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FCP Laggy Playback
Hi Everyone,
Playback in my FCP 7 has recently started lagging. It was playing back fine and now once it hits a certain point in the 4 minute timeline (around minute 3) it starts to lag and I can’t play anything past that point smoothly even if I go back and try to replay that section. I’ve been reading other related forum posts but can’t find anything that seems to work for my situation.
All of my files are on an external firewire drive, the source footage was converted to ProRes 422 with 48khz audio and everything was working smoothly for 2 months.
I have about 40 gb free space on the drive and 30 gb free space on my internal drive. Here are my computer specs:
MacBook Pro, early 2011
2.2 GHz Intel Core i7
8 GB Memory
Graphics AMD Radeon HD 6750M 1024 MBSince everything was working flawlessly until recently, I’m wondering if it’s simply a matter of processing power and the size of the project. I have 2 timelines with about 3 hours of footage strung out. The timeline with the problem is only about 4 minutes but has a lot of edits.
If it is a matter of the size of the project, does anyone have any potential solutions? I’m almost done with the 4 minute video and really just want to finish it up.
I tried moving the timeline to a new project and closing the old project but it still lagged.
Any ideas?
Let me know if you need any more info. Thanks for your help!
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13 Replies
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How big is the file size? And what are your sequence settings?
FCP 6.0.6, El Capitan, rMBP 15″ i7 2.6 GHz, 16 GB RAM
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The project file itself is only 7.3mb.
The sequence settings were set to match the footage: 1920×1080 HDTV 1080i, 2997, Apple ProRes 422, 48khz, 16 bit.
I also just noticed that my scratch disks were set to my local drive, not the external drive. Does that make a difference if all of the media is stored on the FireWire drive?
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I also just tried switching my playback quality to LOW and setting the frame rate playback to HALF and that still didn’t help 🙁
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Your file size is really small so that’s not it. If you switched the scratch disks back to the external drive, saved and relaunched, and still the lagging persists, it’s not that. You say it starts lagging on the same clip, or the same section, every time? What happens if you remove a few of the suspect clips there? Is there anything different about that section, such as codec or frame rate?
It’s a mystery.
My specs: FCP 6.0.6, El Capitan, rMBP 15″ i7 2.6 GHz, 16 GB RAM
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does that mean purchasing a new drive? what connection would you recommend? thunder bolt?
excuse my ignorance
thanks!
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But a MacBook Pro that old wont have Thunderbolt.
Not my monkeys. Not my circus.
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Got it, thank you!
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Still lagging? How many streams of video are you working with? The area where it starts lagging isn’t graphics heavy or anything, is it?
My specs: FCP 6.0.6, El Capitan, rMBP 15″ i7 2.6 GHz, 16 GB RAM
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Yep, still lagging. That portion isn’t graphics heavy at all. Just cuts of raw footage.
Sorry for my ignorance, but what do you mean by “streams of video”? The sequence uses clips from probably 100 different raw source videos.
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How many video tracks (or streams)? Apple’s white sheet says ProRes 422 has a data rate of 127 MB/s. A 2014 Retina MacBook Pro with 2.6 GHz is capable of handling 16 streams. Your’s is older and you can see there’s a limit to how much data you can stream depending upon your computing power.
My specs: FCP 6.0.6, El Capitan, rMBP 15″ i7 2.6 GHz, 16 GB RAM
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