Stuttering and dropped frames during playback
I bit the bullet and upgraded to Final Cut Pro X last week after staring out with iMovie. Love all the great features, but I've been really disappointed in the performance of FCPX on my computer. When playing back the footage in my timeline, tons of frames are dropped resulting in jittery, stuttering video playback. If I play the same video back in Quicktime, for example, it plays fine, so it's not in the video itself.
I do have an older computer, but it was a top-of-the-line iMac at the time, here's the config:
- iMac (27-inch, Late 2012)
- Processor: 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7
- Memory: 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX 2048 MB
- Hard Drive: 1.12 TB Fusion Drive (280 GB available)
- macOS Mojave, Version 10.14
I had this same performance problem in High Sierra before upgrading to Mojave today, but it's just the same in Mojave. The video clip I'm editing is fairly short, about 4 minutes, and was recorded on an iPhone 6 in HD (1920 x 1080) 24fps, and is stored on the internal Fusion hard drive. iMovie worked pretty smoothly on this same computer.
I know my iMac is getting close to 7 years old, but it still works well for all other apps, and the huge screen looks great still. Is my Mac the problem, or is there something I can do to optimize playback in FCPX? I still have 2 memory slots available in my iMac, could this lagging problem be eliminated if I added another 16GB of RAM for a total of 32GB of RAM?
Anyone have any suggestions on what I can do to improve video playback performance of FCPX on my computer?
iMac, macOS Mojave (10.14), MacBook Air, iPhone 6
