FCX sometimes very slow

[Bill Davis]

[Joost Boekhoven] “I have been often quite annoyed with the habit of the program to freeze for seconds or much longer, showing the spinning ball, while there is no apparent cause; I haven’t given it anything to do except position the playhead somewhere, and there’s no rendering going on. “

The key word is “apparent”

Just because you don’t know what X is doing – doesn’t mean it’s not doing something.

I’ve come to see the program a little bit like a hotel. There’s lots going on all the time. But during down times, folks run out and vacuum, sweep, fold sheets, and generally keep the place in order.

I”ve hit stretches with a whole lot of spinning beach balls and frustration. Then a couple of days later, hardly any. Clearly there were things happening under the hood that I didn’t understand, but that the program needed to accomplish in order to keep it’s metadata flow organized.

After a while, I started getting hints of when the things I did screwed up the housekeeping.

Essentialy I’ve had to “mature” as an X user and not act like a teenager leaving my clothes and shoes everywhere and expecting the program to clean up under the hood no matter what I did.

Looking back , it’s a lot like operating Legacy version 1 or 2. Things would go well, then problems would pop up. Eventually all the problems disappeared and we were left with a superb video editing program.

Hopefully, we’re on that path again, but it’s still early days.

Essentially the more I”ve come to understand the rules, the less the program “fights me”.

Not perfect – but better now than 4 months ago by leaps and bounds for me.

And the payoffs are starting to really show up as my event library keeps growing and I have access to more and more by way of raw materials for building all my future videos.

FWIW.

“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

[Michael Hadley]

Bill:

Please share your rules–tips, advice. Would love to benefit. I’ve been working with X for about two months. Much of it is great. And only a little of it (aside from audio mixing) stinks.

But the biggest challenge for me with X is the pokey performance/beachballing. I’ve been doing a simple multi cam project and it was so painfully slow. I was actually on the phone with Apple four times. They weren’t much help.

But: they did tell me not to use a sparse disk image. Maybe that helped a bit.
The biggest improvement I discovered by accident. Previously, I had understood it was okay to keep the project and event on the same external volume. However, I made a backup and mistakenly put it on my internal system driver. My performance improved dramatically, to the point where it is tolerable (although still get hangs and crashes all too frequently.)

So one thing I would recommend is to keep your project on your internal system drive and your event/media on an external (non-system) drive, just like the old days with FCP7.

Any/all other tips to improve performance appreciated.

Oh–and I think from now on I’ll be making both proxy and optimized everything to speed the plow.

(And thanks for all your previously great and useful posts).

[Bill Davis]

[Michael Hadley] “Bill:

Please share your rules–tips, advice. Would love to benefit. I’ve been working with X for about two months. Much of it is great. And only a little of it (aside from audio mixing) stinks.”

Michael,

I try to do that when I have time – but I do this stuff between real work so sometimes I just don’t have the ability to do more than react to what others are saying.

Briefly, the one thing I have learned is that it’s really easy to do simple things (like click the “make proxie media” button – that might take hours (or even days on a huge project) to implement. When that process is running, things bog down in the rest of the software because a LOT of calculation work is subsequently happening under the hood.

So I’ve tried to become sensitive to the choices I make that can have “hidden penalties” in slowing down the X workflow. Eventually, my machine gets the calculations done and things get back to “normal” but that might take a long time. It’s often a trial and error process. But in becoming more sensitive to that stuff, I find myself doing stuff that’s processor intensive or “write new data” intensive less and less when I need to maintain speed – and so my efficiency with the software has increased.

I still do stuff like proxy processing, just largely when I can walk away and let the machine process stuff during periods when I’m not trying to edit at the same time.

It’s a lot of stuff like that that just has to be learned about how X operates.

As machines get faster and with new technologies like faster processors and bigger pipes, maybe this stuff will drop away as workflow issues. But right now, the more experience I have, the better X runs, because I keep learning through trial and error how not to do things that slow performance down.

FWIW.

“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

[Michael Hadley]

Yes, patience is a virtue. Transcoding is a big burden on the system–best done when drinking beer.

I’ve been trying to goose performance and have learned some helpful tricks. That said, in it’s current version, X is definitely buggy and prone to crashing. Can’t wait for the next update.

I’ve got a 2009 tower with 8 cores and 24 gb of ram with an ATI Radeon 4870 with 512mb of ram. I’m wondering if it would make a big difference to upgrade to the ATI 5870 card. Any thoughts folks?

[Joost Boekhoven]

Hello Bill,

Thanks for your advice. The hotel metaphor makes things more clear!
Do you have some thoughts on my other problem? I.e. that FCX seems to turn a lot of the available RAM into Inactive RAM, so that it can’t be used anymore and the available RAM gets reduced to almost zero. Buying more RAM would not help, in that case.
Is using the Purge command in the Terminal really a solution for this?

Thanks,

Regards,

Joost