FCPX 10.1 Very slow on iMac and lots of spinning beach balls

Three weeks ago I used Preference Manager and FCPX ran like a racehorse. I got beachballs 2 days ago and ran Pref Manager again. I have my racehorse again. I also use Event Manager X to hide from FCP all the events I don't need.

I'm running FC 10.0.9 on OS 10.8.5.

I'm about to perform the nuclear solution. Again. The mistake I made was to take advice from an Apple employee and "up" grade to Mavericks. Because Mavericks offered new capabilities to FCPX. I got greedy.

Before that, FCPX worked beautifully, despite missing the new "capabilities". In Mountain Lion I got not a single beach ball of death, aside from the normal, occassional Apple beach ball (they really must fix this).

I am about to go back to Mountain Lion, another ridiculous "up" grade that left multiple software programs I'd purchase AT THE APPLE store useless and unusuable on my MacBook Pro. "sigh"

I refuse to buy another computer from Mac. Also because they've gone nuclear on CD drives. No more CD drives!!! Goofy decision. THey refuse to acknowledge that we use their computers for our jobs.... I just don't get it....
But I will dowload Mountain Lion for $20 to restore it, and see if that helps restore the previous useable condition.

What a shame they can't seem to fix this pervasive issue. I'll keep you posted.

As for my computer info: 2.9 GHz Intel Core i7, with 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3, Intel HD Graphics 4000 1024 MB graphics. Not a dedicated Graphics card, but it worked fine in Mountain Lion, so I know that's NOT the problem. I'm pretty sure there's some Code in Mavericks that is screwing this all up.

And they refuse to fix it.

paulinefromkatonah wrote:

I am about to go back to Mountain Lion, another ridiculous "up" grade that left multiple software programs I'd purchase AT THE APPLE store useless and unusuable on my MacBook Pro. "sigh"

Just a word of caution. Did you update to FCP X 10.1? If you did, you may be able to roll back to 10.0.9 and use it. (I haven't tested this– nor do I know anyone who has.) But if you updated your projects and events you will only be able to open them if you have a pre-update copy of those files.

Sorry that have had such a bad experience. Some people have found FCP X on Mavericks to be great (for example, me) and for others, clearly it's been not-so-great.

Wahat have you tried so far to resolve your problems?

Russ

hmmm. That's disconcerting. Considering Mavericks ate my backup, chewed it up and spit it out.

The oiriginal attempt to resolve the problem was a trip to the "Genius" bar. WHich lasted 6 hours, concluded in wiping the laptop and starting from scratch.

I'll keep you posted on what I try next

I've been having very sluggish behaviour on my Imac mid 2011 with 24gb of ram on a very short project when I decided to try what I see suggested alot of this forum, creating a new user. Now, fcpx is running so smoothly, it's like magic compared to how it was behaving. Does anyone know what this means. Seems like a solution but will report back how it behaves in the upcoming days. Did my old user account become corrupted? How is that possible?

I'd like to know if you return to your original user and run Preference Manager by Digital Rebellion if that fixes the problem. Works for me.

dpcam1 wrote:

Did my old user account become corrupted? How is that possible?

Some file that is user-specific. Here is a knowledge base article with links that discusses troubkeshooting and solutions using a new user account.

Russ

Thanks for your suggestion re Digital Rebellion. It seems to have done wonders trashing preferences. I've copied and pasted a couple of hours of material onto my timeline and fcpx works like magic no matter what I ask it to do.

As for the other option I tried; creating a new user account, which seemed, at first,to work wonders as well, until I opened up a couple of projects and found that titles inside compound clips were gone. I would have had to have rebuilt these from the ground up if I'd been forced to use the new user account. There was nothing exceptional about the titles which were created inside fcpx.

More bizzarely than that, I opened up another project and found that a lengthy piece of video that wasn't even part of the event had been edited into the timeline. This was the first time I'd opened that project since creating the new user account. I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me so I went back to the old user account and checked the same project and there was nothing out of the ordinary there.

How do we totally trust this software, especially in a professional environment, when this sort of thing happens?

I just got my new iMac today and it came with FCP 10.1.1 pre-installed...well (I had to download it using the password they sent me, but basically pre-installed). It's brand new, fresh out of the box, however as soon as I double click the FCP icon I get the spinning beachball of death for about 15 seconds. Any ideas why or how to fix it?

thanks!

FCP X can take a bit to start, as it has to load a bunch of stuff. If you are starting it in a machine with a spinning hard drive (i.e. not an SSD), then I'd say a 15 second start up time is not unreasonable.

The real question is how well it performs after that. If it works ok, there is nothing to worry about.

If you had just turned on your Mac when you launched FCP X it may still have been in the process of indexing your system. Click on the Spotlight icon upper right on your Desktop and see. Otherwise, I don't see why you should see any beachballs at launch.

Russ

I don't see why you should see any beachballs at launch.

I always get a beach ball when I start Final Cut, which takes 15 to 30 seconds to load. It works fine once it's loaded, but might the beach ball indicate a possibility for improvement in performance generally?

I guess if it's performing OK otherwise, I wouldn't be very concerned. I don't get beachballs. but I don't start FCP right away after booting up.

Russ

Hello everybody

I'm writing from Paraguay. I got same problem than you all. Slow almost imposible to use FCPX after OS update to Maverick. I almost read the whole topic and i recommend you all to drop yours preferences with Pref. Manager. After this, FCPX will work well. Good luck

Pref. Manager: www.digitalrebellion.com/prefman

I have similar issues.. 10.0.x worked fine. when I went to 10.1 and now 10.1.2, everything seems slower.. I am on an IMAC 2.6G I5 with 16 GB Ram..

I know my firewire drive may be a little slow but I didnt have any issues in 10.0.x ,,, I notice initial start up of 10.1.2 , I get the spinning cursor while it loads video from whatever projected auto-opens (last one used). Its especially slow if I import MTS file directly rather then what I needed to do in 10.0.x which was re-wrap them. Im going to see if re-wrapping them solves the slowness...

I have already trashs prefs, etc... My library on the firewire drive is large but not too bad.... any ideas?