Final Cut CRUSHINGLY Slow

[Matt Lyon]

Hi Adam,

I’m jumping in late on the thread, but it seems like all signs are pointing to an issue with the machine, not the hard drive (since it works fine when connected to another machine). Do other projects play back fine on the machine in question, or is all video playback affected?

Couple other things to investigate:

Disconnect any other FW drives connected to the machine. I’ve had situations where a dying drive slowed down the whole machine, even though it wasn’t serving any FCP duties.

Bad UPS or bad power: a dying or underpowered UPS device could be throttling the machines performance.

If you’re comfortable using the Console (Applications>Utilities>Console), then crack that open and look for error messages that pop up while you playback. (IO errors, in particular, would point to a hardware issue). On that note: try running the apple hardware tests on your machine.

Try rebooting the machine and zap the PRAM (hold down ‘command-option-p-r’ on startup)

Make sure Time Machine and any other backup software isn’t running.

There could be an issue with the OS install, or the FCP install. It’s never happened to me, but other people have reported problems with doing “update” style OS installs, instead of “clean” installs.

hth,

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Joseph Hung]

Matt has some great suggestions, all of which I tried to help diagnose when I was having the same issues. I would also check the health of your RAM too, I think there’s freeware out there to do this. You could also use Activity Monitor to see what’s eating up alot of your CPU, especially when you hit play in FCP.

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[Adam Craig]

Thanks guys! I have a gut feeling it’s software related, if for no other reason than that a full-res QT made from the same rendered sequence plays flawlessly in QT Player but not in the timeline—from a disk and CPU perspective I’d say those should be equivalently taxing on the system.

I’ll work my way down those (very helpful) lists and get back to you guys…

[Adam Craig]

hey guys,

update: for reasons completely unknown to me, changing my video card from the stock NVIDIA card to an ATI mac radeon fixed everything. thought this might be helpful to others, and thanks again for everyone’s help.