FCPx slow export.

[T. Payton]

No. Not normal. On my MacPro, I routinely do 2 hr projects. They typically export in faster than real time.

Ram could be an issue with your MacBook Air, but it shouldn’t be that big of an issue.

What type of footage is it? What codec is being used?

Are you exporting in the background? i.e. is FCP X showing it’s progress box during export? If not background exporting is much, much slower. See here:

https://fcp.co/forum/4-final-cut-pro-x-fcpx/11482-benchmarks-survey-background-rendering-vs-foreground

——
T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque

[Joe Black105]

Thanks for the response.

The footage is in pro res 1080i. Background render is off(in the preferences). Yes, fcpx is showing the progress bar. I have no other programs running so that fcpx can have the full resources.

I have exported things using After effects on this little machine and found it very nippy in comparison to my old macbook pro 2.33 core duo.

Thanks again.

[T. Payton]

Humm. Something is up.

I just did a test on my MacPro 2006, 2.66 4 core, 13gb of ram. 1 hour of 1080p prores, dropped on a timeline and then I grabbed an hour of audio from a another project. Disabled original audio.

I started the export and it was 20% completed, a 10.16GB file in 6 minutes. So based on that the whole thing would have taken about 30 minutes to export. Activity Monitor showed the FCP process running at about 195%. Using about 1.7GB of RAM. Disk activity was about 35MB/sec (this is probably due to the fact that the audio was on a FW drive.)

I then did a desaturate color correction on the entire 1 hour of footage (making it black & white) and put in about 20 cross fades. Then it was 10% completed, a 3.91 GB file in 5 minutes. So it would take about 50 minutes to do that export.

A few questions. Is your MacBook Air video card qualified for FCP X? What kind of storage are you using? Are you sure that your 1080i footage is not being deinterlaced? Is your project setting interlaced also?

——
T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque

[Joe Black105]

The project settings say it is interlaced.
The video card does qualify.
Using a g-raid drive.

Interestingly enough the file it is trying to create is around 195gb. The original files amount to 96gb.

Thanks for your help.