FCPX on Macbook pro extremely sluggish

[Olof Ekbergh]

What kind of MBP, how much RAM etc?

What codec material, have you tried working in proxy mode?

Often running DiskWarrior will fix wierd disc access problems.

Olof Ekbergh

[Jeff Kirkland]

Have you tried cutting and pasting your current project into a new one?

Most of the sluggish behaviour I’ve experienced seems to be directly related to how much data FCPX is trying to manage in relation to the current project. Sometime moving the edit to a new project cleans things up.

Jeff Kirkland | Southern Creative Media
video * audio * post * production
Melbourne, Australia

[Chris Lambert]

Similar issues here rendering takes literally forever 3min of retimed clips and cc takes maybe 1-2hrs importing and analysing of gopro footage I gave up on after 2-3hrs of analysing. I copied contents into a new project since update but no joy 2011macbook i5 8gb ram project on FireWire 800hdd

[Jim Waterwash]

I’m also having critical lag problems.

I have a new imac 27″. When I select a keyword in the events browser list view that is associated with a 1.5 hour video, it takes 3 seconds before the beach ball starts spinning, then about 90 seconds for it to stop spinning before the new keyword is highlighted. When I press “e” to add it to a project, I get to wait another minute. By then I forgot what I’m even doing, so my productivity has dropped to about 10%. I can’t work like this.

I bought a thunderbolt drive and expensive cable and it did nothing at all to help.

If I select all the keywords and add them at once to a project, my systems hangs and I have to force quit.

No idea what to do.

[Jim Waterwash]

Not sure if this will help in the latest version, but I had similar problems with a 4 minute final edit taking 3 hours to render. I found that for every sub-clip that I had made, if I turned off the default Color, Transform, Crop, etc, within the inspector, that my encode time dropped to 15 min. I was speculating that FCPX was doing extra work for these sub-clips even though they were left at their defaults. I had a timeline that had nested sub-clips, maybe 4 deep. It worked for me..

[Michael Hadley]

I had the exact same problem (on a medium beefy tower). Even had the SAN warning.
I was able to resolve it. I did a number of things as follows:

>>I used Digital Rebellion’s maintenance pack and ran Housekeep and trashed prefs
>>I used disk warrior (on the system drive and external media volume) I think this is what fixed it
>>I used Cocktail to run daily, weekly and monthly maintenance routines and repaired permissions

I’m starting to think we need to run Disk Warrior frequently with x because of the way it manages files and aliases–something gets a little out of whack and you are screwed. DW rebuilds the file directory on a volume. I’ve read that it should be done at least once a month on your system and your external volumes. (Of course, make sure you have a backup first!)

ALSO: beware very wary of stills. Make sure nothing is over 4000 pixels and FWIW I always convert stills to PNG. Also, I had some stock footage in another event that I was having problems with–it was in the photo jpg MOV formate. X didn’t want to optimize but that cause major problems. Once I deleted the media, manually transcoding to Pro Res, everything is fine.

One big lesson is that X doesn’t always know what to optimize and what not to. If you have any elements that are suspect, manually transcode and import.

Good luck.

[Jim Waterwash]

The only way that I was able to add all of my keyword sub-clips into a project timeline and avoid the beach balls (and the usual corruption of the project that often followed when reloading FCPX) was by adding the entire parent clip to the project.

I then used the defined keyword regions now within the project, to again chop up the video and delete the video that I had not key-worded. This totally makes no sense as a workflow, but I guess that is apple’s way if you are working with a long video source. I could not find an easy way to just select a keyword within a project and turn that highlighted region into it’s own project sub-clip.

Deleting preferences and using the maintenance tools suggested was of no benefit to me. I did not try the disk tools.

Getting the beach balls and then having projects not be able to load, has made me very fearful about FCPX corrupting my projects.

[Michael Hadley]

Yes, FCPX can give one the jitters. But I’ve had issues with FCP7 as well, so it seems to just come with the territory.

It seems like your event is corrupt (to test this, hide the offending event and try working with other projects–a $5 app called Event Manager X makes this super easy). If X runs fine with other events/projects, you know that it is your current event is corrupt.

Check all the source for non standard file formats and delete this (convert and re-import). But I would first start with Disk Warrior. It’s something you should do on a regular basis anyway, IMHO and it may solve your problem like it did mine.

Good luck.

[Jim Waterwash]

I wish Disk warrior had a demo.. If the event is corrupt, I wish FCPX could recognize it and fix it, rather than just spin balls and continue like everything is OK when it is not..

Thanks for your help.