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Level 1

18 points

FCP X creating 40GB of swap while rendering 15 mins of HD video!

Hi all,

I saw this topic already in different threads, but I cannot find anyone really coming up with a real solution or realistic explanation. I use a Macbook 2.2 i7 with SSD and 8gb of Ram, and I use with it professionally Logic and always used FCP Pro. Recently I tried giving a try to FCP X and although it seems and feel faster and more modern for sure, I can't get past a huge problem with rendering. I'm trying to render a 15 minutes HD video project, exporting it, even if exporting it as Master File in 720p (ntsc 25fps and normal audio AAC 256kb constant bitrate).

After just three minutes of rendering I can see FCP X creating an insane amount of swap files (it's the only program open and just after boot), basically filling up all the space without limit till it all crashes because there's no space left on hard drive (!!). This is obviously a bug not a feature, the scratch disks concept is much more advanced (luckily Adobe keeps it) because I might have a more capable or more free disk and I must have the option to use that one instead of being forced to have my hard drive full of gigabytes of swal (is same concept of scratch disk but without a choice!). And anyway no software should ever consider filling up more than twice the amount of memory in swap...while with FCP X it goes without limits, no way of stopping it I tried up to 40gb of free space occupied!

Does anyone have a solution for this? Maybe there's a way to forcedly limit the amount of swap memory any process can create, or maybe some hidden oprion of FCP X to avoid it? I had this problem with previous version on Snow Leopard, so I updated it all to Mountain Lion but latest version still has the same problem. Saying that for such stuff I should have more RAM is just nonsense, 8gb of RAM should be more than enough (like with audio) and if anything I should just get slower rendering due to lower amounts of buffer data avaialble to cache during operations.

Any idea of a real solution to this problem?

Final Cut Pro X, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.3)

Posted on Jun 3, 2013 6:37 AM

32 replies

phil79

Level 1

0 points

Aug 13, 2013 5:48 PM in response to rofus

got exactly the same problem with fcpx here!!!

Apr 3, 2014 9:49 AM in response to rofus

Rofus,

Just found your post while trying to figure out if FCP X will take advatage of 4 gigs of video ram if I buy a new imac versus having only like 1 or 2 gigs of vram in an older model.

I have been battling whether to learn FCP X or FCP 7 for a long time. I am new to this field and don't know much other than research.

Im going to give it a try FCP X. And, Im going to buy a competely built out imac 27" to do it with a 500 gig ssd. Im going to pay Apple $3400 for this "laptop slapped onto a monitor" computer with FCP X. Hopefully, it functions. Because otherwise, I was a complete sucker and fool! I just built a huge PC desktop for $1500.00. Im probably an idiot for not going to Adobe!

Anyway, look at this link. http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4589

I find it funny that there has been about 8 updates to FCP X since it started in 2011. If you look at the updates by clicking on the triangles, you will see when they list the description, most sentences start out with:

1. Resolves an issue

2. Fixes a stability issue

3. Improves system performance

I feel like this software is a work in progress and you are probably a guinea pig for them!

FCP X creating 40GB of swap while rendering 15 mins of HD video!