[Michael Hadley]

Oliver: I’ve got an 8 core 2009 tower with a 4870 card . Have had a lot of performance issues with 10,0.3 and thinking of upgrading to the 5870 card. Sounds like you have had a good experience with 10.0.3 in terms of performance with the 5870 card?

[Michael Hadley]

Yes, patience is a virtue. Transcoding is a big burden on the system–best done when drinking beer.

I’ve been trying to goose performance and have learned some helpful tricks. That said, in it’s current version, X is definitely buggy and prone to crashing. Can’t wait for the next update.

I’ve got a 2009 tower with 8 cores and 24 gb of ram with an ATI Radeon 4870 with 512mb of ram. I’m wondering if it would make a big difference to upgrade to the ATI 5870 card. Any thoughts folks?

[Michael Hadley]

Bill:

Please share your rules–tips, advice. Would love to benefit. I’ve been working with X for about two months. Much of it is great. And only a little of it (aside from audio mixing) stinks.

But the biggest challenge for me with X is the pokey performance/beachballing. I’ve been doing a simple multi cam project and it was so painfully slow. I was actually on the phone with Apple four times. They weren’t much help.

But: they did tell me not to use a sparse disk image. Maybe that helped a bit.
The biggest improvement I discovered by accident. Previously, I had understood it was okay to keep the project and event on the same external volume. However, I made a backup and mistakenly put it on my internal system driver. My performance improved dramatically, to the point where it is tolerable (although still get hangs and crashes all too frequently.)

So one thing I would recommend is to keep your project on your internal system drive and your event/media on an external (non-system) drive, just like the old days with FCP7.

Any/all other tips to improve performance appreciated.

Oh–and I think from now on I’ll be making both proxy and optimized everything to speed the plow.

(And thanks for all your previously great and useful posts).

[Michael Hadley]

I’ve been having a similar problem with a much shorter project. Was on the phone with Apple 4 times and even sent them files (more about that in another post).

Performance improved quite a bit when I copied the project file to my system drive (event still on external eSata drive). I had understood best practice was to keep both project and event on the same volume. But the crummy performance says otherwise.

So for now, I am back to a FCP 7 approach, with project files on my system and project media on external drives.

It might be worth a try.

[Michael Hadley]

Your troubles sound just awful. I can sympathize.

Two things: Were you actually recommending regularly deleting render files to improve performance?

And what do you mean by getting corrupt versions out of your project folder? Are you suggest creating another project folder, on another volume, and then copying/pasting the new project into that location?

Thanks.

[Michael Hadley]

I was experiencing the spinning beach ball/poor performance problem and it was getting worse as I continued to edit.

I actually called apple. Here was their solution.

Sometimes, project files get corrupt. The fix is simple: in your current project, select everything (command A) copy everything (command C)

Next, go to the project library. Create a new project. Open it, and paste everything into it (yep, command V). This may resolve your problem. It seems to have worked for me. For now.

Apple also recommends making a duplicate of your current project once every few hours in case it gets so corrupt you can’t open it. That seems to be an issue for some poor souls. And then even the backup won’t open.

My guess this “corrupt project file” issue is big and something they are working on given how quickly the service tech offered it as the potential solution. And it is working so far.

Guess that’s why some folks never work with a .0 app. Hopefully they solve this (or reduce it) in the next update.

I think this is important so am going to repost as a new thread…hopefully not too boring for the audience here but I was about ready to weep until I found the solution.

Good luck!

[Michael Hadley]

Well, yes. Rather too late–running 10.0.3.

As far as OS goes, am running 10.7.3–up to date Lion.

I’m also using Event Manager X (great app) so only two events/projects readable by X.

I might switch from dual monitor to single monitor mode and see if things improve. I had a different problem typing simple titles in dual monitor mode and once I switched to a single monitor, things improved quite a bit.

I guess my question is: if I beefed up my card, would the increased performance be worth it? Really, I don’t think this project is too nutty in terms of pushing the system so I wonder if it’s just that X is kinda slow.

Which would be a bummer.

Thanks as always.

[Michael Hadley]

Just to close the loop on this.

Finally achieved a very good key. And was actually able to do it in FCPX. The key was to turn down the automatic sample strength to about 7%, take my own samples, and add 4 edge pins.

A slight shift on the color bias, a bit of softening on the matte and a touch of light wrap, and it all looks very good.

But the key (no pun intended) was turning off X’s automatic sampling and using the edge pins. I’m sure PHYXX and CVH are wonderful tools, once mastered, but I was able to get a very good result from X.

Thanks for everyone’s great advice.

[Michael Hadley]

Thanks, Simon. Sound advice from a pro. Much appreciated.

[Michael Hadley]

You are definitely right about the audio in multi cam. Wonder then how you can mix different tracks (a boom mic and a lav) in the timeline then?

As to slipping a 30 minute multicam clip, in the angle editor, you can blade just the section you to tweak and then adjust as needed. At least that worked for me. Only a small portion of the clip is then impacted.