FCPX Freezing/Green Screen Frame Issue

Give complete and exact information about your media. Open in the QuickTime player and post a screen shot of the movie inspector.

although X is capable of handling those videos nativelyu, you can really settle the issue by selecting OPTIMIZE video when you import the clips into FCPX - then they'll be converted to Apple ProRes and you should see a huge difference in playback.

Sometimes FCPX takes RAM and uses it and doesn't make it available until you re-boot - it may be possible that a re-boot will help you move along again. This happens when you have a project open for an extended period of time. It's worth trying.

Tom is asking you to open one of your native clips in Quicktime (just go to the clip in finder and right-click on it and say open with: Quicktime. When Quciktime opens, above where there is File Edit View etc. go to 'Window' and select "Show movie inspector" then write back to Tom what it says.

PikPiks - some of the challenge of helping is isolating the real issue - so if you don't mind being patient, it would be good to make sure we're on the right path. So to see if the RAM thing is even an issue do this:

Go to Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor (open that) and select the tab that says Memory - see what slice of the "pie" is green, available, and what slice is blue (not available).

Good job - well the files are all the same - 30fps and H.264 w/ 48k audio - so that's good they're not a mix, and I still (personally) recommend optimizing those file to be ProRes. X will handle H.264 but you are not on the most powerful system. X relies on your video card a lot too and so ProRes would help. Would you like to give that idea a spin?

y'know - another possible issue I noticed is that you have these files all on your desktop it looks like - if your internal hard drive is 5400RPM versus a 7200 RPM disc, then there is another bottleneck because it might be a little sluggish for the iMac to work with Apple ProRes (they will be several times larger than the highly compressed H.264 files) - I feel like I'm giving you a lot of bad news.

Stil try it - make the optimized files and lets just see how it goes once you've done that.

OK - so let's drop the RAM idea - it looks good (kinda odd that so much is available) I have 32GB of 1333MHz RAM on a 12-core and it uses it and ties it up over a period of time - but that's obviously another problem for another time... glad you're not having that issue.

I do it upon capture but you can do it anytime according to many very knowledgeable guys like Tom Wolsky and more. Let me look at one of my project files to see how easy it is - and in the meantime - maybe Tom will help too.

OK - you go to FCPX project and then in the EVENT Library right-click on one of your video clips (usually sorted under a date it was created) and there will be a drop-down list. Select "Transcode Media..." (yeah, there are really three periods - weird, huh) and your choices in the new pop-up window will be create optimize media or create proxy media. you might want to consider the proxy route if you're working with a 5400RPM spinning hard drive in your iMac - but either should get you up and running again.