FCP X Has Slowed To A Crawl

[VIVIsectVI]

After spending countless hours on a project in Final Cut Express only to discover its poor rendering power, I ultimately decided to try and rebuild my project in FCP X - especially since I could try it for free. At first, FCP X ran fine. After a week it started to load slower and there was slight lag while working on the project - nothing too significant. Since then it's pretty much devolved into an unusable mess. My project is only 12 minutes long, yet it takes about 5-10 minutes just for it to completely load in the timeline each instance I open the program. And then when doing even the simplest of actions, it can take minutes until the "spinning wait cursor" finally disappears. It's become unbearable at this point. I've already put a significant amount of time into the rebuilt project and considering it was devastating having to start from scratch, it's especially devastating having such tremendous issues yet again.

I searched the boards and have seen that others have had similar problems. I tried some of the proposed solutions, like restarting the computer, deleting third-party plug-ins (I only had one), and deleting render files, but none of that did anything. Would I be able to uninstall it and then re-install it even though it's a trial version? I doubt it would do a thing, but it could be worth a try.

I had intentions of buying FCP X when the trial ended, but if this is what it's going to perform like, it will be utterly worthless to me.

Also, at this point I only have one day left until the trial is over, so if I can't find a solution soon, I'm certainly not going to pay $299 just to struggle with it further.

My System Specs:

• Processor Name: Intel Core i7
• Processor Speed: 2.66 GHz
• Number Of Processors: 1
• Total Number Of Cores: 2
• Memory: 8 GB

 

[bbalser]

Is that a laptop or iMac? A lot depends on the GPU you're running.

Turn background rendering off.
Be sure you're not storing your Projects and Events on the system drive.
I'm not having any performance issues at all.
What specifically do you mean by FCEx poor rendering performance?

 

[daihard]

Yea, sorry... the suggestions above are about all you can really do. Other then that, we'd need to look at what other things you have installed. How much HD space you have, also how your HD is hooked up (USB, Firewire, serial, internal, SSD)...
What kinda files your working with, how you imported them, do you have things like faces, stabilization, color balance, etc. turn on/off?

Im editing on both a late 2009 iMac duo 3.06, with 4g of ram. As well as a late 2011 i5 Imac, 12G of ram. FCP X is perfectly fine on both computers.
Im editing both hacked GH2 and Nikon D7000 footage. Usually about 3-4 hours captured and up to 30-45 mins edited with each project.
I have a FW800 raid drive at home, and off site i use a simple USB portable drive.
So... obviously, there is some issue with how you have your computer and footage setup.
Maybe telling us your workflow would help pinpoint the problem.

 

[alpi69]

Are you on 10.0.5?

 

[dustylense]

Try installing event manager X and only open projects you are working on or with. Also, make sure that you close waveforms and audio bars when not using them. I edit on an early 2011 17in MBP 16gis Ram with the GRaid thunderbolt drive and my editing is snappy! I'm going to replace the internal HD with a SSD as well.

 

[VIVIsectVI]

Is that a laptop or iMac? A lot depends on the GPU you're running.

Turn background rendering off.
Be sure you're not storing your Projects and Events on the system drive.
I'm not having any performance issues at all.
What specifically do you mean by FCEx poor rendering performance?

It's a laptop. GPU is listed as "Intel HD Graphics" and "NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M".

One of the first things I did when the problem started was turn background rendering off and it didn't seem to help at all.

Currently my Projects and Events folders are on my computer's drive. Why would that affect performance?

As for my FCE comment, I don't even want to get into it - long, frustrating story.

Yea, sorry... the suggestions above are about all you can really do. Other then that, we'd need to look at what other things you have installed. How much HD space you have, also how your HD is hooked up (USB, Firewire, serial, internal, SSD)...
What kinda files your working with, how you imported them, do you have things like faces, stabilization, color balance, etc. turn on/off?

Im editing on both a late 2009 iMac duo 3.06, with 4g of ram. As well as a late 2011 i5 Imac, 12G of ram. FCP X is perfectly fine on both computers.
Im editing both hacked GH2 and Nikon D7000 footage. Usually about 3-4 hours captured and up to 30-45 mins edited with each project.
I have a FW800 raid drive at home, and off site i use a simple USB portable drive.
So... obviously, there is some issue with how you have your computer and footage setup.
Maybe telling us your workflow would help pinpoint the problem.

HD space on my internal drive is currently at 124.6 available. Working with a .mov file shot on a Canon T2i. I think I imported it by hitting a button that simply said "import". I do have a few color effects and film grain, but that's it.

Are you on 10.0.5?

Yes, the trial is 10.0.5.

Try installing event manager X and only open projects you are working on or with. Also, make sure that you close waveforms and audio bars when not using them. I edit on an early 2011 17in MBP 16gis Ram with the GRaid thunderbolt drive and my editing is snappy! I'm going to replace the internal HD with a SSD as well.

I've heard about Event Manager X, but I only have a few copies of one project - that's it. I used to have more, but I deleted all of them to see if that would help performance, which unfortunately it did not. Also, I haven't even been using waveforms and audio bars.

