Stuttering Playback on iMac

If your MOUSE also makes strange sticks, there is something else going on!

Partition your system drive, make a clean install and try from there!

Putting FCPX on it is a drag&drop operation..

Or maybe try with a different user account first..

I'm curious what Apple says.

The only time I've experienced anything similar is when FCP wasn't releasing RAM. I thought that was mainly fixed in one of the updates, but it's worth checking Activity Monitor. In my case, I found repairing permissions was a big help.

Russ

What's the frame rate? What's the audio? Compressed AAC? That's not a production format.

Coming from an iPhone does not mean nothing. It means the company that designed the software capable of editing h.264 also designed the software and hardware that shot the footage in h.264 format. It means we can expect that at least some thought was put into them playing well together. It means that if I shoot some test video on an iPhone, put in on an iMac running FCPX without filters I should be able to expect smooth playback all else being equal.

An iPhone is not a professional or even a prosumer camera device. FCP is a designed for professional formats and devices. You want to edit iPhone video, use iMovie.

Tom Wolsky wrote:

An iPhone is not a professional or even a prosumer camera device. FCP is a designed for professional formats and devices. You want to edit iPhone video, use iMovie.

Well, it's not a pro-cam, that's for sure, but the camera and lens in the 4s and 5 is just as good as a Contour og GoPro camera, and they are at least prosumer grade - so I tend to disagree on that part - AND they also shoot in h.264..

And I also tend to disagree on the 'build for pro' statement! It's also build for pro people and their equipment, but if Apple did not want people to use it with all the mixed camera types and video resolutions, why does FCPX then have such a splendid multi-format mix&match timeline support??

The quality of the lens is irrelevant to the format and post production software that has to work with it. FCP has problems with GoPro MPEG-4 media as well. Saying that it's H.264 doesn't mean much either, as pretty much everything used in acquisition and delivery is a variation of H.264, everything from the cheapest webcam and YouTube video. The point is the formatting of the camera is not a format for production work. What's particularly critical is the compressed audio embedded in the video file.

why does FCPX then have such a splendid multi-format mix&match timeline support??

Was this meant to be a joke? I couldn't tell. Apple would like to think it has splendid multi-format mix&match timeline support; it doesn't.

Interesting comments about limitations of iPhone video, Mp4, and FCPX marketing…but I'm still thinking this is a hardware issue.

I have successfully used iPhone clips with FCPX. And while I typically transcode them to PR, I have also tested them without transcoding – without the stuttering you report.

Russ

Where are your Projects and Events folders?

If your Mouse stutters, you have issues that are 'software' realated, in the meaning that something is affecting 'thread 0' (the kernel) is such a way, that the lowlevel mouse handling is also affected. Given that the mouse in OS X (and classic) is handled at a very low level, this means something is not releasing system resources as it should.

This could be kernel extensions (drivers) or other software running.

My suggestion to try on a clean system, or on a clean user account, is in order to filter such things out!

The easy solution, is to start with a clean user, it takes about 5 sec to create in SysPrefs, and open FCPX from there and your projects (just make sure your projetcs/events are not in the other user folder..)

If that still mess up, try a clean system install - on another partition/disk. You can easily make a 30GB partition on your boot disk if you have available space.

AHT will not see system related stuff like this, only basic hardware issues.