Spinning beach ball on every mouse click

A few things that can be happening: some problem with your media; some preference corruption in FCP X; something on your user account; your VRAM being almost used up.

I'd start by deleting FCP X preferences (hold down command and option while starting the application, confirm when asked).

This alone may be all it takes. All sorts of misbehavior can arise from corrupt preferences.

If that does not solve it: start FCP X with a new library. Hold down option, and then choose to create a new library. Add some media, do some edits. Does the beach ball come along? If not, then it may be something in your libraries.

If even with a new library you still get beach balls, create a new admin user and try FCP X from that account. If it works fine there, it will be something in your regular account.

The problem with putting Libraries and media on your system drive is the bottleneck that can occur in the system drive data pipe. It is limited, even with SSD drives, enough that heavy video editing can eat up a ton of that bandwidth easily. I'd put it all on an external USB 3 (7200 rpm or SSD) or T'bolt drive and test it out.

That GPU is not eh most powerful in the world, either. What I'd ask is how much media is in that Library, and how long is the Project timeline you're working on?

If you need to run media/Libraries off your system drive, with something as highly compressed, and thus CPU intensive as AVCHD (H.264), test with some Optimized or proxy media.

I too was having beach ball issues, taken my computer into work as we have 100mb/sec and i have only ADSL2 at home with 20 mb/sec.

I have had no Beach ball issues at home but straight away once set up encountered the spinning ball.

So here i am and read you note and restarted FCP holding command and options and deleted preferences and presto, deleted my edited 1.30hr game of rugby league. What wrong now. The only thing in FCP was untitled library......... I have found my original project but i am back to just my timeline import with no editing. HELP ......................

Those key stroke combinations cannot delete events or projects or media.

Search in the Finder for the Library you need. You may well have more than one.

Double click the FCP X icon to open it.

Post screen shots if in doubt.

Al

Thank you very much. COMMAND + OPTION was a new trick for me. I'm curious if I can use it with other programs.
Needless to say I was sh*tting my pants all morning until I read your fix. Huzaah!

m