Q: FCPX - time marker doesn't move during playback

Thanks Tom. I can't seem to locate the FCPX prefs file in Library or System folders, can you point me to where it resides? The only thing in the timeline is straight video clips which have been processed / rendered by the app.

OK so I reset the prefs and rebooted and still no luck. Had to relocate/rebuild my library and reconfigure my workspace across three monitors, ugggggh. FCPX version is 10.2.3.

As a test, I just tried a simple short video clip with nothing else on the time line. Same result. The other thing I noticed is the time indicator (HH:MM:SS:FF) freezes as well until you pause the video then it updates, so no real-time feedback in the timeline whatsoever. This really ***** for editing.

On a single monitor, the timeline indicator and numeric readout are still frozen during playback, but it does jump positions at random intervals (i.e. in a 20-second long clip it goes from 2 seconds to 16 seconds and then shows up at 20 seconds). Audio level meters work normally. App is installed on my boot drive (a 480GB SSD), FCPX library is located on a 3TB internal.

Thanks. The media is plain vanilla 1080p footage, like I said this just started happening recently. I think my poor old Mac Pro is showing its age, and since Apple has pretty much abandoned the pro market I will need to think about switching to Windows and using Avid or Premiere for video editing (gasp).

Thanks Alchroma. My settings were already set to Better Performance, the problem was I had the Video Scopes showing before and that was too taxing on system performance/playback. Turning those off temporarily was the solution, only need them for color corrections and crushing IRE values so they remain between 0-100.

Hi Tom - each monitor is on a separate video card. The preview window is on its own monitor, but the timeline is on the primary monitor so it is strange that the settings would affect playback performance on the other window. The resources being consumed by the video scopes seems to be the culprit. Too bad the last Mac Pro Apple released in 2013 doesn't have room for 4 PCI-e slots and 4 internal drive bays...hope Johnny Ives comes up with a practical design  if they ever decide to update this model.