Imac and FCPX slooooooow

[Charlie Austin]

people have reported some weirdness withe certain preset titles on new iMac’s with 680 GPU’s, which I think you have. Apple supposedly aware and fixing it… See if there’s a drop shadow turned on in the video or text inspector and turn it off. You may be experiencing something different, but doing this solved a title render/playback problem I was having on the same iMac. And don’t use the “pixie dust” preset. I don’t know why anyone would, lol, but it’s really messed up…

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[John Davidson]

Are you doing any footage processing in the background, like optimizing or creating proxy? Are you working at a frame rate or resolution different from your source media? USB 3 should be pretty speedy, but which USB 3 drive are you using? Are you using any 3rd party plugins aside from the build in title? Which title exactly are you using?

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[Carlo Ferraro]

Are you doing any footage processing in the background, like optimizing or creating proxy?
No
Are you working at a frame rate or resolution different from your source media?
No footage, working in 50i
USB 3 should be pretty speedy, but which USB 3 drive are you using?
Raid Buffalo 6TB
Not taking any material from usb3 drive, rendering to it
Are you using any 3rd party plugins aside from the build in title?
Yes
Which title exactly are you using?
Reelpath Star Wizard

Imac 27 Quad 3.4, 16GB Ram, 2GB Graphics, 6GB USB3.0 & Esata Raids
http://www.birdsaustralia.net
http://www.ferrarovideos.net

[John Davidson]

Well, the areas I’d look at are the third party plugins and also confirm that the buffalo drives are working correctly. Some reviewers on Amazon haven’t had the best of luck with it, drives have died, etc.

Generally I avoid all 3rd party plugins in FCPX unless they are absolutely necessary. The variables involved in maintaining them can be annoying. For example, you may have an older version of the plugin that doesn’t work well with 10.0.7, or perhaps your plugin is newer than the version of X you’re running.

You can make a starfield in Motion – just digging on youtube I found this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s-GdT0ZaU8

Try working without the starfield plugin. Disable the layer or just delete it entirely. Apple doesn’t make that plugin so they can’t QC it.

Good luck and let us know if that was the problem.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[Steve Connor]

I know it’s obvious but is playback quality set to “better performance”

Steve Connor

There’s nothing we can’t argue about on the FCPX COW Forum

[David Battistella]

Seems like time machine can really slow stuff down as well.

Open up the activity monitor and see what is going on wit the cores and memory.

David

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https://www.davidbattistella.com

[Bill Davis]

[Carlo Ferraro] “No footage, working in 50i”

Whenever someone mentions that they’re working not with video, but perhaps with graphics, it sends up a red flag to me.

Sometimes, graphics – particularly large ones – can slow X to a grind. I believe that’s because while it’s trivial to CREATE a graphic with lots of resolution today – when you import that same graphic into a program that works with calculating motion and change over time – they can create monstrous calculation loads for program like X which is built to do precision math and not shortcut the rendering quality of what you toss into it.

I’m very careful these days to look at the ACTUAL resolution needs of the graphics and photos I import to X and to make sure I create a file that’s no bigger than necessary before import.

Largely because if I toss something like a 20 megapixel still and decide to float it around – X will take me very seriously and try to calculate the positions of ALL those pixels moving around over time.

FWIW.

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.

[John Davidson]

That’s a good strategy, Bill. Generally speaking, we prefer to do any graphical and compositing work outside of X other than basic titles. That said, we’re not running into sluggishness when using After Effects rendered graphics with alpha channels as Generators in X. In fact, that is turning into an awesome trick that we’ll be showing off at some point in my little blog here.

Example: You have a sponsor logo that needs to be incorporated with a networks graphic package that normally would be done in After Effects.
Now though, we apply an effect or generator to the raw jpg or psd of the sponsor logo in a timeline and it builds it correctly into the network graphic. The guys at work showed this to me Friday (God bless them for experimenting with it when I had two days off) and it is awesome.

I talked a little bit about it in the presentation for Melrose Mac a few weeks ago. Hopefully we should have that online in a day or two.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[Carlo Ferraro]

When it does not stop it shows around 120 % use of CPU (80 plus idle) and 12GB free memory

Imac 27 Quad 3.4, 16GB Ram, 2GB Graphics, 6GB USB3.0 & Esata Raids
http://www.birdsaustralia.net
http://www.ferrarovideos.net

[Bill Davis]

[John Davidson] “That’s a good strategy, Bill. Generally speaking, we prefer to do any graphical and compositing work outside of X other than basic titles. That said, we’re not running into sluggishness when using After Effects rendered graphics with alpha channels as Generators in X. In fact, that is turning into an awesome trick that we’ll be showing off at some point in my little blog here. “

That makes sense. When any user understands source raster issues, it’s easy to stop some of the OP’s troubles (If I’m reading his post correctly) before it becomes an issue.

What I see more is that folks try to import MONSTOR JPEGs generated by, perhaps a modern DSLR – or a similar very hi-rez unflattened or uncompressed file generated out of a graphics package – and just PLOP that onto an X timeline and try to work with it.

X will “take in” the file. But under the hood, it’s going to try to calculate everything based on megapixels of data – often when the screen presentation needed is actually orders of magnitude smaller.

I’ve seen situations where someone creates a composite made up of 10 pictures scaled to 1 inch by 2 inches – but underlying EACH is a 22.5. megapixel DLSR still!

Ask X to fly those around and composite them (probably with transparency!) and the math load will be crushing for any program, particularly one like X, that was built to allow the import and management of very high rez files.

BTW, looking forward very much to your report on graphics import – It’s great having shops like yours pushing X and discovering new “best practices.”

FWIW.

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.