Imac and FCPX slooooooow

[John Davidson]

Maybe you should copy and paste all your work into a new project or comp, depending on which workflow you’re using and see if that helps.

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

[Bret Williams]

I know it’s unscientific, but for the heck of it I just grabbed 10 t4i (18 megapixels) photos out of iPhoto and laid them out in a grid. I gave them each a move across the screen at the same time. When set to better performance, my iMac didn’t even drop a frame during 1080i playback unrendered. So I gave them all transparency. X still had no problem.

This is all on a mid 2011 iMac with 16gigs of RAM and decked out graphics card. The iPhoto files are playing off a FW800 drive.

Don’t know what that means, but it’s not far off from the situation you give. Give X more credit!

[Bret Williams]

And possibly duplicate the project and event onto the iMac local drive to see if there’s a problem with the raid.

[Jonas Bengtsson]

Your RAID, what hard drives are in it?

I hade a similar problem, Mac osx software RAID0 – 4xWD Caviar Green xTB

WD Caviar Green is very good singel hard drive but in a RAID configuration it can create disatrous results.
Its the varriable 5400-7200 rpm disc speed that is problem.

[Mike Kelland]

Was having slowdown issues with my Mac Pro. Restarting fcpx helped a little but the real fix was closing the inspector. Night and day difference – it’s quick again.

[Bret Williams]

You’re right! I wasn’t having slowdowns per se, but I was making lots of changes in the inspector to the audio, so with the audio inspector open things weren’t so snappy clicking around. I think with each click the inspector had to update the info it’s displaying, or cache it before it starts playing because it follows along with the audio pans and levels. Closing the inspector and it becomes much snappier.

[Mike Kelland]

Yeah, because the inspector (and other parts of the program) are live and dynamically linked all the time it seems to slow things down. Mind you I’m on a Mac Pro 3,1 so it might not be an issue with new iMacs and MacBooks…? Even with the inspector closed it’s not snappy like FCP classic or AVID. This is a bit of a deal breaker for me at the moment, but still enjoying learning the program. Some of the stuff in there is simply awesome. Worst thing is trying to use my tablet (I use it in ‘pen’ mapping not ‘mouse’) – almost unusable in the Event Browser. It was obviously designed by mouse users 🙂

[Jef Harris]

This worked perfect! Don’t use the inspector unless you absolutely need to.

[Dave Gage]

One other trick that helps me and is similar to closing the Inspector, is to go down to the timeline view menu (light switch) on bottom right and select the far right view which doesn’t display any icons at all (blue bar). This greatly speeds up the timeline re-draws. And as suggested for the Inspector, I just change the view back when I need to see the audio waveforms.

Dave

[Bill Davis]

[Bret Williams] “Don’t know what that means, but it’s not far off from the situation you give. Give X more credit!”

Interesting.

If I wasn’t getting ready for NAB and swamped, I’d try it on my pre-thunderbolt laptop and on my older MacPro. It would be interesting to see if it’s something X leverages off the newer chips and/or GPUs.

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