Video editing bottleneck (hard drive?)

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Video editing bottleneck (hard drive?)

Hello,

I'm running video editing in FCPX and find the program overall to be quite slow. I'm looking for a hardware solution. My projects typically run with about 400GB of footage that I load onto the iMac's internal HDD. My main problem with the slowness is in scrolling through and selecting footage from within FCPX.

Where is the bottleneck? CPU doesn't seem to be maxed, and I have free RAM.

Would running the footage off of a Firewire 800 external drive help?

Should I ditch this machine entirely and upgrade to a MacPro or faster machine with USB 3.0 and/or Thunderbolt?

Thanks for any help.

Current specs:

Late 2009 iMac 2.66 GHz i5

22GB 1067 MHz DDR3 RAM

Internal 1TB 7,200 RPM disk

Posted on Oct 17, 2013 8:47 AM

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Answer 1

andynick

Level 5

4,955 points

Oct 17, 2013 9:58 AM in response to rosseau

Working from your Mac's internal HD is undoubtedly causing the bulk of your problem. The Media might be another factor, and of course, a more powerful Mac would help.

Ideally your Projects and Events should be on Firewire 800 or faster External HD - formatted Mac OS Extended (journaling is not required for this application). If you move the Events and Projects as I described, you should see a big increase in productivity.

Andy

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Answer 2

rosseau Author

Level 1

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Oct 17, 2013 10:07 AM in response to andynick

Thanks. I was hoping that putting all files on the same drive would increase things, but you're confirming my doubts. I'm limited to USB 2.0 and Firewire 800 at the moment.

When doing read/write speed tests (using BlackMagic Disk Speed Test), the internal drive gets rates of around 90 mb/s, while a Firewire 800 connected SSD gets slightly less.

I realize that this test does not necessarily relate to real-world editing, and so I'll try moving the project and associated files onto an external and see what happens.

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Answer 3

andynick

Level 5

4,955 points

Oct 17, 2013 11:10 AM in response to rosseau

rosseau wrote:

When doing read/write speed tests (using BlackMagic Disk Speed Test), the internal drive gets rates of around 90 mb/s, while a Firewire 800 connected SSD gets slightly less.

That's not the point. You touched on it with the word "bottleneck". I'm not familiar with the tech jargon, but basically your system drive is pretty much working flat out to keep the system running - when it has to process highly compressed video as well, it struggles - so we put the media on a different drive and it opens up a new gateway for the processing.

I've used FW800 for several years - no problems with it at all, but of course, I have my eye on Thunderbolt now.

Andy

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