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Final Cut Pr0 7 REALLY SLOW to edit – experts required!
I have been editing a project on FCP 7 for a few months now and it has been running fine. All of a sudden, it is running very slowly. When I try and drag my clips around it takes about 10 seconds to catch up with itself and the rendering time is hours (sometime 24-30!) I have a lot of footage and my timeline is staked very high, almost 100 tracks sometimes. But – it is still running slow on the sequences and parts where I don’t have a lot of footage stacked.
I shot my footage on a Panasonic 160, log and transferred it in to FCP 7, it says it is all in ProRess 422 in the bins, when I dragged it on to my timeline I let FCP match the clip settings so I assume the timelines are set correctly. All my footage and the project is saved to my external hard drive, which is 3TB (only 1TB used so far), this is also where my scratch disks are set.
This is the configuration of my Mac:
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4GB GDDR5
• 3.4GHz Quad-core Intel Core i5, Turbo Boost up to 3.8GHz
• 16GB 1600MHz DDR3 SDRAM – 2X8GB
• 1TB Serial ATA Drive @ 7200 rpm
• Apple Magic Mouse
• BATTERY CHARGER 065-C1J9 NO APPLE BATTERY CHARGER
• FINAL CUT PRO 065-C171 NONE
• LOGIC PRO 065-C172 NONE
• APERTURE 065-C173 NONESorry if I have provided some unnecessary information!
Thank you for your help in advance, it is much appreciated.
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12 Replies
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What hard drive is this media stored on? Connected how? How large is the drive, and how full is it (optimally it’s best to have 15-20% of the drive empty).
What are your sequence settings? CMD-0 (zero) will tell you.
How large is the project file?
One thing to try is trashing your preferences…digitalrebellion.com has PREFERENCE MANAGER which does this automatically.
Why are you rendering on the timeline? DO you have filters on the video files? If so..which ones?
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
The hard drive is a 3TB Seagate, which is plugged in to the mains and then a USB slot at the back of the mac. I have 1.91 TB left on the hard drive.
These are the sequence settings:
Project file is 102.9MB
I use a variety of video transitions but the problem occurs even when working on a section that doesn’t have video filters or effects on. Thank you for assistance
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It is a USB 2 or 3 connection? USB 2 is not fast enough for ProRes. USB 3 is, but you need to have a USB3 connection on the back of the Mac too
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
I’ve heard that the problem is the size of my file – and that over 100MB is too big for a FCP file, so I’ve saved all my sections in different projects now which seems to be the way forward. Interesting you mention the USB ports – I had no idea that the USB slot I chose is anything to do with the speed of FCP – or that they had different speeds!!!
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Well, FCP has to communicate with the media, and if the connection is slow, that’s a big part of it. And project file size can be too. 70MB is big, but not big enough to cause that much of a slow down. I’ve had 80MB files that were sluggish, but not THAT sluggish.
And yes, USB2 and USB3 are very different. USB 3 is much faster
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
I’ve tried looking in the USB device tree for my computer and my hard drive isn’t there so I’m not sure as to whether my hard drive is connected to a USB 3 or 2?
thanks for your help
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Oh, i’ve just seen that my computer actually has 4 USB 3 ports. So I haven’t figured out why its so slow then 🙁 I can’t think why else this would happen. Do you reckon if I used a different computer with my hard drive, it would be quicker?
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I didn’t mention that I have 99 layers on a lot of this sequence and it goes on for about 1 hour so I guess that is contributing to the slowness of the machine.. I am rendering it now and going to leave over night – it says 5 days to render! Lets hope not!
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NINTY-NINE VIDEO LAYERS??!?! Seriously? Why so many? Yeah…that’ll definately slow things down. The more layers on a sequence, yeah, the slower things will go. As it has to reference a LOT of video files.
Why so many? That seems nuts…
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
She might be doing one of these:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NENlXsW4pM
I also wonder if the mac was trying to do indexing on all those files.
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