• Apple Final Cut Pro

  Slow system…

  Posted by Olly Lawer on October 18, 2012 at 10:32 am

  Hi,

  I have a iMac, i7 with 20GB of RAM. Never had an issue with speed before, but FCPX keeps dropping frames and running really, really slowly. I have 500GB free space on my hard drive, so not sure what the issue is? Tried restarting, resetting PRAM etc. To no avail. Very frustrating. Any ideas?

  Thanks

  Olly Lawer

  Bret Williams replied 13 years, 7 months ago 5 Members · 6 Replies
• 6 Replies

• 

  Steve Connor

  October 18, 2012 at 4:16 pm

  What drive are you using? What footage are you working with? Are your playback prefs set to “better performance”?

  Steve Connor
  ‘It’s just my opinion, with an occasional fact thrown in for good measure”
• 

  Olly Lawer

  October 18, 2012 at 4:20 pm

  I swapped to firewire 800 from my drive to a 400 – 800 converter on my Mac and seems to work fine now. Strange. I suppose essentially it is now running as firewire 800.

  Olly Lawer
• 

  Bret Williams

  October 19, 2012 at 2:52 am

  I thought iMacs max out at 16gigs of RAM? At least that what the Apple specs are.
• 

  Jason Jenkins

  October 19, 2012 at 6:46 pm

  [Bret Williams] “I thought iMacs max out at 16gigs of RAM? At least that what the Apple specs are.”

  OWC has a 32 GB upgrade for the newer ones.

  Jason Jenkins
  Flowmotion Media
  Video production… with style!

  Check out my Mormon.org profile.
• 

  Steve Modica

  October 19, 2012 at 8:30 pm

  One way to debug stuff like this is to open a terminal and run iosnoop:

  $ sudo iosnoop -D

  You’ll see a ton of stuff like this:

  409 502 58833 R 141752216 28672 Preview ??/MacOS/Preview
  603 502 58833 R 141749976 53248 Preview ??/MacOS/Preview
  459 502 58833 R 141749736 24576 Preview ??/MacOS/Preview
  264 502 58833 R 141752360 4096 Preview ??/MacOS/Preview
  400 502 58833 R 177961592 24576 Preview ??/A/MediaUI/..namedfork/rsrc
  286 502 58833 R 175560496 4096 Preview ??/Fonts/Noteworthy.ttc/..namedfork/rsrc
  273 502 58833 R 178331992 4096 Preview ??/Resources/TB_contentAndThumbs.pdf/..namedfork/rsrc
  294 502 58833 R 178332488 8192 Preview ??/Resources/TB_zoomOut.pdf/..namedfork/rsrc
  318 502 58833 R 141749624 8192 Preview ??/MacOS/Preview

  This shows you what’s being read from where. Column 6 is the IO size. Column 7 is the app and column 8 is the filename. You can use this to be sure there’s nothing funny going on. The first column is the time (in usecs) that it took to complete the IO.

  Steve

  Steve Modica
  CTO, Small Tree Communications
• 

  Bret Williams

  October 20, 2012 at 3:15 am

  Considering the 16gigs I have only cost $70, I assume the 32gug would be around $175? Ill have to check it out. I have the 27″ i7 with the 2gig 6970m. RAM is about the only way to make it better. And yep, AE could sure use it. But it could use a Ray tracing graphics card even more.

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up