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Help! Spinning beachball lag with playhead.
When I start the playhead (press spacebar) I get a 10-15 second lag before the playhead begins playing. This happens in both the timeline and the viewer and canvas. I am using FCP’s built-in easy setup for Firewire NTSC DV. My footage is on a fast internal Seagate drive (separate from the drive that my system is runnning off of). Using a dual 2.5 G5 running FCP 5.0.3, Mac OSX 10.4.3. I’ve been editing with this configuration for months with no trouble. Suddenly (mysteriously around the time Apple’s Software Update installed the latest “Pro Application Support”) I get this annoying bug. This is the second time this has happened. The first time I fixed it by trashing various FCP prefs. This time that’s not working. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
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7 Replies
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When you trashed your prefs, did you set up the second drive as your capture and render scratch disk?
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G5 Dual 2Ghz <> 4GB RAM <> FCP 5.02 <> Kona 2
ATTO 42XS <> Huge Systems 4105 Fibre -
Yes, the second drive is the primary scratch disk. It contains the media files only. It has 90GB left on it–not a lot, but that shouldn’t be stopping the playhead like this.
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Greg,
I have three different drives on my system, an SCSI RAID, a Firewire RAID and a single Firewire drive, and no matter which one I’m using I get the lag you’re getting. This has been happening ever since I upgraded to FCP 5. BTW it only happens when the program sits for a period of time. I’ve just learned to live with it.
Have a wonderful day.
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I have other drives as well. One of them is a 1.8TB SATA Raid (five 400MB Seagates). It doesn’t matter which drive(s) I put my media files on and set up as a scratch disk, I’ve still got the lag. Contrary to yours Chris, the problem occurs irregardless of how long the machine has been on. I can boot first thing in the morning, launch FCP and the lag will be there. I don’t know how you live with this, scrubbing can only get you so far. Thank you for your response though. Hopefully someone will be able to help us out. BTW, I forgot to mention in my first post, my G5 is running 4.5GB RAM.
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Greg,
The fact that you didn’t start to have real FCP lag problems until you upgraded the Pro Apps software recently makes me think that there might be other issues with your G5 than just FCP. Two other things you might want to try, okay there’s actually three things:
– repair permisssions using Apple’s Disk Utility – should be done anyway as part of periodic system mantainence.
– run the program DiskWarrior to rebuild your startup disk directory, in case FCP is having trouble accessing different files, etc. because of possible directory corruption.
– perhaps your system cache and log files are getting bloated and need cleaning out. This will slow down even the fastest systems. There’s a shareware program out there called Cocktail that will clean out all that stuff and do other system mantainence as well. Unix systems (like the Mac) are actually supposed to be left on all the time so that these system cleaning chores run automatically in the wee hours of the morning. Trouble is, most everybody shuts their machine off and these chores don’t get done. Programs like Cocktail are designed to fill that gap. Just Google it and it’ll come up.
Hope this helps.
– Don
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Don, thanks a million. Yes, there were all kinds of probs with my system. The problems I was having had nothing to do with FCP. I booted from another drive, repaired the disc containing the FCP app, repaired disc permissions and voila, no more lag. Damn, I love this forum. Thank you so much.
greg
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Exellent!! Glad I could help.
– Don
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