Can I export the file right away without waiting for thumbnail and waveforms to finish their tasks?

[Jeremy Garchow]

Yes you can export right away.

[Joe Marler]

[Sam Lee] “hundred of hours of edited materials…When importing into FCP 10.3.4 to 10.4.5, I noticed it can take half a day or more to finish the thumbnail and waveform generation.”

As already stated you need not wait for this to finish. The problem is it’s not “half a day” — it’s totally unpredictable based on how you scroll the Event Browser. IOW if you don’t scroll down through every page of thumbnails, it may never finish generating them.

This is apparently a UI and performance design issue. After import, Apple wants to show a populated screen in the Event Browser ASAP and provide good performance for marking ranges, ratings and keywords on that first page.

To achieve this they shut down thumbnail and waveform generation of subsequent pages. Only when you scroll down does the generation resume.

They could have provided a config option (like Lightroom) to go ahead and generate them all, whether displayed or not. They likely wanted to avoid an additional user preference and background processing mode. Most of the time you don’t need this, but for large imports of new media it can be frustrating.

You can expedite the process by putting the cache on a fast drive like an SSD, then minimizing the viewer, turning off Inspector, turning off the library sidebar (CMD + ~), pick one thumbnail per clip (CMD+Z) and reducing thumbnail size. This fits the most possible thumbnails on a single screen, reducing the number of page down steps to walk through all the thumbnails. Once generated you normally don’t have to do it again. However there are cases if the thumbnail size is changed sufficiently they will be regenerated.

[Joe Marler]

Sorry, I meant SHIFT+Z in the Event Browser to show one thumbnail per clip.