FCPX and very occasional lag.

[Charlie Austin]

[Julian Bowman] “this forum will be more useful than annoying, and people will be less antagonised by your dogmatic fundamentalism, which is always a flawed position to take anyway.”

Well, I hope I don’t come off as a dogmatic fundamentalist. I don’t think I’ve ever claimed that X is perfect, it’s clearly not. And I’ve said before that I’m not a big fan of people who crow that X is the most wonderful thing ever. I do happen to like it though, and it works really well for what I do. Also, my reply above was an honest one, I was, until recently, using X on a machine maybe almost exactly like yours, and I didn’t experience the lag you’ve spoken about. My longest projects are about 10 minutes though, mostly much less, so there may be performance issues I don’t see.

I’m with you on the X timeline. The first version sucked, and it’s only really been useable since .4. I guess I just don’t see the inherent design flaws everyone else does. I like where they’r going with it. I do see plenty of things that need improvement and/or refinement, which I think I’ve been upfront about.

Anyway, If I ever come off as some sort of blinded fanboy, please let me know. I think blind love, and blind hate are both pretty worthless when it comes to computer programs… 🙂

————————————————————-

~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Julian Bowman]

Sorry, I just hit reply, I wasn’t aiming my post at you per se, but at those whom it describes. As I tried to express there is some good debate on here and I have learnt from it… In fact without this forum and following the sensible threads I wouldn’t currently be using FCP10.0.7. But there are also some right frustrating fan boys on here too.

And yes, I am jealous of those with similar set ups having no lag issues. I want to see them running to see how much better they are than mine and I’d love for a tech person to fix my set up but I don’t know who to look for to try and hire someone to do it. So my experience is currently frustrating beyond belief.

In fact if I had that record your monitor software I would record me editing so others could see and comment on whether it is normal or insanely laggy.

[Charlie Austin]

[Julian Bowman] “Sorry, I just hit reply, I wasn’t aiming my post at you per se, but at those whom it describes. As I tried to express there is some good debate on here and I have learnt from it… In fact without this forum and following the sensible threads I wouldn’t currently be using FCP10.0.7. But there are also some right frustrating fan boys on here too.

No problem, I actually share your disdain for “everything is perfect, you’re doing it wrong!” posts myself. They’re as unhelpful as the “it’s iMovie Pro and Apple hates pros!” posts… Which have been getting under my skin a lot recently for some reason… (and that wasn’t directed at you by the way, just to pre-clear up any potential misunderstanding) 🙂

[Julian Bowman] And yes, I am jealous of those with similar set ups having no lag issues. I want to see them running to see how much better they are than mine and I’d love for a tech person to fix my set up but I don’t know who to look for to try and hire someone to do it. So my experience is currently frustrating beyond belief.”

Well, I understand the frustration. And as a self certified geek, I’d be happy to help, but as I’m 6000 miles away here in LA I guess that won’t work. 😉

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Mark Dobson]

Hi Julian,

I’ve been through the situation you describe so well, except my Mac Pro was a 2008 model but with a new 5770 graphics card and 22GBs Ram, and I’ve been waiting for the Mac-Pro upgrade since forever.

I almost lost clients because of the appalling performance of FCPX initially, but I’d committed myself to the change and wasn’t about to switch over to PP or any system. After an initial FTF period I really saw the potential of FCPX and that’s why I’ve stuck with it despite it’s flaws. Through this forum I’ve been able to share other editors experiences with both hardware and software issues and it’s because of the really positive feedback that I went against my instincts and invested in the new beefed up 27″ iMac.

I think it was a good decision, I’m still encountering a lot of issues but the lagging behaviour has disappeared. I use Preference Manager frequently, I repair disk permissions frequently and see both of these activities as part of the day job.

I do all my colour correction using FCPX but do use external plugins ( Sorry John but they are really useful ). The main external plugins I use are CoreMelt, Slice X and Lock and Load. I also use Several FxFactory based plugins and find mFlare really useful.

But as you pointed out in an earlier post it was quite an investment – with all the Thunderbolt connectors etc etc – and a new 8GB Gtech TB drive its added up to about £3.5K – But its a set up that I feel really confident with and one that I could easily swap out should a new MacPro actually be released this year.

You mention trying to find a tech to help sort your system out, and I’m sure there will be one in the Herfordshire area, we use a company called Purple Mac down here in Sussex and they’ve been really helpful but not at the detailed level of system optimisation for FCPX.

Might I suggest that you create a separate system drive to run FCPX from, the drive is not that expensive and you can just do a clean install of the bare essentials that you need. That will give you an accurate picture of how well you system is really doing. I did all these types of things and never found my performance improved dramatically but you have a much newer MacPro.

But whatever you do you will not get the benefit of the extremely high speed Thunderbolt connections and new processors that the iMac offers.

[Erik Lindahl]

Q: Are there responsiveness issues in FCPX?
A: In short – yes.

A longer answer is more complex but simple playback is lacking in FCPX from my experience especially when working out over a video card. This is my experience on minimal projects with a 2008 MacPro and a Kona 3 as well as a 2012 iMac 27″ pretty much maxed out and a BM TB interface. This is excluding the so called “lag build-up” with larger events and projects.

