poor performance with longer project

[Nikolas Bäurle]

I had the same problem over a year ago editing a feature length experimental art film, shot on xdcam ex. It is full of color corrections, fast edits, sound filters. Was using my 8 year old FW800 500GB Raid + 2011 MacBook Pro, i7. Until then it had bee outperforming even my newer LaCie drives. Suddenly with X and about 20 hours of footage, 60 min cut, X would pretty much come to a standstill, up to 30 min beach balls, the project could take about 15 minutes to load on certain days, relinking about 10 min… duplicating a 500 GB event inside x took about 12 hours.

When an got my LaCie thunderbolt drive everything worked perfectly fine, on the same MacBook. On my new iMac there’s practically no stalling whatsoever.
My old drive still works with my laptop very well, just not long X projects.

FCPX generally has problems with older hardware, in my experience. The places I’ve used X at all had problems with their drives. I had a job cutting 3 min image clips last year on a 12 core MacPro, pimped out machine. At first the Raid died, and even after getting the new one it was slow., I ended up using my MacBook with my old 500 Gb Raid Drive:-)) worked like a charm.

“Always look on the bright side of life” – Monty Python

[Michael Graziano]

I hear you. Both my computer and drives are brand new. Like I mentioned before, not the most high performance, but still should be more than enough. I ran disk repair on everything to see if something was failing or corrupted, but there were no problems at all.

It’s still workable. And never pinwheels for more than 30 secs, but it’s maddening when trying to trim a clunky and/or long winded interview response and every time you use the blade the pinwheel comes out, even if it’s only for 5 seconds.

If this keeps up I’m going to get a thunderbolt raid. I thought USB 3 would be enough (I was able to get 2 brand new 4TB USB3 G drives for the same price as 1 4tb thunderbolt raid). we’ll see…

I looked at the render files. All of them put together only add up to 100gb, which shouldn’t be the problem.

In any case, before I pony up for the thunderbolt I’m hoping there’s some default or preference or something that’s causing the trouble that I’ve overlooked and to which someone points me

thanks for your input

mike

[Nikolas Bäurle]

Do you have background rendering turned on? That can slow you down, and it generates a lot of files, every single change you make gets rendered automatically, then you make speed changes adding optical flow for example or add 3rd part effects and X spends its time background rendering like crazy, so any time you move your mouse it starts beachballing to pause the rendering and start rendering again once you stop, it happens on older macs and drives very often. I would delete your renderfiles on a regular basis if you background render.

[Michael Graziano]

I was just about to post to the thread when I read this.

I do have background rendering turned on, which makes sense that as the timeline expanded the increased weight would cause the pinwheeling. I’ll try cutting without it on to see if that helps. although, WTH this almost all straight cuts, not effects, titles or even tags yet.

All that said – don’t know why I didn’t think about this earlier – but I turned off audio and video skimming after my last post and performance improved *dramatically* – pinwheeling only a fraction of the time – back to 90% performance.

Maybe if I turn off BG rendering i’ll be back to 100%.

What are the pros cons of turning off BG render altogether vs. just trashing render files periodically? If i go with the latter, i.e. trash but leave BG render on, won’t that just cause the program to attempt to re-render everything that I trashed as soon as I’m back on the timeline?

thanks again,

mike

[Nikolas Bäurle]

I always have it turned off, I only use it when If need to render the entire edit. I always render selections using ctrl+r and only if its really necessary.

If you leave BG render on and you open an unrendered project it will start rendering.

[Jeremy Garchow]

This might sound oversimplified, but do you use Dropbox?

I rarely do, but one of my vendors swears by it so I have to use it, unfortunately.

I was getting massive slow downs in a really simple project the other day and quitting Dropbox was like flipping a performance switch in fcpx. I had to actually quit it not just stop it. I am now using Dropbox through the web only on fcpx machines.

Jeremy

[Nikolas Bäurle]

I had the same problem with iTunes slowing down X last week.

[Michael Angelo]

Hey Carlson Orlt,

I love the idea of having separate Event Libraries! I’m just new to the software and haven’t really figured out how to use all my valuable keywording to make a search across multiple Events. Say for example I break the imports into 10 logical Events and I want to see all the shots with 3 specific characters, at 2 common locations plus another criteria across all my Events. That would be 5 keywords that I would like to use to pull media from within 10 Event Libraries. When I put a key word in search field it doesn’t pull anything up. I guess that leaves smart collections which don’t seem to work across events meaning I’d have to create 10 Smart Collections one for each event? I’m so very new to this work flow so please excuse my ignorance…

This forum is unreal, really appreciate all the great info and responses…

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