FCPX Rendering Slow on Trashcan Mac Pro

Angry Leprechaun

Angry Leprechaun

Well-known member
So I've been working with FCPX for awhile and have been editing over the past year on the late 2013 (trashcan) Mac Pro. It has 64 GB of RAM and I'm using a Thunderbay RAID 0 for storage. This should be a beast of a machine but over the past couple months the whole system's been insanely laggy and the render and export times are killing me. The footage I'm editing is DVCPro HD from the HVX-200 (old codec I know...) and generally I do use a lot of text graphics over top, but if I change one word in a basic disclaimer I'll have to wait a good 30 minutes to an hour to rerender everything. I know it'd be much smoother to edit in ProRes but unfortunately we don't have the option to shoot in ProRes and when I import files "Optimized Media" is greyed out. But regardless I've edited Redcode Raw on a much slower 2010 Mac Pro and it wasn't this bad.

I recently saw that Apple had a repair program for Mac Pros regarding the graphics card (same D500 FirePro in mine) and it almost sounds related. I don't have blacked out video and I can work on my Mac Pro but sometimes it'll get so laggy (the whole system not just FCPX) I have to restart it multiple times a day and sometimes when I restart it'll try to shut down for ages and never shuts down. Other times after a reboot It'll come on but I have nothing on my monitors until I restart again. This sound like it could be the issue?
 
Does sound like an problem, Ive got the trashcan running FCPX and render/export times are fast,
have had a few issues since updating to El Capitan - FCPX quits/freezes a lot more often
but no problems like your having - you tried all the obvious stuff like updating, running first aid and trashing prefs etc?
 
@Angry Leprechaun,
To rule out it being DVCPro HD issue, have you tried opening a FCPX library with prores or other type of footage?

If so then you may want to transcode to prores using compressor and make a destination folder seting that will name the files exactly the same (without the setting label in the name) to a new destination folder. Make sure FCPX is closed, then move your old footage to a new folder temporarily. Then re-link using the new prores footage folder.
 
I have updated but I haven't run first aid or trashed preferences. I don't think I can use first aid on my Thunderbay because it's using Softraid, but it looks like all the drives are healthy (they're not even a year old) and Blackmagic disk speed is clocking it at around to 500-600 MB/s.

I have another project with 4K Prores from a Shogun and it does render quicker but still pretty slow. I worked on that project back in February and I feel like it rendered much quicker.
 
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