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FCP getting super slow….
Hi – I use FCP X, v.10.4.6 with my MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2012).
Lately, editing has been getting slower and slower. Often the spinning wheel comes up for thirty seconds or more.Here’s my laptop specs: OS Mojave 10.14.6 – Processor: 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5 – Memory: 10 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 – Intel HD Graphics 4000 1536 MB.
I usually use a G-Drive SSD External Drive.
I’ve tried closing all windows except my timeline when editing, as well as closing Chrome and other open apps on the laptop, and FCP still seems to be running very slow.Do I need to just buy a newer laptop? Any other suggestions? Thanks!
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3 Replies
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You don’t say what material you are editing. Your 2012 mac book pro is a bit long in the tooth, I know because I have one…. Also not mentioned is how your libraries are structured. If you put the library on your internal drive ( assuming you have an SSD drive) and the media on an external drive connected via thunderbolt or even USB to a SSD drive will help.
Working in proxy mode with help speed things up.
If you are using a stock internal spinning HD for libraries, you’re really sunk. Those drives will not keep up with the needs of HD or greater media.
Replacing the stock HD with a SSD drive will help. Structuring your libraries as I have suggested will also help speed things up . Of course so will a later model laptop can make a big difference.
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Have you checked your remaining disc space (internal and external)?
In the past this usually happened to me when disk space was getting low. And low, for FCPX, means less then 10GB of free space.
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10.4.6 is before the Metal optimization work that began in later versions. 10.4.10 will be significantly faster on certain tasks, especially encoding and effects. Before upgrading, ideally make sure all libraries are backed up, and in Finder make a duplicate copy of the Final Cut Pro.app file in /Applications. That will allow easy rollback to the prior version if you encounter problems. Make sure all plugins (esp. CoreMelt) are upgraded beforehand. You can stay on Mojave if you want.
Make sure Chrome is not only closed but totally not running — not in memory at all. Verify with Activity Monitor. It is safer to just not run it, since it mis-uses the MacOS VideoToolBox framework and can unpredictably cause slowdowns, hangs and crashes.
A 30-second beach ball or spinning wait disc isn’t like a slow progress bar. Rather it indicates the main application thread is stuck in a code path and has stopped responding to events. It implies something is wrong such as a system-layer issue or a buggy plugin which deranges the FCPX process.
Make sure you have plenty of disk space, and try disabling background rendering, then delete all current render files via File>Delete Generated Library Files>Delete Render Files>All. Thereafter render the timeline manually as needed by doing CMD+A to select all clips and CTRL+R to render.
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