[David Eaks]

Julian, I don’t want to frustrate you further with comments about older hardware working fine but it really is doable, I swear. I’m running both a 2008 Mac Pro 3,1 2.8 eight-core, 16GB RAM with Radeon 5770 and a 17″ 2010 i7 MBP 6,1 8GB RAM. Each with SSD System Drives and editing off internal RAID-0 or individual external FW800/esata drives respectively. Mostly Prores lt from my KiPro and maybe some avchd from Sony NX5s mixed in (not optimized). Haven’t updated to 10.8.3 or 10.0.8 yet.

Haven’t been experiencing these lags, one of my current projects (on the laptop system now but will be moved to the desktop for finishing, via sneaker net), is three days shooting with 7-8 hours of lectures each. Each clip is about 45 minutes to 1.5 hours. Each day has a one hour, 2-angle avchd multicam clip. For fun I threw all the clips from each day on their own 8-hour timelines and started overlooking everything and then started making some global changes (the whole project is one main speaker). Performance was fine and I just kept working with those three timelines, duplicating and breaking them down into about 2 hour lengths for DVDs. Clicking around and scrubbing, keyboard trimming, range-selected audio adjustments, project switching/duplicating etc. all snappy as I could expect it to be (except the AVCHD Multicam clips, they bog down the laptop system a bit). Maybe the “loading project” window pops up for a couple seconds if I go into the Project Library. Barely any delay when hitting space and it playing, even when rapidly skimming to a different part of the timeline and hitting play/pause repeatedly.

I had a test project that was a huge mess of clips with heavy effects, keyframed zooms and moves, a 9-angle multicam clip with a couple offline angles, mixed formats, just tons of crazy stuff going on and it wasn’t particularly bad except skimming over the stuff that had so much going on that playback wasn’t even possible at all. In fact, part of a screen recording I recently posted regarding an audio bug was working in that project (during which, editing performance was notably terrible).

None of this is to say that I haven’t experienced my fair share of green frames, crazy purple flashes, beach balls and unexpected quits. But the regular trash renders/prefs/permissions, copy/paste to new project etc. stuff has got me back on track. I still get a glitch where the skimmer doesn’t work from time to time, simply going in and out of the project library fixes it every time. Through all the madness of switching to FCPX, I have been more confident that I won’t lose any work after a crash and that my project will be just as I left it when I come back than I have ever been (my humble beginnings in Premiere 5-6.5 (NOT CS) were filled with lost work and messed up projects, which scarred me for life).

One thing, is that I’ve been an obsessive clean-installer, mostly ever since I truly started the switch from FCP 7 to X at 10.0.3. I wait to update until matching OS X, FCP X and Matrox MXO2 versions are available and “COW-approved”, then I do a complete clean install to a new system drive (cycled from the shelf), keeping the old one on the shelf for a backup. Not that I’m absolutely sure that this is why I don’t have this problem, just throwing it out there. Maybe it’s because the vast majority of my projects are long clips with a relatively small amount of cuts and effects. Whatever the case, I’m quite happy with FCPX overall.

[Carsten Orlt]

[Julian Bowman] “but there is a thread with my macs specs, and my workflow, which is basically pro res converts on an external 2tb hard drive. “

I tried to find it but can’t. Would you mind pointing to it? Thank you.

Happy Editing

[Julian Bowman]

Sorry, it is here:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/335/49831

[Frank Gothmann]

A friend of mine is having brutal lagging issues with FCPX on an new iMac while the exact same project is doable on a 2010 MacPro so there is probably no best advice here.
It may be your machine, it may be your install, it may be not.
Unfortunately, in my experience, Apple’s in-house software often behaves very weird and unpredictable with no proper means to figure out why and when. I have seen Motion projects that suddenly took three times longer to render after a simple reboot, nothing changed in the project itself.
I certainly wouldn’t spend another 3k on an iMac if your current machine is only 2 years old. From an economic point that’s insane.
Plus, in the worst case scenario you will encounter the same problems.
The architecture in an iMac is more modern with a more modern instruction set but you are talking about issues in very basic UI operations that can hardly be related to that. If a 2 year old Xeon tower has problems running a single app and everything else is fine, something is wrong with the app.

The fact that you even have to ask yourself these questions is the core of the problem here, not any functionality, track based or magnetic timeline dogmatism or whatever. Reliability and consistent behaviour is the key, certainly to me.

I’d put another hard drive in, do a clean install and see if this or a new project behaves different. Then you’ll know more.

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement

[Julian Bowman]

Cheers David, it is some solace knowing it is probably more an issue with my mac, especially as at some point (when Apple release a new MacPro) I will get myself a new machine and dedicate it solely to editing.

You machine sounds like mine on the whole though I am not using any raid setup with my internal drives. Interestingly I have never experienced these coloured frames issues others have, although I get unexpected closes, but then I get those with most software at some point or another, just something I expect to happen.

Someone has mailed me suggesting I defrag my drives, which I wil do when I have finished my current big job, and I will see if that helps. Steve has suggested rendering out my timelines to see if that helps which i am doing but i can’t imagine that is it.

I’ll keep trying stuff and hoping Apple release the new MacPros with expediency 🙂