• Apple Final Cut Pro

  Thumbnail and Waveform draw speed

  Posted by David Eaks on June 17, 2013 at 12:45 pm

  I’m curious how long it takes YOUR Mac to draw the thumbnails and waveforms in FCPX, for example, a 1 hour clip of 1080i Prores imported and immediately dropped on a timeline and hit shift-z to fit timeline zoom.

  My 2008 Mac Pro 3,1 eight core 2.8, 16GB, radeon 5770, with a crucial M4 System Drive and a 6TB three drive internal raid-0 media drive teetering on the edge of acceptable capacity (backup system in place of course), currently takes just under a minute for thumbnails and 2-3 minutes for waveforms. Then when I zoom in the timeline I have to wait for both to redraw again, at each zoom level. I find myself waiting on these a lot recently. With thoughts of the new Mac Pro in my mind, I wonder how much better current iMacs and MBPs (or newer Mac pros). Considering I don’t own a thunderbolt enabled Mac, I’m feeling like I’m missing out on quite a bit of FCPXs potential performance. Not just in waveform drawing speed, but its just one example I’m curious about.

  So, what is your Mac and how long does it take? Is it all almost instant? Or about the same as mine?

  David Eaks replied 12 years, 11 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  James Cude

  June 17, 2013 at 6:12 pm

  It’s typically almost instant on our 27″ 2013 iMac so I’d guess the bottleneck is probably your system either the CPU or GPU.
• 

  David Eaks

  June 17, 2013 at 6:24 pm

  Thanks James, I’m really looking forward to upgrading!

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