• Apple Final Cut Pro

  What is FCP X doing all the time that is grinding my project to a halt?

  Posted by Jimmy See on December 8, 2014 at 5:00 am

  I am trying rather unsuccessfully to cut a project in FCPx and it’s difficult because everything is at an agonisingly slow pace with constant dropped frames and having to wait for the beach ball to finish every time I restart playback after pausing.

  I just finished one nearly identical project in FCPx only a few minutes prior and it was smooth as silk. Both were media files produced with a samurai blade which recorded at Pro Res HQ 1080i.

  As soon as I started on this new project, for which I created a new library (on the same hard disk) the performance dropped dramatically.

  I’ve been trying everything I can to work around it. I noticed it was constantly background rendering so I turned that off. It didn’t help so I turned off the waveforms in the timeline, and it helped only marginally. I turned off the thumbnail filmstrips for the timeline, nothing. All the background tasks read idle but I can hear that the hard drive is experiencing constant activity as the LED on the drive dock indicates too.

  This activity ceases completely as soon as I quit FCPx. When I go back in to X, the project runs nice and smooth for about 30 seconds and goes back to it’s current useless state thereafter. What is it doing? How do I tell it to stop it?

  Ronny Courtens replied 11 years, 7 months ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Noah Kadner

  December 8, 2014 at 5:16 pm

  What are your system, GPU, and hard drive specs? Are you running anything else on the same system that could be impacting performance?

  Noah

  FCPWORKS – FCPX Workflow
  Call Box Training
• 

  Jimmy See

  December 10, 2014 at 4:59 am

  hi mate,

  Wasn’t back at the facility where I’m using the particular equipment and FCPx until today. I’m having similar issues today also (although there’s other confounding factors involved today so hard to get a measure).

  The system specs are

  Model Name: iMac
  Model Identifier: iMac14,2
  Processor Name: Intel Core i5
  Processor Speed: 3.4 GHz
  Number of Processors: 1
  Total Number of Cores: 4
  Memory: 32 GB

  By my reckoning this should be sufficient for the demands we’re placing on the system with our workflow, any clue?
• 

  Ronny Courtens

  December 12, 2014 at 5:23 pm

  Select the Library and in the Inspector click the Modify Settings button.
  In the settings window set “Backups” to “Do not Save”.
  Does that stop the constant writing to disc?

  If so: update to 10.1.4.

  – Ronny

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