Importing incredibly slow and bypassing import errors.

[Steve Connor]

Is this on the same system that you had lost event issue with?

Steve Connor
‘It’s just my opinion, with an occasional fact thrown in for good measure”

[Tangier Clarke]

Yes. And I forgot to mention my system specs:

Mac Pro 2×2.26 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
16 GB RAM
Mac OS 10.8.2
ATI Radeon HD 5770
FCP X 10.0.7
BlackMagic Multibridge Pro 2

[Jeremy Garchow]

Yeah.

There’s something going on here.

Is this your boot drive you are importing to?

Proxy creation can take a while, and if yuo continue working while it’s importing, it will take longer. Are you importing from a card or another hard drive?

Please give the full run down.

[Tangier Clarke]

The app is only on the boot drive. Raw card folders are on my third hard drive, importing to the event folder on my 2nd hard drive.

At 9 am FCP X was importing clip 6 of 336
now at 11:08 am it’s on clip 19.

Looks like it’s importing and transcoding at the same time.

Not sure what else of the rundown you mean. Activity monitor has FCP X taking up most of my CPU (to be expected – 780 % or so – that’s weird)

Apple mail is open, FxFactory loaded, iMessage open two monitors on A/V output turned off.

Tangier

[Mike Drew]

From the looks of your specs your machine should easily be able to handle 5D II files with no transcoding at all. I have no idea why it is so slow but maybe try just loading the h264 files and see if that helps. I use a mid-2012 15in Macbook Pro and I haven’t had to transcode a file in months. I regularly load over 100 clips at a time and I’m ready to rock in a matter of seconds.
Another thought – sounds like you’re daisy-chaining your drives. In my limited experience with doing that I’ve found that invisible bottlenecks can develop which slow transfers. Maybe copy your folder of .mov files to your desktop – blasphemy, I know – and try importing to FCPX from there. Might eliminate one variable, anyway.

[Jeremy Garchow]

Thanks so much, Tangier. This certainly helps.

On your second or third drive (or any drive) are there any card structures at the root level or are they all in folders (meaning is there a “PRIVATE” or “VIDEO” or “DCIM” or similar card structure folder at the root level?)

Do you have “Copy files to Final Cut Events folder” turned on?

I know that Blackmagic has a disk speed test. It might be worth running a disk speed test on Drives 2 and 3 to see if they are functioning normally.

WIth FCPX processes paused, you should be getting speeds of 60-100 MB/sec per drive.

Jeremy

[Tangier Clarke]

No card structures at the root level. But here goes my spotlight reindexing again. Yesterday I went through the process of reindexing after clearing the index and doing a couple other things to get Spotlight healthy again. It looks like this weird and irregular reindexing is back.

Tangier

[Jeremy Garchow]

I feel like there’s some weird OS voodoo going on here, Tangier. Your system doesn’t seem to be operating at peak level.

You can choose to ignore indexing on drives 2 and 3 for now to see if that helps to speed up the import at least.

Be sure to read the article AND comments here: https://www.coolestguyplanettech.com/downtown/spotlight-out-control-mac-os-x-mountain-lion-108

[Tangier Clarke]

I do have copy files to event folder on, but still it’s sssllllooooowww. FCP X has always seemed slow to me controlling Finder level processes than the actual Finder. It’s been one of those weird things.

Drive 2 Read Write = 118MB/s, 116.4MB/s
Drive 3 Read/Write = 134MB/s, 130MB/s

using Blackmagics speed test

Tangier

[Tangier Clarke]

It only keeps reindexing my boot drive.

Tangier