FCP X 10.0.7 slows down to crawl

Hi Russ:

Let me try the Permissions and then see how it goes. This may address some of the remaining disk related observations, but I doubt it helps with the FCP X issue. But I may be surprised.

Eberhard

One more question on this:

In the past, I might have completely re-installed the software from the DVD. I bought FCP X from the AppStore. What would I have to do to make that happen through the AppStore? There isn't any button like "re-install" or so.

Eberhard

Tom and all:

Thanks for your replies and suggestions. There is definitely something wrong with 10.0.7.

I have tried to wrok just with one single Project and one Single Event, and this did not do away with the problem. I even turned off background rendering when editing, but even then FCP X turned slow.

After I heard about a memory leak in the new version as a potential culprit, I ran a test yesterday, and, indeed, after some doing in FCP X all of a sudden system memory was drained to almost 0 within less than a minute after the "leak" started. See my Memo below.

Can anybody tell me how to report this as a Bug? There doesn't seem to be a place to reports suspected bugs.

Technical Memo

Final Cut Pro X (version 10.0.7), suspected Memory leak

Hardware: MacBook Pro 13”, 8 GB System memory, 512 MB Video memory, 750 GB hard disk, ≈ 200 GB free space

System: MAC OS 10.7.5

Since version 10.0.7, FCP X slows down to a crawl each time after working with it for a short while. It becomes pretty much unresponsive.

After hearing about the possibility of a Memory Leak with the latest version, I did a test. I opened Activity Monitor and made sure no other program was open on the Mac. I took a screenshot of Activity Monitor before launching FCP X:

The free system memory is ≈6 GB at this point.

Next, I launched FCP X with a small project for a DVD Trailer and took another Activity screenshot.

The free system memory dropped to ≈4.9 GB. At this point, FCP X is reacting just fine. I was able to finish the editing without any problems. Here is another screenshot.

Meanwhile, the system memory has decreased to 4.5 GB, but FCP X is still working smoothly.

Next I went into the larger video project with which I had lots of problems with FCP X becoming unresponsive lately. I took another screenshot.

The system memory decreased further to 4.3 GB, but FCP X still works smoothly and the memory decrease doesn’t look suspicious, because the remaining appears to be stable. Now I went to editing in a minor way some compound clips that I had created from several still images with masks, which had taken me a long time over the past few days. The only things that I actually did now was to move the compound clips that I had sitting above the main timeline (where I had put a gap clip of the appropriate length for adding 5 compound clips) into main timeline.

Now I noticed a slight slowing down of the editing. I switched to Activity Monitor and took another screenshot.

The memory had dropped to 766 MB, i.e. rather drastically. I followed with another screenshot shortly after.

Now (only 32 sec later) the free system memory was down to 7.4 MB, i.e. practically nothing left.

At this point, FCP X was down to a crawl, and switching back into it took a while. Next I quit FCP X (Cmd Q), which took several minutes to complete.

After quitting, I took another Activity Monitor screenshot.

The free system memory is restored, and the computer reacts fine.

In conclusion, during some of the editing actions, FCP X appears to leak memory, and it is not released anymore until FCP X is quit.

I found that pretty incriminating.

As you can see, I could work with one Project fine for some time, but going to the other Project where I had experienced the problem made the memory leak show up. I am curious to find out under which circumstances it does show up. Definitely, the longer Project contains video clips, still images that are animated after rendering, sound effects, music, etc.. None of these caused problems before.

By the way, it looked to me as if editing still images and making them move with effects might contribute to the problem. However, none of this was happening in the previous versions. I did similar edits. After talking with Apple support, I made sure all my images were already downsampled appropriately, but this didn't help either.

The only suggestion that has come up in these discussions, which I haven't tried out yet, is to work as a New User. Although I doubt that this can help after my test for memory leak, I am willing to try that one.

Hi Cebulski:

I suspect that you, perhaps, are using the new Shape Mask in FCP 10.0.7?

That is what I identified as the culprit, at least in my case back then. Using this Mask leads to extraordinarily hefty memory usage per still image. For example, if I used more than 4 still images in a certain part of my timeline so much memory was used that the system started to swap in and out between physical RAM and virtual memory (impossible to to work with FCP that way).

I have posted (unfortunately under a different thread that I had been getting into) a workaround for this issue until Apple comes with a new version that tackles the excessive memory usage of this Mask.

Here is the link that another (way more experienced) user made to this post.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4618047?answerId=20687951022#20687951022
I hope it helps.

Eberhard