FCPX Lagging in Timeline Playback

Using optimized media is probably not helping you much performance-wise.

Optimized media takes a lot more disk space, and drive speed is probably what is holding you back.

Fusion drives are not great for media. Your media is certainly in the HD part of the drive, and that HD is a slow 5400rpm.

Working in proxy would definitely help, as would probably using a faster external drive.

You could also just try using original media instead of optimizing. Original media is harder on the CPU, but easier on the hard drive. Since the drive is (almost certainly) the bottleneck...

And of course you can save hundreds of GB of space too (optimized media can be some ten times as big as the original).

Are you running High Sierra? Have you updated directly from Sierra or did a clean install?

You might try doing a clean install of High Sierra on a separate drive or partition, install FCP X on that and see if there is a difference. The current version for the most part seems to work fine on machines where there was a clean install, and often no so well on machines where the OS was updated over a previous version.

One other simpler thing to test is to make a small library on the internal SSD and see if there are playback issues there. It could also be there is a problem with the library or the media drive, though in the present case it seems unlikely, and I am more confident to be a software conflict - hence the possibility that a clean install may help.

Since they are properly backed up I would seriously consider using RAID0. You are adding just a little security while losing a lot performance-wise.

Same issue. 2.3 GHz i7 with 16 GB of RAM from 2013 running 10.13.3 High Sierra and 10.4 of FCPX.

Just trying to edit a very simple 15 second video from two different file sources that are currently stored in my movies folder, both 2 GB in original media size. Super simple stuff that I've done a thousand times and now with the latest updates, what would have been a 30 minute job is taking me multiple days and is unbearable to work with. Changing settings to better performance or proxy does nothing.

The program has become unusable.

What exactly is your mac model? iMac? MBP? What is your system drive? A rotating HD? An SSD? How full is it?

I've given up using fcpx. I've asked my 3 year old niece to look into the issue and anticipating a better response from her than 'support'.

Hi Luis,

I am also experiencing this problem on a iMac Retina 5K 2017 model with a 4.2GHz Intel i7.

32GB 2400 Mhz DDR4 RAM, Radeon Pro 580 8 GB..

We primarily edit in AVC-Intra 50 (1080p 30fps Linear PCM).

Internal Drive is a 500GB SSD running APFS. My storage is a Mirrored G-RAID (Thunderbolt 3) 10GB which is transferring data at an average of 160GB/s Read/Write

I've deleted the contents of ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.FinalCut folder as was suggested in another article. When I restarted I thought the error had disappeared as the TC reader on my storyline once again was showing frame counts. This lasted about a minute before the first video freeze, and then the audio dropped out. The reader then began displaying TC in a choppy manner. Transcoding to Proxy makes no difference, and frankly my 2011 iMac (with less cowbell) handled AVC Intra with no issues. I believe there is a definite problem with this build, but am looking for any option to try and handle this.

Have changed from 'Quality' to 'Performance' in Playback; tried optimized and proxy; have deleted preferences, I'm out of ideas! Have all the latest updates from Apple...

Have sent a support message from FCPX and suggest everyone with this problem also does that. But I have to admit, when you have clients in the room and you cannot play a single stream on the storyline (just rendered dissolves, no connected clips) without dropping frames and audio... it gets embarrasing.

Good Morning Luis,

Indeed we did run into multiple problems when I upgraded from Sierra to High Sierra, However this was done when the computer arrived, before any applications or third party software was loaded. We actually went to the recovery partition, formatted the SSD drive and did a clean install from the web (as the software on the recovery partition I expect was Sierra, and not HS...the option for Sierra was not available!)

I did move a 33GB project from my raid to my internal, and though it did run nicely with no audio or frame dropouts, (Write speed 1934.9MB/s. Read Speed 2735.MB/s) the frame display did not run smoothly.

While it would have been nice to have a huge internal SSD, I am limited to 512, so large projects (and we often run 200-300GB/project) are not feasible on this machine.

The external RAID is made by G-Technologies and I incorrectly stated earlier I was receiving rates in GB, and it should have been MB's. Using Blackmagic design's Disk Speed Test I get Write 119.4MB/s and Read 147MB/s. This program states that I should be able to process 1080p60 ProRes HQ with no difficulty. (G-Tech specs say these drives should be able to go upwards of 240MB/s though we've never reached near that speed...)

Maybe the problem here is throughput, though my Mac boasts Thunderbolt 3, I would have though I would have the speed.

As an aside, when I take my RAID over to a 2014 iMac with a Fusion drive that is not APFS, but Journaled with a Thunderbolt 2 interface, it project plays flawlessly.

As for conflicts, I have not loaded any other editing software on this machine, apart from iMovie. Just FCPX

On my previous machine (2011 iMac/Thunderbolt 1 16GB Ram) I was running FCPX, Resolve, Premiere, and HitFilm, as I was working with students with multiple setups.) Was using an 8GB Pegasus RAID though. This may be my next test, Get that RAID back and check throughput with it.

So I am indeed confused/perplexed/and a bit frustrated to say the least, but I do thank you for the support.

Peter

You say ***mirrored*** RAID... that would be RAID1, I suppose.

Mirroring adds redundancy, but does nothing to help speed.

I was going to write that the RAID speed was bit low but if it is RAID 1, 147MB/s is quite decent.

RAID0, which would almost double throughput, easily going above 200MB/s, probably the 240MB/s you mentioned.

Of course, with RAID0 you need a good backup strategy, but that should happen anyway.

Was that Pegasus RAID set up as RAID 0, or perhaps RAID5? If so, and if your present RAID is set as RAID1, that would explain the slower speeds.

Of course none of those explain the slow/inconsistent update of the frame counter.

Indeed the G-Drives are configured as RAID 1 (Time machined as well : ) ). It's of course a software RAID created with Disk Utility. The Pegasus was a 5 Bay RAID 5 with a hardware controller. We worked these beasts hard for almost six years before a failure... so I guess it was just a matter of time.

We went to the G-Drives after one of our Pegasus RAID's hardware controllers went up in smoke and the data was long gone. Thankfully we are diligent with our backups and lost nothing.

G-Tecnologies drives were recommended at the Final Cut Creative Summit in Cupertino, (for those of us who can't afford something from Lumaforge...like the Jellyfish,) so on the advice of a couple of mentors, I suggested these drives to the powers that be. I work in education and unfortunately budgets are pretty low and it's hard to get folks to look into the future and buy an enterprise solution...

Thanks again!