-
FCP VERY slow opening existing projects?
First post for me here as I am fairly new and have been learning as I go. Found this site extremely helpful and usually can figure out problems by the help in other posts, but after a day of trying to troubleshoot and searching I am stumped.
Problem occurred yesterday when FCP stuck on the spinning wheel and I had to force quit (was told this shouldn’t have caused any problems) . When I turned everything back on my computer would not read either of my external drives. I hooked one up to my laptop and it read fine. So after messing around for awhile I decided to let my computer rest for the night and tried again this morning. Well they came up this morning but it took about 90 minutes for FCP to open a project! So I trashed the preferences thinking this would fix the problem. Well FCP loaded pretty quickly after this, but then when the project opened it kept dropping frames like crazy, and then went back to taking forever to load a project or even do anything once opened. I tried pointing my scratch disk to another external drive thinking the current one might be acting up, but no change….. After many hours I re-installed FCStudio but the problems still intact…..
Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks
Chris -
10 Replies
-
Sounds like your hard drives are either full or going bad.
Jeremy
-
Do you have lots of Motion projects? I have found this slows things to a crawl
-
The hard drives are kind of full. The original external that it was pointing to was 500GB and was getting close to full so I just bought a 1TB and copied everything to that so I was backed up. That 1TB is half empty so it shouldn’t be a space issue and its only a few weeks old… Not saying they both aren’t going bad, but its odd that everything was smooth then all the sudden everything went haywire which makes me think its something else? I do have lots of Motion files but it was a sudden change?
Thanks for the response… Thinking the hard drives might be the issue here, which is really scary if this is the case!
-
I dont know why the sudden change, but I have found projects with lots of Motion files in them take forever to open.
-
[Chris Wheeler] “The original external that it was pointing to was 500GB and was getting close to full so I just bought a 1TB and copied everything to that so I was backed up”
And did you tell FCP the media is now on that drive? Do you still have both of them hooked up?
The motion files might be the culprit too if you have a bunch of render files that went offline.
Jeremy
-
– Run Disk Utility, verify disks and repair permissions.
– Ensure that your media and system drives have at least 10% free space
– Ensure you are not using media on a USB drive
– Create a new project and copy your files across to the new project
– Close any open sequences you are not using, so that only the sequence you are currently working on is open.Ryan Spanger
Video Production Melbourne -
Looks like the WD 500GB is going bad… When I originally pointed FCP to the new external they were both still hooked up and that must have caused the drag? I disconnected the 500GB and re-tried with the 1TB and it started right up. Problem is I didn’t back up the most recent work I did (render files that were pointing to the 500GB) to the new 1TB. Trying to copy them over now but that drive seems like its ready to go as its incredibly slow.
I ran disk utility and it couldn’t verify the disk saying something was busy.. resources maybe.
Hopefully I can get this under control and get that drive fixed as its not very old… Good thing is im getting the grasp on how this stuff connects.
Thanks for steering me in the right direction! Helped me keep my sanity here
Chris
-
Glad to hear things are working out.
If the files on the bad disk are mainly render files, better to just re-render than trying to copy them over. When trying to rescue your files from the bad disk, make sure it is plugged directly into the computer and not daisy-chained through other drives.
Also, try using a different firewire cable. It may be that the cable you are using is damaged.
Copy across any other files you need from the bad disk. It is very unlikely that you will be able to have it repaired once it goes bad. If you are able to have it repaired, it will be too expensive any way.
Ryan Spanger
Video Production Melbourne -
[Chris Wheeler] “Thanks for steering me in the right direction! Helped me keep my sanity here “
No worries, Chris. It’s hard to diagnose exactly what’s going on with those types of problems. You should just re-render to your new drives as FCP has a hard time keeping up with moved render files. It will cause less problems for you later on.
Then, free up some space on your 500GB and see if it performs any better (deleting render files should help with this). What kind of enclosure do you have? If it’s a few months old, you might have a warranty if it’s from a manufacturer. If it’s a cheap enclosure, you might not have any warranty, but the drive inside might be okay. Before I say more, tell me what kind of drive you have.
Jeremy
-
Chris,
What you need is to rebuild your HDs directories.
Get yourself Diskwarrior, TechTools or Driver Genius.
if you are new to Mac you should start by learning how to keep your system optimized.
rafael
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up