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

Hi Hirschkorn,

althought Studio Engineer's info is quite interseting and informative I doubt very much that it is the cause of the problems we are having with FCPX and the new iMac. I am one of those having problems and in contact with the FCPX team working on a fix and I am not using the Fusion drive. I bought and am using the 768GB SSD drive. I and several others here seem to have associated the problens with the NVIDIA 680MX 2gb graphics card, not the hard drives.

This does not mean that what Studio Engineer alerted us to is inacurate, on the contrary I think it makes lot's of sense and call it intuition or anything you want, but I came close to buying the fusion drive then I thought, no what you want is speed speed and speed, so I opted for the largest SSD APple offered and didn't eat meat and potatos for the next month....hahaha

Forgot to add that I also use Thunderbolt drives attached to the new iMac, two 6TB drives plus 7 Western Digital Aluminum casings 2TB FW 800 using a Thunderbolt adapter to connect them to the iMac. Although I have the 768GB SSD drive I don't put any of my photography and video files on it, or anything else for that matter other then Applications and mail. I dedicate 300GB for now and can give it more exclusivly for cache space given to Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro. My thinking was why have a 2gb Video card if the previews will be slowed down by the hard drive. So given that the previews use RAM and then hard drive I thought dedicating a large cunck of the fastest HD that exists only made sense.

Experiencing the same problem over here with these specs

Final Cut Pro X just stops rendering, we have to restart and so on...

Read about that it could be something to do with the new Fusion drives, well, we do not that in our case here, so it just has to be some kind of bug in FCPX not being able to function well with the graphics?

The issue you're describing is caused, probably, by the GPU - this is the only common factor up to now (see previous pages for details).

Are users of FCPX with 27" iMac, i7 with 2GB graphics card saying they are unable to complete projects? Just received new iMac and don't want to transfer existing projects across if unable to render and finalise.

Don't transfer - copy. And then try it and see what happens. But pretty much all FCPX/680MX users have the same issues. So better be safe than sorry.

Whatever you do as Hirschkorn says, just make sure you don't lose the ability to continue working with your existing setup. If I did not have my MacBook Pro I would not have been able to make changes on my new iMac 27" to a video I had made with FCPX using the MBP.

From what we know now the FCPX teram is hard at work looking for a fix and I remain confident this will hapen in days or weeks, but not months. But there's so much more you can feast on using your new imac. Enjoy, it's a wonderful machine.

Thanks guys, this has helped. Didn't want to transfer across then find I couldn't complete current projects. Reckon will complete on old iMac and hope there will be a fix within the next week or so.

Just want to add in my 2 cents here, in case it helps anyone else.

A few weeks ago I purchased a late-2012 21.5 iMac to use almost exclusively for video production and graphic design using Adobe products.

Processor is 3.1 GHz Intel Core i7 with 16 GB memory and the NVIDIA GeForce FT 650M with 512MB. Software all up to date.

I wasn't sure I wanted Final Cut Pro so I downloaded the trial on the day I bought the iMac, three weeks ago, and was using that to produce a few test videos (had been using iMovie only).

It's been running fabulously, never faltering and blazingly fast. It handles very large book and magazine projects extremely well.

Yesterday my Final Cut Pro trial expired so I bought the full version and that necessitated a new download.

Big big BIG mistake.

It's been stupendously bad. Freezing, slowing down, grinding to a halt, stuttering, you name it. This version of Final Cut Pro, in the vernacular, *****.

I'm so upset because I have a big project I need to finish and it's just so painful I can barely get it done.

My trusty Macbook Pro is too maxed out as my main computer to use with any version of Final Cut Pro so I'm stuck.

I sincerely hope this is resolved soon. I'm so disappointed in Apple, as this represented a signficant investment (like many others here) and trust that they are the pinnacle of professional video software and hardware.

Curious to know if you know which version the trial-version was/is ?

I'm not sure. I can drag it out of the trash but it will no longer execute. I downloaded it in mid-January. If you know where I might find version information in the package contents (which I can access by control-clicking), I could let you know.

If I have the time I will call Apple and find out if I can download another trial version, if it will pick up and work with my projects that are now in the full version.

I am nearly finished with a nice 6-minute video that I'm happy with, and need for an upcoming public presentation for a conservation project I'm working on.

hit command + I to get the info window.. You should be able to see the version number there...

Perhaps you need to drag it outside the trash - not sure...

I haven't had to do this but I read in this forum that you can re-download the application by putting the current FCP X in the trash and then returning to the Store. Look under Purchased.

I agree that it would be interesting to know if the well-functioning demo was a different version than the paid download. Even then the sequence of events is mystifying.

Trashing preferences is always a reasonable trouble-shooting step when things aren't working right. Use Preference Manager from Digital Rebellion.

dick glendon

Generally - folks experiencing SLOWNESS with FCPx should make sure they dont have Safari or iTunes (Both latest versions) running at the same time as FCPx...

The latest of those versions seem to have a direct impact on FCPx performance. I have reported this already to Apple and they are looking into it (Hopefully)

RoseannH - It may have nothing to do with whether the non-trial program is a different version or not. The reason I say this is that up until a few days ago, everything was running fine on my shiny new iMac 21". Then suddenly I started having the same issues as the others in this thread. As far as I know, nothing changed. One minute I'm fine, the next everything goes haywire.

So who can say what triggered it, either for you or me?

The bottome line is, there's nothing any of us can do about this except send good thoughts towards the developers, who I'm sure are burning the midnight oil desparately trying to solve this problem. As a developer myself (not for Apple), I can assure you there are many developers at Apple losing sleep over this issue, perhaps even developing ulcers as we speak. If I close my eyes, I can envision them standaing around a whiteboard, arguing with each other about the feasibility of various theories... Or at least they better be. 😉

Dan