Final Cut Pro X freezing on top spec new 27" iMac, help!

Allright, maybe I am working in the wrong rendering format, but if working with a better harddrive is nessecary I will definately buy a better drive cus it is important for us to work fast and it is pretty strange that if you buy such an expensive and powerfull machine as it is thought out to be then it should deliver the top specs

We have previously worked with Mac Pro with 512 mb graphic ram, 6 gb ram, regular 7200 rpm 1 tb harddrives, we didn't have these issues as we are experiencing on the new iMac, and the iMac we got is 4 times better than the Mac Pro that we used to work on previously, when we didn't have access to them anymore we decided to buy ourselves a decent computer which came to discussion, we maybe should've saved up a bit more and bought the mac pro instead, things should at least render alot faster so this is pretty strange to us still, and keep in mind we are not even makming big changes, I can speed up a clip that is 2 minutes long from 100% to 109% and it takes final cut about 2 minutes to render

GizLee wrote:

I can speed up a clip that is 2 minutes long from 100% to 109% and it takes final cut about 2 minutes to render

I would say there is a boottleneck that's specific to your system. My 4 year old iMac renders a 2 minute retimed clip in half that time.

Russ

Well, if it helps, I just took a 2 min clip and re-timed it to 109% and it rendered in about 30 seconds - that's on the 1TG fusion drive rather than bothering to move it to the SSD first, but that would be quicker - I'd estimate probably 15 secs or less.

Now, clearly, a LOT depends on your source format as well as how you have FCPX configured, but there certainly doesn't seem to be a fundamental issue with FCPX performing such operations, but clearly something specific with your files/project/set up.

Ah, full disclosure I just realised - I should say, the clip I used had been imported much earlier so proxy files etc are all already in place. If you do a "fresh" import and try to work with it while FCPX is still copying the media/transcoding the proxy files in the background etc AND expecting it to render the result at the same time, you'll almsot certainly be hitting major I/O bottle necks. NB the fussion drive doesn't actually make much impact if any when working with files like this, it's not what it's designed to speed up.

But, its easy enough to see for yourself what's causing it to take longer using the Activity monitor. If your CPU is ticking over below say ~80%, then it's not that limiting things. If the disk I/O is flat out as I suspect you'll find, then that's your problem. You can either ajdust your work flow so that import/proxy creation etc has completed before you need to do a lot more IO, or invest in fast IO - i.e. SSD (or RAIDed storage etc).

FCPX is still freezing for me during playback.

While working the program eats up 500 - 700% of CPU.

I only have one project that exists.

It's a seven-minute-long film using SD footage imported from DV tapes.

Background rendering is OFF.

Waveform previews are OFF.

No harddrives or other USB devices connected (other than a mouse).

June 2012 Mac Book Pro ver 10.8.4

2.3 GHz

16 gb RAM

FCPX seems to be working at least a little better since the update but it has not stopped giving me the beach ball.

Maybe there is something gone corrupt in that project.

You could try:

1) Delete preferences - never hurts, and usually the first thing to try.

2) Delete project and event render files.

3) Copy everything from your project and paste into a new project. Maybe the project itself has become corrupt, and this is the common solution in this event (pun intended).

I tried all those. Nothing. Thanks though.

I tried a completely new project with different media and everything. That seemed to work pretty well but my cpu was still running around 150% during playback.

There's defintely something corrupt in those original files but I have no idea how to find it. Using Event Manager, I tried editing by isolating events and seeing if the problem conintued. It happened no matter what event I kept on or off.

Well, the 10.0.9 update is out, lets hope that it includes the fixes with the rendering problem and such, going to check it pronto on wednesday

Nothing happens ! Apple let us moan on his support pages, but infact it doesn't care about us.

The problems with the graphic card NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX 2048 MB is well known, but why should Apple management care about it? The loyal idiots like me and other old iMac user will go on suffering and - buing the next iMac version.

Mr. Incredible - you know who is using this word 2 times in every sentence - is taking Apple to the edge of the clip celebrating old stuff in new clothes. There is no real treatment, although many problems can be resoved with one effective update (like a new driver for this graphic card)!

That well-known problem with that graphics card was a problem in the OS and was fixed some months ago with an OS update. There was a very long thread of iMac users until the issue was resolved, but it had been for some time in either the .3 or the .4 update. We're now up to .5 in the OS, which will probably be the last version.