Fcpx rendering too slow

Restart or shutdown your Mac.

Is your drive more than 60% full?

Are you using an external HD for your Events and Projects (also not more than 60% full)?

Trash the FCP X preferences with

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

Open Disk Utility and Repair Disk Permissions

If there is no improvement look at this article

http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/troubleshooting_fcp_x_03_taylor.html

It has always been recommended that projects and events (or any video media) should be kept on a different drive from the Operating System.

Only apps should be kept on the OS drive.

This is because it puts a strain on the heads of one drive having to handle both the app and the media.

Having another drive splits the load and makes things run better.

As for whether your rendering is excessive, without seeing the exact project it's impossible to say as some short projects can be incredibly complex.

However, on the face of it, 6 hours for a 6 minute project does sound excessive.

Just a thought . . . have you got FileVault or TimeMachine activated as they can kill apps like FCP X?

Incidentally you didn't mention the format of your clip or exactly what you are doing with it in Compressor?

This seems to be a widespread issue with 10.0.3. You can try to make a new fresh short video and the render will be faster. So is it in my case. Older projects are horrible slow rendering under 10.0.3 but the best if you have copy of 10.0.2 somewhere.

Your MBP has more than enough power. I'm only using a 2008 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo iMac with 4GB RAM.

Turning off TM and using an external drive will only make a slight improvement.

There is apparently something more seriously wrong either with your setup or the way you are using FCP X.

A 6 minute simple project should only take a few minutes at most.

Exactly what codec and frame size is your .mp4 video and what are you intending to do with it? Send to the internet? Make a DVD?

Your MBP is good for editing with FCP10, just make sure you have these things right:

1. If your MBP is early 2011 it will have two graphics processors inside, a standard Intel and a faster Radeon. Make sure that your Energy Saver settings are set to "Higher Performance" so that you use the Radeon for editing. Here's how you do this:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3256

2. Always store your FCP10 events and projects on a decent external drive, NEVER on your boot drive. Do NOT use USB drives for video editing as USB does not provide sustained data transfer, so it is not really for for feeding continuous video streams. FireWire is very good, Thunderbolt is spectacular.

3. Highly compressed formats such as MP4 (and mp3) put a lot of strain on your system resources. Although your MBP may be fit to work with such formats natively you will work much, much faster when you have such formats converted to higher quality edit-friendly formats such as ProRes for video and AIFF for audio proior to editing. You can optimize your media during the import process (Create Optimized Media) or you can do the conversion from the Events Browser after the media have been imported. You will notice an important gain in editing speed.

4. Make sure background rendering is turned off while you edit. You can always render manually whenever you wish. If you have imported a lot of media and FCP10 is still busy doing its background magic (conforming, creating thumbnails etc...) this may also slow down your editing. Check the Activity Monitor to see if you still have background processes running.

5. Do not export (Share) straight from the timeline. Export a QT movie from your project and bring this movie into Compressor for further conversions. This is a much, much faster process and in FCP10 this does not make any difference with regards to the quality of your final movie.

Best wishes,

Ronny

Just one point.

Currently I have 4 x USB 2.0 HDs and 2 x FW800 HDs plugged into my old iMac.

I have used the USBs almost exclusively for editing since 2009 and have had no problems with speed or anything else.

Many of my friends also use USB 2.0 with no problems.

These are the types with their own power pack and 7,200rpm. I have not used any portable bus powered 5,400rpm ones for editing but I doubt whether they would cause any trouble either.

Tales of USB 2.0 HDs being unsuitable for editing is a myth that I first busted in 2005 (and no doubt many others had done similarly before me).

Everybody trots it out (as I did once) but few if any have actually tried them.

I also use FCE 4 and all the apps in Final Cut Studio 3 (FCP 7 etc.) on my old iMac and have never had a problem.

This setup works perfectly with DV PAL, HDV, Motion JPEG and AVCHD including editing 4 angle multicam.

Everything works as it should do, though obviously with such an old machine, rendering probably takes 4 times as long as with the latest, but I'm never left hanging around for hours.

Ronnyco,

Thank you for that info! May I ask a silly question though?

I am at a loss!! I am so painfully frustrated! Everything moves at &^$# crawl pace.

I have an external drive for back-up but it is with a USB 2.0 only. I removed everything I could off the hard drive. I have left only the files I need to complete the project. These are short videos too, 3 min tops. I am using "export media" and then compressing for youtube only.

I have a MBP, i7, 8G RAM, 2010 model.

How do I use files while they are on my external drive with a USB 2.0? Do I have any real recourse at all? I want to throw this thing through a window at Cupertino! After it took me 6 six longer than ot should to edit, it then too me an 90 minutes to render the final product!

Must I learn Premiere now? I am a jack of all trades, I cannot afford this time.

Thanks to anyone who can help.

How do I edit with files on my external drive? Stupid question I am sure, but exactly how do I do that?

It doesn't matter where your files are as long as FCP X is linked to them.

As far as you are concerned, your video files are there on your desktop on the FCP X interface . . . . even though in reality they are somewhere totally different.

However, when moving video files or projects from their original position you should use the FCP X "Move Project" or "Move Event" commands, otherwise you could risk losing access to them.

You should not use USB drives in video editing on a Mac, though I don't think that's a cause of your slow down. It's probably a combination of the OS and memory problems. Innocentius and others think Lion runs slow and FCP ith it consumes memory til the OS runs practically to a standstill.

Ronny, I have been exporting directly from the timeline via Share and I thought that was all right, but tonight decided to brave the new world (to me) of Compressor (4.0.2). I'm exporting a 20 minute sequence to ProRes 422, stereo sound, 1920x1080 at 24P, and it is taking, oh, I'd say about four to five times as long as it would exporting/sharing directly from the timeline. What's up? What is Compressor doing that sharing directly from the timeline doesn't do? Will I notice a difference? I mean, a 23 minute video taking over three hours to output to QT ProRes (when the original files are ALSO ProRes--the "events" are ProRes?!).

And also I am storing all my video on external FireWire 800 LaCie D2 drives, the projects on one drive, the events on two others, and working with a MacBookPro (mid 2009)....which I know has slow graphics, but I did up the RAM to 8GB....