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FCP and sluggish response
Before I start deleting caches & prefs….
1.5 hour feature film project, 173 MB project file size, several cutting stations with FCP 5.0.4 on Dual G5’s with at least 2.5 gigs RAM per station, XSAN/XRAID setup.
Up through our first 4 rounds of rough cut, FCP was responding quickly, but just recently it’s starting to bog down: it scrolls and plays without hiccup, but things like highlighting a clip and pressing Delete take a couple seconds to respond. This is happening on several seperate workstations with varied setups, hardware, and levels of use.
This used to be a problem in 4.5 when the project got too big, but I thought this was solved in 5.
Thanks in advance
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5 Replies
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I don’t know whether things have changed in FCP 5, but I’ve always contended that it is best to break the feature down into different project files to keep the size down.
For example, I’ll have a capture project with all video and audio. Then I’ll dupe that and sync in another project. Then I’ll take the sync clips and keep just them in another project, splitting them into scene bins. If there was a tremendous amount of footage, I might consider splitting scene ranges into their own projects. As I move along, I may dupe the project, and delete all the old sequences from this new dupe. I also try to keep the minimum number of sequences open at a time.
Since more than one project can be open at a time, I can always go find old things if I need them.
This is my superstitious, non-scientific preference, but perhaps this might help.
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Yes, that is our thinking. Will give it a try when we all break for the weekend. thanks!
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Charlie,
Try openning a new project and moving the essential timelines and bins from your old project into this new project. That was suggested here by some very experienced editors, and it seems to really work whne things get sluggish.
DRW
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In addition to the size of your project, you can also experience sluggish behavior If most of your media files are lengthy. FCP prefers short and discrete clips over capturing and subclipping entire rolls. Getting rid of unused media via the media manager should help a lot. I’d blow away clips that you will probably not need.
Kevin Monahan
Take My FCP Master’s Seminar!
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Don’t forget the standard list of timeline “no-no’s”: Turn off thumbnails, waveforms and Dupe detection. If “dupe detection” is on in ANY of the projects that you have (even if they’re not open) it can cause the kind of slowness you’re describing.
Compartmentalizing your projects is, in my opinion the best way to work.
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