Spinning Pinwheel stalling my progress.

[Steve Connor]

First thing – do you have background rendering on in preferences? Do you have the inspector open if you do then does closing it make it any better? If you choose a view without waveforms in the timeline does that help?

[Joby Anthony jr]

In addition to Steve’s thoughts, switch the View to Better Performance, and consider creating Optimized media (or even Proxies for that matter).

There’s also the outside chance one of the files has gotten corrupted. Might take awhile to figure out which one. Creating new libraries with a re-import might help troubleshoot that.

Also, double-check any effects you’ve applied, especially third-party plug-ins. I know NeatVideo will slow things to crawl. If it’s an effect, disabling it should get you through the edit. Just remember to turn it back on at time of export.

Other considerations too could be the extent you’re using multicam and compound clips.

And more extensive troubleshooting would include doing a Safe Boot (sort of a soft reset of caches at the system level), and resetting FCPX Preferences. Here’s a Larry Jordan article that can help walk through those considerations. It’s older, but still relevant:

https://larryjordan.com/articles/five-step-trouble-shoot/

— Joby.

[Eric Santiago]

[Joby Anthony Jr] “There’s also the outside chance one of the files has gotten corrupted. Might take awhile to figure out which one. Creating new libraries with a re-import might help troubleshoot that.”

Delete the proxies and whatever renders it created then start again.
This time let it go for a few hours till you know it’s done.
This has happened to me and that was my only fix.
Sadly, it was for that one project, didn’t quite work that way for my most recent Optical Flow nightmare 😛

[William Schelhas]

Thanks for the replies. I will look into your suggestions. They are important as I am learning this stuff on the fly and find that I have to rethink a lot of old ways of doing stuff. As it is, I have a real messed up situation. How much of it relates to these problems and what is related and what is not, I don’t know. Seems my Hard Drive was going bad. I started having other issues, like this,

Here, even though all the video was fine on my SD card, It was importing with these “Black Holes” In it. I then noticed an odd file on the Hard Drive, something to the effect of Bad or Corrupt Files. In there was a copy of the clip that I mentioned above. Then, as I was putting the final ending on the program, FCPX froze. I had to Force Quit and when I re-booted the computer and FC I got an error that permissions were denied that I was already working on the project on my computer. I tried going into Get Info and changing the permissions. Something was messed up that when I unlocked the drive I could NOT change the
Everyone to Read and Write. That was followed by a message that the Hard Drive could not be repaired by OSX.

In the end, I stayed up all night starting back from square one. That is when I noticed something. Pardon if my terminology is off here. I originally setup with a “Library” Named for my client. Then, I setup “Events” for the dates of the individual debates. Followed by a “Project” for the actual edit. Last week, I had little trouble, other than the learning curve of having to look up stuff from my old FCP7 and try to figure out how to do it in FCPX. No render or pinwheels. Then, I created another Event and Project for the new debate that I shot on Sunday. The first hour of the program was fine. It was when I got into the second hour, and, incidentally, when I was editing the bad footage with the aforementioned “Black Holes” that I couldn’t do anything without triggering the pinwheel. When I started the new project, I had 1 library, 2 Event and 2 Project open. Where, before, I had 1 library, 1 Events and 1 Projects. Could it be that having 2 events and projects open was causing trouble?

[Steve Connor]

[William Schelhas] ” Could it be that having 2 events and projects open was causing trouble?
“

Not at all, shouldn’t make any difference

[William Schelhas]

Here’s another one. Having 2 projects open, Last Week and This week, I was taking Lower 3rds and Titles and Music and other items from the previous project and copying them onto the new one. I am not sure I was going about that right. Is there anything I should know about copy and past… stuff from one project, as a template?

[Joby Anthony jr]

Dying harddrive will definitely cause the pinwheel (LOT of pinwheel in fact–just experienced this myself). As will a nearly full harddrive. A general rule-of-thumb is to not fill up a drive more than 85% (so 1 TB drive = 850 GB of usable space). You need that 15% headroom on the drive or bad things can (will?) happen, similar to what you’ve described.

The black holes sound like dropped frames. That could either happen on the capture side or the import side. Hopefully you have the original card structures to go back to. That will tell you which side that problem is on.

In terms of copy/paste from one project, event, or library to the next–no big deal as long as you do it all inside of FCPX. It’ll track all of that for you pretty seamlessly.

I’d say concentrate on the harddrive issue first. 1. Don’t edit on the internal drive, use an external drive (USB3 or TB). 2. buy two new drives at the same time (one for edit, one for back up–always by drives in pairs).

And forgive all the workflow suggestions here if they’re already familiar to you.

— Joby.