poor performance with longer project

[Sascha Engel]

Please, keep me us updated, if you find something.
I will soon start a bigger project in X as well, and your post sounds a bit worrying.

Thanx.

Sascha Engel
TIME BANDITZ Productions
http://www.youtube.com/taikang

[Carsten Orlt]

Rather than compounding, which I avoid totally until the very end right now hearing so many bad things about it, why don’t you try to cut in sections, meaning creating several projects rather than having everything in one?

I’m in the middle of a large project and don’ have the slow decrease in performance. But I edit ‘scene’ based right now. Every scene or logical section of the doc is in its own project. I will only put it together in the end. Don’t know what will happen then but so far so good. It might take a moment when loading a diff project because of the size of associated events, but ones it’s done system runs normal.

Mac Pro 2008, 16 Gb ram, ATI 5750, third party eSata raids.

Happy editing.

[T. Payton]

Every edit you get a pinnwheel? Humm. I saw this quite a bit on 10.0.4 and earlier, but now it is much better. I’m guessing that is a Ram issue, or an issue with your HD.

Take a look at Activity Monitor, and view the “System Memory” area. See if the Page Outs is anything larger than a few hundred megabytes. That will send any app into spinning beach ball land.

I would run disk utility “repair” on your external drive.

What version of FCPX are you on?
What kind of media are you working on? Format, resolution, etc.
How many elements are on your timeline? Look at the timeline index and choose clips and it will show how many items you have.
How large is your currentversion.fcpproject file?

– T.

——
T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque

[Oliver Peters]

In my experience, these are things to AVOID in large projects:

Many events
Liberal use of compound clips – especially those with full timelines, like “selects” assemblies
Compounds within other compounds
Lots of effects and graphics
Many keywords applied to a lot of clips
Native camera media – HDV, H264, REDCODE, AVCHD – as opposed to ProRes variants

What the fail-over point is will vary with how many of these you have and the speed of your system (GPU, CPU, RAM, hard drive). Unfortunately there does not seem to be a definitive answer.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Michael Angelo]

Appreciate this thread, just posted a similar query as launching a feature on FCPX, so at the bottom of the mountain:

https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/344/22337

Would be curious to know if you broke up your Events or just have one large Event? As far as edit timeline, in other systems, I usually break show up into reels and if I need to see the entire show, I cut a flattened version and view it with everything I don’t need unloaded. FCPX makes that tough unless you design the show to work with Event Manager X and have multiple Events etc. Multiple Events have their own inherent issues, but is Event Manager X something that can help you?

Been banging my head against the wall for weeks researching, testing, inquiring about how to avoid the exact problem you are having, will post any useful findings as I get a bit deeper into the process and will definitely follow this thread closely.

Hope you get moving again soon!!

“A life without cause is a life without effect.” -Dildano

[Carsten Orlt]

I can’t say that having many events has any disadvantages for me, I would actually say it is the opposite.

Having events available doesn’t mean they will be loaded in full when you launch FCP. I have 60 events for our doc. Each location is one event. And music is separate from SFX and VFX etc.

FCP only loads the full event that is needed in a given project, or if I select the event in the event browser. FCP keeps managing the memory perfectly and I only occasionally have to wait. I’m on a Mac Pro and just upgrading to a SSD as my system drive made a huge difference. I noticed that FCP uses the system drive quite a bit to cache stuff (or whatever it does – guess it puts memory content there temporarily) and the super fast SSD speeds up this process dramatically.

Same goes for projects. I have a new project for every little seq I edit. New version of same seq = new project. I do not create compounds to edit in. I maybe only would create a compound to apply a global effect or mix bus. So far no crashes – no hiccups.

Ah yes I do actually edit in proxy mode. I feel its faster, specially when working with non Prores originals. And FCP handles all the conversions under the hood. I couldn’t be happier!!!

And while I’m at it, boy do I love the new timeline. Once you get a hang of it you never go back!!! And audio editing is 100% better than it ever was. Kudos to Apple for having the vision and sticking to it!

Happy editing

[Michael Graziano]

Thanks everyone for your responses.

@ T Payton
Thanks for the good questions. here are answers with your original questions included:
What version of FCPX are you on?
10.0.8

What kind of media are you working on?
I’ve been creating optimized clips on import. I have plenty of storage and up until a couple days ago performance has been fine. Originally shot in 1920×1080 24p on Canon c100. Canon C300, and 5d

How many elements are on your timeline?
400 (is this outside the normal range? What is “normal”? Would be great to get your feedback on this)

How large is your currentversion.fcpproject file?
16.7 MB

Page outs is either 0 or a few kb

I think you may be right about it being an issue with my HD. I’m dumping everything on to a different drive now to see if that makes a difference.

@ Carsten

I get why breaking the film up into section and assigning each of those sections a different project/event could help performance, but to my mind you shouldn’t have to do that … I cut similarly sized projects on FCP7 with a slower older computer and slower older drives with no problem. Now suddenly I have to break everything apart?

That said, I’m not bashing FCPX. I’m converted and i think it’s great. ANd the workflow/approach you propose does make sense, and if it works well for you that’s all that matters, but I don’t think we should *have* to do this with large projects.

I actually think I’m having some kind of HD problem on my external.

@ Oliver

I’m doing none of those things you warn against

@ Michael ANgelo

Thanks for the encouragement. I haven’t even looked at event manager x. I have to have a fine cut of this by the first week of Sept. and a final cut by Oct 1 so I’m just trying to get through. As I mentioned, everything was working beautifully until a few days ago, which seemed to coincide with the time line approaching the 2 hr mark. The size of my event, however, has not really changed – i.e. all the footage was already imported and optimized well before I started this heavy editing. I’m thinking / hoping that it’s just an issue with my external HD (which totally sucks because it’s brand new).

Will keep you posted

Also, Larry Jordan mentioned trashing preferences as a way to improve performance – he was referring to earlier versions of FCPX though. I’m wary of doing this with 10.0.8. Anyone have any thoughts?
thanks again, mike

[T. Payton]

Michael,

If you want, email me directly using my creativecow username without the period at onecreative.net. We can screenshare or talk in the phone and probably get this worked out quickly.

——
T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque

[Jacob Brown]

With the feature I’m finishing up now I experienced a similar issue towards the end of the project.

One thing that definitely helped was deleting all render files — towards the end I started using effects more and I think maybe there are some snags as effect render and rerender. Or it may just be that the old render files (unused) start piling up and eating away at memory.

I also went out and bought a small thunderbolt raid to edit off of. (ended up getting the Lacie 2 big. it’s basically two 7200 rpm drives in raid) and that really smoothed things out for me.

[Michael Graziano]

hi T, I just emailed you.

Thanks