FCPx is seriously lacking Playback Performance Compared to Other Apps

How long are the clips you're having problems with? The ones I tested were quite short but would loop OK from the event viewer and all play fine in a timeline.

Stuart

My current project is at about 5min. and I observe about 225% CPU when I play an H264 timeline. I get no stutter or choppy playback. I have background rendering turned on and when I stop working and FCPx is free to render my cpu use jumps to about 500% which is great. Mine is an iMac 2011, 24GB RAM, SSD internal with external FW drives. I use WD Black drives for all my external drives. I can squeeze out the occasional choppiness when I try to play something that is not rendered but that's to be expected.

It's interesting FCPx can't handle what PPro can.

You aren't trying to play unrendered footage are you? 25p? Not 24? Your timeline is playing back clips that are matched? You say your HD is capable of playing "raw image sequence.." but I don't know what that means. I have a MacBook Pro that's a few years old with an older CPU that plays FCPx footage just fine. I may have set it to better performance...but my first attempt at solving your problem would be to look closely at your external HD. I'm assuming it's connected by FW or USB3.0 ? Again..not good that PPro out performs FCPx but the issue is to find out if your problem is being worsened by something and I'd look closely at your HD for that unlesss you know it's a solid fast performer and not a "green" drive or 5400 spindle drive.

wow. I wonder if you'd find any difference if you set your screen to 1080? Could the retina display be making the playback work too hard for the video card? Recently I advised a friend to not bother with a retina display for similar reasons...there have been a few complaints about the retina displays taxing playback....just a thought ...

I am also having terrible playback and editing lag... as much as 10 to 12 seconds can go by between my click and when FCPX recognizes I am doing something.... every 2 actions brings up the beach ball or at least a dead zone of no action for 10 seconds.

What is astonishing is that I am running Proxy media because I gave up on editing H.264 from my FS-100 so I spent 3 days to convert to Proxy.

My specs are similar to yours - Retina MBP, 16Gb, 2.6Ghz. I am running this very lean and already tried a new user... all the routines - nothing worked.

My problem maybe is subtitles as I have a lot of text clips on the timeline.... but I am in proxy mode - no HQ. No rendering.

How on earth can my FCPX performance be so poor... IN PROXY MODE!!

In activity monitor I get about 130% CPU in Proxy Mode and shoots up to 235% if I change to H.264 original media.

What exactly is this telling me.....???

I have started a project in FCPX and have the media and project on external drive. I want to try to separate the project and the media on separate hard drives and see if that improves performance. How do I move the EVENTS/Media or the PROJECT files and not destroy the links since I am already into the project for about 6 hours of work.

Alright, so I'm not the only person who's had issues. Usually 24p AVCHD works well enough for me but I too am surprised by the CPU usage of FCPX. My theory is that despite all of Apple hoo-ha Final Cut X still doesn't leverage the GPU in a meaningful way--at least not in the way that other programs do. I can't find a good GPU/OpenCL meter to test this theory, however.

I have a mid-2010 27" iMac with a quad i7 and ATI HD5750 and have the same problem. I'm trying to preview 1080p/60 footage from a GoPro HERO3 in FCPX and I get about one frame every second.

I can open the same file in Quicktime and play it straight off the SD card with no trouble. If I import it into FCPX and hit the space bar on an event it'll play smoothly for about 5 seconds and then get jerky. Audio is always smooth.

If I use optimized media it will play smoothly but transcoding is a lengthy process. I'll settle for jerkiness if/when an effect is applied but vanilla media should not exhibit this problem.

This is not a RAM or disk bandwidth issue as evidenced by the fact that Quicktime can play the file with no trouble.

I also have a Mid-2012 Macbook Air with Intel HD4000 graphics and it exhibits the same problems.

Same EXACT problem.

Only differences - 2011 macbookpro

I used to edit in 720 on my first gen gopro...no problem, no jerkiness, many videos made

Nothing has changed in terms of computer & how I go about EVERYTHING

Moved to 1080, plays fine in quicktime. As soon as I try to playback the footage in FCPX to edit, jerkiness. Very annoying and I just want to solve my issue.

If I have to take all my 1080 footage and convert to 720 somehow, I will. It would probably be a pain though, I have over a 100gb of footage from a recent trip.

Anyone have any suggestions?

grinsearchin wrote:

Anyone have any suggestions?

Optimize your media – either at import – or after import when you've selected the clips you want to use. Don't re-size it to 720.

Russ

Thanks Russ. That worked for me, no more jerkiness

But. I'm now out of harddisk space 😢

What is up with 'OTHER'?

Time Machine off, everything been accounted for for space. Still a ghost of 193GB's taken up by OTHER. I hate you OTHER.

yes i used omnisweeper (came up with the proper amount of space left) - Ghost 193GB's still hiding

Yes, I even had a apple online pro (great dude) look over my computer through the interweb. He couldn't figure it out, his senior advisor couldn't figure out.

10 different threads read on here with the same answers (omnisweeper, OTHER starts to erase after 80% capacity, etc)

I would like to add that the sumo command key in terminal does work. At least it did the first time which was months ago, this time it didnt because EVERYTHING IS TURNED OFF(snapshots, timemachine, etc.)

<Edited by Host>

I see FCPx running at 266% CPU when playing back 1080 60p recordings on a 720p timeline. Coming from a MacPro 1.1 that could not play H264 files without optimizing, I'm quite happy that my little iMac plays virtually anything without hesitation and without the need to optimize anything. Although I'm not a big FCPx fan, I use it regularly and at least on my iMac it runs very well. It may be inefficient but what is going on under the hood isn't a big concern of mine. The practical result is it runs well in terms of playback for me. Some machines that might be marginal may well find other programs to work better.