 AM in response to slobberingdog

You don't mean that you're editing Animation media, do you?

Something is very wrong here, but we'd need more details about the event and project contents. Reboot, open only FCP. Do you have third party plugins installed?

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Answer 3

Feb 20, 2012 3:25 AM in response to Tom Wolsky

Hi Tom,

Well - that's pretty weird.. I rebooted and ran only FCPX and - presto - it is running at the same speed as the demo on the net... very cool. I had been opening and closing motion 5 and compressor during the day etc, so maybe there was a memory consumption error (I have no idea ?? I'm talking out of the top of my head now. 🙂 ).

Anyway it is running like a dream now - on battery even !!

I will keep an eye on what is running etc if this happens again and post it for further investigation.

Cheers,

Craig

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Answer 4

Tom Wolsky

Level 10

150,974 points

Feb 20, 2012 5:57 AM in response to slobberingdog

Which OS is this? There seems to be serious memory problems in Lion.

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Answer 5

Feb 20, 2012 11:47 AM in response to Tom Wolsky

From the "about this computer" screen:

Mac OS X Lion 10.7.3 (11D50b)

Seems ok for now .../treads warily .. 🙂

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Answer 6

Tom Wolsky

Level 10

150,974 points

Feb 20, 2012 11:55 AM in response to slobberingdog

11D50b? That's an odd build. What computer is this?

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Answer 7

Mar 19, 2012 3:35 AM in response to Tom Wolsky

Hi Tom

Sorry for the lengthy delay - I was away with work.

I have a MacBook Pro 2.2Ghz core i7, early 2011, 8gb ram, 500gb hdd, 15" screen. I'm in Australia, if that makes any difference.

Since I submitted my discussion topic Final Cut Pro has been working very well. Rendering etc takes a little while, but we're talking maybe an hour for a large project, which is fine by me.

Now I need to figure out how to fix aspect ratios ... 🙂 I will post this separately.

Thanks again for your assistance.

Craig

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Answer 8

Mar 19, 2012 3:40 AM in response to slobberingdog

If you want FCPX to really accel.. Use proxy Media. That will speed up things greatly. Also use a dedicated Hard disk for the media.

Aspect Ratio... Try this (If I understand correctly) open inspector while in the timeline go to the Spatial Conform tab... Under Type select the one that applies...

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Answer 9

Mar 19, 2012 3:58 AM in response to Studio Engineer

Thanks very much for this - I'm trying it (proxy media) out now. Seems like a very clever feature.

The aspect ratio thing is a hassle for me. If I may indulge in my story todate:

I recorded a nature show off free to air tv to my panasonic blu-ray pvr.

I burned the title to a dvd (I'm relatively unsure of the format, as it finalised a dvd as part of the process).(.vob files etc).

I have imported the dvd using a video converter program (aimersoft) with 1980x1080 resolution - .mov format.

The thing is - the imported file looks more like a square than a rectangel. Even when I change the spatial conform setting (there is only a choice of fit, fill or none) I can't see any immediate difference.

Is there anything obvious in my process that you might recommend me re-visiting ?

Thanks in advance.

Craig

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Answer 10

Mar 19, 2012 4:17 AM in response to slobberingdog

You might wanna check out if the clip you are using has been transcoded wrongly... Open it in the quicktime player... If it looks wrong there... Chances are that the app you used for the transcode was set wrongly.

I'm not sure whether FCPx has a 'per Clip" aspect ratio-correction.

Basically, what I would do when transcoding material with NON-Square pixels, wanting to use them in a square pixels projects... would be to convert the material to square pixels on transcoding.

I am no expert in this field as all my material have square pixels.. But it might be a solution.

PS - When using Proxy Media... DONT forget to uncheck proxy media in the preferences when rendering out your MASTER or rendering out for COMPOSITING.

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