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Stills in FCP – cursor delay
Hi there –
Whenever I work with stills I’ve imported into FCP, I have that annoying problem of cursor delay, where I can’t do anything for a few seconds after each change I make. It’s not the spinning wheel, but a slow blinking arrow. I’m not sure why this happens and wondering if there’s something I can do to fix it? Importing pics in a format other than jpg? Changing my FCP settings?
Cheers,
April -
5 Replies
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April,
How big are these stills? Best practice seems to be to keep the resolution down to about twice that of the sequence resolution.
I believe .png is better than jpeg also – so you could try this?
Regards,
Mark
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Do you have sufficient RAM on your system?
When doing these stills, do you have other applications open and running in addition to FCP?
Is your media on a separate drive from your main system and applications?
As Mark asked, what are the pixel dimensions of the stills in relation to your project?
Any of these factors can affect performance in the way you describe. -
The stills range in size from 500KB up to 3MB, and the issue exists on all of them.
I usually have Firefox and iTunes open, when running FCP.
The media is on a 400GB LaCie that has about 14GB available.
RAM is 768 (if I’m reading that right).
Pixel dimensions look to be around the 2000×2000 ratio (if I’m getting the numbers from the right place — I opened up a few pics in PS and looked at image size).
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[April Hill] “RAM is 768 (if I’m reading that right).”
Aha. This is probably the main issue. Way, way too little RAM for the job at hand. You should have at least 2GB RAM on your system. Memory is inexpensive and will make a very big difference in performance.
2k dimension images are fairly large. Unless you’re needing to keep them at that size for zoom-ins or panning, size them down in PS before importing into FCP. This will also save some processing resources until you get more memory in there. -
Thanks for the input Chuck. I want to make sure I gave you the right RAM numbers – I went to “About this MAC” > “More Info” > “Memory”. It says 512MB in one slot and 256MB in another (I think I purchased extra when I first bought the computer). So not enough, huh? Every other application runs fine, even FCP when rendering a two-hour movie, weird. If that’s what you think it may be though, you all are the experts! Thanks for your help.
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