[Roland Leong]

OS 10.14.1
FCP X 10.4.3
Radeon Pulse RX 580

With the OS 10.14.1 update, FCP X 10.4.3 finally ran for me. FCP X didn’t crash, I was able to import clips from my iPhone, play them in Browser, place them in a Timeline, play the Timeline, export with Compressor and play the resulting file. I have not made anything with layers or elementary edits, so I cannot say any more on what works or does not work beyond what I’ve already said.

[Roland Leong]

Yes, but it wasn’t easy. I’ve only got it working as of today, so it took a month of trouble shooting and multiple times of pulling out/putting in video cards. My son-in-law made the following suggestions, and so far they’ve seemed to work:

Just grasping at straws here…

1. Did you uninstall the NVIDIA and CUDA drivers before rebooting with the Radeon card? Given the shoddiness of Apple’s software quality-control over the last few releases, I wouldn’t be surprised if FCP-X (or macOS itself) is getting confused about the switch of GPU architecture?

2. Have you trashed your FCP-X preferences as part of your troubleshooting? If not, it’s definitely one of the first things to do to eliminate simple preferences corruption as the cause of the problem. I can’t tell you how many times in the past where I’ve spent hours and hours trying to troubleshoot an issue I was having in either Final Cut Pro 7 or Adobe Premiere/After Effects (pulling/swapping out RAM sticks, uninstalling potentially conflicting apps etc), when ultimately it turned out that simply trashing the app preferences fixed the issue. I recommend using Digital Rebellion’s free Preference Manager for this task, since it allows you to backup your prefs before it trashes them.

3. The final hail-mary pass is to zap the PRAM, not once, but THREE times in a row. I have to periodically do this on my Mac Pro because the 10gig Ethernet card in my system randomly stops being recognized by the OS a few times a month. The only thing that ever brings it back is to to zap the PRAM 3 times in succession. I’ve never seen any official documentation from Apple about the triple-zap being an actual thing, but ever since I learned about it from this CalDigit techsupport document, I can personally vouch that it can sometimes inexplicably work to fix weird hardware issues.

So while I’ve output a couple of timelines to ProRez 4444 and it’s worked, I can’t give you a final determination as to whether the RX580 is a keeper yet. Let me know how you fare.