Final Cut Freezing / crushing (Hardrive problem?)

[Joe Marler]

[Nicolas Bori] “Almost every time I make a change, or specially when I undo a change, I get the Mac color spinning wheel, and need to wait 10 to 20 seconds, until I can continue….Sometimes…the computer does not respond and I need to force shut it down…H264 files from a Panasonic GH4 and GH5 (Project has about 2000 clips)…Final cut Pro X (10.3)….MacBook Pro mid 2015 retina 15 inch. “

I edit lots of 4k material from a GH4 and GH5 on a similar MacBook and it usually works pretty well, although proxies are required for good performance. That said, the GH5 4k 10-bit 4:2:2 H264 codec is not well supported and H265 won’t work until the next FCPX update. But the regular 8-bit codecs work OK.

If the computer becomes non-responsive this often indicates a system problem not an app problem. IOW hardware, disk drive, out of free space on the boot drive, etc. How much free space is on your system drive?

Can you run BlackMagic performance test on your external hard drive and get the results?

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/blackmagic-disk-speed-test/id425264550?mt=12

You could also try running Disk Utility First Aid on both system drive and external drive.

[Noah Kadner]

H.264 is very processor and storage intensive for editing especially with that many clips. Switch to proxy mode.

Noah

FCPWORKS – FCPX Workflow
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[Jeff Kirkland]

I would have thought that your hardware is more than up to the task and I’ve personally not had any issues with GH4 and GH5 footage. Given the behaviour you’re describing, I’d be suspecting the hard drive is either faulty or too slow to keep up – I always find FCPX’s performance to be significantly slower when editing from a USB 3 drive.

The obvious question would be, have you tried editing it on a different hard drive?

But it could be any number of other things…

Have you tried optimising your Media? How’s the performance with ProRes?

What effects are you applying in the edit? Could one of those be causing the system to freeze?

The library could be faulty in some way – what happens if you add the same footage to a new library?

Trashing preferences or reinstalling FCPX can sometimes fix those sorts of issues.

I’ve even once had an issue where FCPX would constantly go slowly or freeze that I eventually traced back to a USB hub I was using that the hard drive wasn’t even connected to – and only on that particular Mac.

It can be a pain to figure out but start with the simple stuff like creating a test library, optimising media, or copying the project to a new hard drive and work up from there

—-
Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer & Cinematographer
Hobart, Tasmania | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Nicolas Bori]

Thanks Joe, Noah and Jeff !
I really appreciate your help on this, this is a really cool community.

So I was trying some of the things you guys mentioned, so far I noticed a big change when switching to proxy files, so I am going to start doing that from now on.

I am editing from an USB 3 Drive, do you think I could get better performance from another drive? Like thunderbolt, or something else? Any suggestions?

I am gonna start editing a new project with about 2000 files, so I can try to replicate what happened before and see if working with proxies at that scale solves the problem I had. I will post if I find out anything interesting.

Thanks all again!

MacBook Pro mid 2015 retina 15 inch.
Processor 2.5Ghz Intel Core i7.
Ram 16gb 1600 MHz DDR3
Graphics AMD Radeon R9 M370x 2048 MB

External Hardrive LaCie 4TB Porsche Design USB3