 

[bbalser]

Having projects and events on your system drive can effect performance severely. All NLE's recommend putting that type of stuff on a secondary drive. Drives have limited bandwidth. Video editing apps have to do live streams (plural) of that stuff constantly. On top of the OS and app having to read/write data to the system drive non-stop, you can bottleneck that single drive's limited bandwidth very quickly.

FCE is a long story? Really?

I suggest some proper training, seriously. macProVideo or Ripple Training. Proper workflow is everything.

 

[alpi69]

hmm....an i7 with 8GB should run smooth. I have sometimes small projects on the internal drive and have no issues as long as I have enough space on the drive.
When you say you have 124.6 available...is that GB or MB? In case of MB the machine should be slow in general not only in FCPX.

When you imported your footage did you choose to "Optimize media" and is FCPX 100% finished with that process (the little icon right in the middle that shows the status of background processes)?

 

[VIVIsectVI]

hmm....an i7 with 8GB should run smooth. I have sometimes small projects on the internal drive and have no issues as long as I have enough space on the drive.
When you say you have 124.6 available...is that GB or MB? In case of MB the machine should be slow in general not only in FCPX.

When you imported your footage did you choose to "Optimize media" and is FCPX 100% finished with that process (the little icon right in the middle that shows the status of background processes)?

GB. Sorry for leaving that out - kind of important.

I can't remember if I chose to optimize media or not at this point. I don't even remember being given the option. And last time I checked the render icon was at 100%. Of course, now the trial's up and I don't want to spend $299 only to find out I can't solve whatever problem was occurring. Wish I would have been on an earlier trial, so I could have another 30 days to figure this out.

 

[BillinSC]

You may want to look at your renders file. You may have a very bloated folder and that will slow things down as well. Overall, the program is very good. Much of the issues have been addressed, and for 299 it is not a bad buy. I am not sure how large your hard drive is, but you may want to see how much available space is on the drive. The drives have a tendency to slow down, especially once they pass about 65% of the space being occupied by files.

Another thing to do is to let your laptop run all night long. During the night there are built-in optimization routines in OS X that will defragment the hard drive. You will find things are zippier after that. Also go to disk utility and run repair disk permissions. That can also reduce beach balls and other delays in processing.

The advice about using an external as your scratch disk is right on target. Good luck in your decision making.

 

[hendosan]

Currently my Projects and Events folders are on my computer's drive. Why would that affect performance?

Because your hard drive (especially a laptop drive that I'm assuming isn't a SSD) has very limited bandwidth and your computer has to access multiple streams of video and audio to play your timeline, in addition to having to do all the read/writes of your project file and then all the other stuff your OS does to read/write to the drive. When you're editing video it's always advantageous to put the media on a separate high speed drive from wherever your operating system is stored.

 

[John Foundas]

I'm having the same issue. I'm on a quad core i5, 16 RAM using a 1T G raid as a scratch disk and FCX is murdeoursly slow. I've run cleaners, trimmed a lot of files off and still very slow renders, loads and staggered click commands.
Frustrated...

 

[hendosan]

I'm having the same issue. I'm on a quad core i5, 16 RAM using a 1T G raid as a scratch disk and FCX is murdeoursly slow. I've run cleaners, trimmed a lot of files off and still very slow renders, loads and staggered click commands.
Frustrated...

According to your other thread, you throw all of your project media into one timeline and edit inside the timeline. This probably has a lot to do with how slowly FCPX responds. Don't do that.

 

[John Foundas]

HAHA, Thats not what I'm doing…Other thread was lost in translation…
Whats odd is there are no preferences to trash inside the library. Im on a free copy of X, if I trash the whole thing I gotta come out of pocket.
Very odd. Slow, share function greyed out, renders are painful. Just doesn't makes sense.


ATI Radeon HD 5750 1024 MB
8 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 (2 open slots available)
1TB GRaid as scratch and 700 GB of space on the desktop.
Ran Mackeeper to clean, and still problems.

I was just starting to like cutting with X too.

 

[alpi69]

Very odd. Slow, share function greyed out, renders are painful. Just doesn't makes sense.

If the share function is greyed out that is an indication that FCPX is not down importing th footage and supports my suspicion that FCPX is still working or was closed before finishing the ingest.
if the Background gauge is at 100% then check you footage in the event and look if there are clips offline (red, missing media) or have a camera symbol to them.
In the missing media case you select those and go to File > Relink media
In the camera-symbol case go to File > Import > Re-Import from Camera/Archive

Now FCPX will continue the ingest and once that is done, you can share/export. It is not possible to export directly from a camera card, FCPX needs to have the footage in some container of its database.
Mind you if you have a 30GB file (1 hour of some high quality codec, then this can take some time depending on your drives). But it takes just as long on another NLEs. Some time you need to ingest. FCPX only allows you to work while it happens and does it in your breaks (as a pseudo-background process) and that works fine with FW800 and thunderbolt drives; USB2 is too slow for ingest and edit simultaneous.