FCP Laggy Playback

[Connor Callaghan]

It’s only one track, nothing different about that section versus the rest of the timeline. I’m only using one track with edits throughout and there aren’t even video filters or anything like that. The audio is also just a single track AIFF song.

My only thought is that my computer and external drive have basically reached the max project size that they can handle. This happened on another similar project where I had hours of source footage and was cutting a 30 minute documentary. It worked flawlessly up until I got into the final 5-10 minutes of the timeline. Then it started lagging and I basically had to export the first half of the timeline and drop it into a new sequence as a single video file so that I could edit the second half of the project without lag…

Thanks for your help with this.

[Niklas Wikman]

Never use your system disk as video disk.

Also, the free space on the video disk should not go under 10 per cent of the total volume.

That’s the only help I can give you.

One option might be to delete all render files (using the Render Manager tool) and re-render the project. This will flush your undo queue.

You could try de-fragmenting the video disk, using third-party software. (Although OSX is claimed not to suffer from file defragmentation).

[Connor Callaghan]

I think the free space on my video disk (the external hard drive) is at less than 10% so I’ll try to clear that up and see if it makes a difference.

I’ll also try re-rendering the project.

Thanks for the suggestions!