-
Timeline has become unworkably slow, for no reason??
Hi,
I have multiple projects on my computer at work. Everything seemed to be working fine until now. All of a sudden, when I open up a project, everything runs incredibly slow. When I try to scrub through the timeline, I will get the spinning ball of death, then it will take literally a minute before the timeline updates to where my mouse is. OF course, this makes editing impossible.
I have space on my hard drives. They are full, but there is still aroun 14 GIG free in each of two hard drives. I just cant work out why things have suddenly started to work so slowly?
Can anyone help? Thanks very much for any advice.
Running Final Cut 5 HD, on a 2 Ghz G5 tower, with Panther, and 2 Gig of Ram.
-
7 Replies
-
Couple things that can cause this. “Dupe detection” on ANY timeline in a project that you have open will bring your CPU to it’s knees. Check every project and turn it OFF.
You may also want to turn of other processor intensive activities like waveforms and thumbnails and so forth. If doing these steps has no effect, then I would start pointing at your drives.
Mark
-
14 GB is probably too low for free space, unless your media drives are 120 GB or less in size.
General rule is that you need to leave at least 10%, and preferably 20% of hard drive space free for headroom & file swapping.
Try cleaning out some old render files or something, and see of you can get the free space on the drives up to at least 10%.
If they are smaller drives, how big has your project getting? You might want to break it up into a couple smaller projects. Large project files can also be taxing.
Post back if either of these doesn’t help!
debe
-
Your drives are too full. You need to either get a bigger/faster drive and work from that, or, trim down your footage so you have only what you need and then you still need to defragment (or perhaps run disk warrior as it doesn’t defragment, but rearranges the directories so they are seen ‘in order’). This seems to be the age old case of not having enough fast storage on hand. What kind of drives and what are the sizes? Once they start to fill up, the data gets written on the inside (slowest) part of the disks. This is what is slowing your system down. The drives simply cannot feed the data to FCP. The best way to defrag your drive (which is not hard, but takes a lot of time and disk space) is to clear off your media drives and move your data to other sets of drives (i.e. back up the data), erase your media drives, and then copy the backed up media back to your now clean and reformatted media drive so that everything is now in order on the media drives. Just learned this technique myself the other day and it worked like a charm.
Make sense?
Jeremy
-
Delete as many render files as you can (old versions of cuts don’t need renders anyway) and restart. this might help.
-
It might be possible your project is trying to access some file thru your network… a definite cause for something like this. Try disconnecting all drives from your network.
-
If you have multiple sequences in your project..it definately slows the load in….try scaling it down to only the sequence you’re working on and see if the timeline moves faster….if so…that’s you problem
-
All the above are good suggestions. Another thing to check is to make sure “Display Audio Waveforms” in your Sequence Settings >> Timeline Options is turned off. Turning waveforms on dramatically slows down FCP.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up