• Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

  Edit Command Lag with Proxy Multiclip

  Posted by Adam Schoales on April 19, 2012 at 7:54 pm

  I’m working on a multiclip-heavy timeline with Apple ProRes (proxy) settings, but the sequence will lag during edit commands. There is a very slight playback delay, but the real problem seems to be when creating In and Out points, cutting, copying and pasting. After giving FCP a keyboard command, there will be a one to two second lag, followed by the spinning beachball for another few seconds, and finally FCP will react to the command.

  I have tried taking all of the clips offline and reconnecting, which then gives me an “Unspecified Path” error. After the reconnect, the project will often work fine for an hour or so, but will always revert back to the lagging edit commands.

  I’ve tried copying the media into a new sequence within a new project, to no avail.

  I’ve tried copying the media to new sequences in small batches (Act 1 sequence, Act 2 sequence, Act 3 sequence), but the commands are still lagging.

  Playback and Frame Rate are set to Dynamic.

  Exact copies of the source media are in use on other systems with no lag problems, so the source files I’m pulling from are fine, and the codec matches the sequence settings.

  Similar sequences on this system are working just fine with the edit commands, so clearly something in this specific project is corrupt.

  …Any ideas, my wonderful Creative COW gurus?

  Computer:
  MacPro Quad Core

  Settings:
  Aspect Ratio: NTSC DV (3:2)
  Pixel Aspect Ratio: NTSC = CCIR 601 / DV (720×480)
  Anamorphic 16:9
  Compressor: ProRes (proxy)

  Adam Schoales replied 14 years ago 1 Member · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Adam Schoales

  April 23, 2012 at 6:42 pm

  Well the problem has been solved.

  After numerous attempts at “solving”, and thinking we had found the solution the problem kept coming back. We were at our wits ends but I finally decided to sit and watch the editor work and see if I could be present for when the problem started to occur and work our way backwards to reverse-engineer the solution.

  And that’s exactly what I did.

  Turns out the editor had been flipping on “show duplicate frames” and in so doing was causing final cut to have to re-calculate that information every time an edit was made. By simply turning it off the problem went away which explains why whenever we built a new timeline/sequence or even a new project the problem would never occur for us because we did not have that setting turned on by default.

  While there are probably other issues that certainly didn’t help (like rogue XDCAM footage making it’s way into the project) this seems to be the root cause and the problem is solved (unless it comes up again *touch wood*)

  So, in short, if you experience any sort of long delays while cutting check to ensure these processor intensive options like duplicate frames or audio waveforms are not enabled.

  Best.

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