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FCPX and text – anyone else find playback slow and stuttering?
I’m finding that FCPX slows to a crawl (and often crashes) when playing back media with text overlay.
One text box requires a couple of playbacks to run smoothly, but add 2,3 or more (or any kind of transitions), even over a simple .png background and the preview window freezes until the play head has moved past the text.
It renders out fine but it makes editing difficult. I’m running a fairly powerful system, which has no issues handling the highest quality AVCHD footage.
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9 Replies
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Yes that’s a fairly common issue Philip.
There’s something horribly inefficient in the way FCPX composites titles.
Each FCPX title is effectively a motion project with a text layer and drop zone with access to whatever is underneath it.
So in AE terms with three layers of text the top layer is essentially a comp containing a precomp, containing a precomp that contains the video on the primary storyline and a text layer.
In terms of a Motion project – my mental model is of a single group with a video layer and three layers of text, when what you probably have is four groups, each a clone of what’s below it in the stack, and with a layer of text in the top three groups.
It’s late down here in the Antipodes and that may not make any sense.
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Yes I have been having the same experience — four title clips stacked on top of a video in the primary storyline. I was pretty disappointed that my super-fast Mac Pro (12-core Xeon) was haltingly slow. But it did stop happening after a while. I suspect that it was just a really long render.
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That’s because all text overlays (title graphics) in FCP X are Motion 5 projects. A real resource hog.
Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
FWIW. MacPro 1,1 (2006) 2.66 Ghz, Radeon 5770, 13GB RAM. Did a quick test:
1080p timeline:
– 1 minute h264 footage on primary (4K clip no less).
– 2 layers of PGNs with alpha, one PSD with transparency each with a custom “grow” filter applied.
– 3 “custom” titles stacked,
– 1 “ferris wheel”,
– 1 “field of view’,
– 1 “dramatic”
Background rendering is turned off. Plays back with “Better Performance” and no dropped frames. Applied transitions to each, staggered them in time, and it does drop frames, but not very noticeable.
However, I copied and pasted that 10 times on the timeline, so now a 10 minute timeline with 868 items– dropped frames throughout even without transitions. The dropped frames are noticeable but it is not unworkable.
I then replaced the h264 clip with a bunch of 4K (4096 x 2048) ProRes LT clips, it improved somewhat but still had dropped frames.
I don’t now why my older MacPro is performing better. Its really nothing special. What kind of video card do you have?
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
Is this stuttering performance before or after the background rendering is complete?
I find myself “expecting” everything to work in real-time because so much does via proxy – but then run up against something slow, open the render view, and notice that there’s a LOT of processing left to complete under the hood.
Just curious.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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I have seen this but it’s not consistent so it’s difficult to pinpoint the problem. I removed some questionable fonts from my system and that seemed to help. FWIW
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Setting aside for a moment that the slowdown problem is real, I thought I would tell the story of a slowdown that was for other reasons just to put into your toolbar of troubleshooting ideas.
A fellow editor was having his projects playback slow tremendously in both FCP and FCPX. I did all the usual housekeeping tasks for the computer and found some problems along the way but fixing them did not speed up the timelines.
I was thinking that I was completely out of ideas when I had a House moment; I moved one of his video files to another hard drive, imported it into the slow timeline, and where that clip was placed, the timeline sprang to life!
It was a dying hard drive that showed no obvious sign of dying. It appeared healthy enough with saving and serving files but gave no clue that it’s data rate in serving to the system was very lethargic.
Just something to check.
Don Smith
NewsVideo.comNewsVideo.com
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I found the FCPX Credit Roll tool very HORRIBLY SLOW. This is on a Mac Pro 2009 with GTX 285 video card and 13GB RAM. Lion.
A one minute title scroll at 1080i60 timeline ProRes LT plays back haltingly.
When I let the FCPX render it took over 30 MINUTES to render a 1 minute title scroll. What gives? Horrible. Epic Fail.
So I went back to doing my title scrolls in Adobe Illustrator and Animating them in After Effects, which took 2 MINUTES to render the same darn thing!
best,
-Greg -
What fonts did you remove?
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