Spinning beachball of death — and I'm still browsing footage

I'm nowhere near having a project yet. I'm at the start of the editing process, viewing footage and tagging it with keywords. I began getting the SSoD (spinning beachball of death) last week, so I trashed FCPX and re-downloaded it from the Apple Store. This took a whole day. Well, it ran just fine the first time I launched. On Day 2 (today) it's back to the SSoD.

I accidentally managed to fix it about three weeks ago — just by re-importing the media and having it transcoded during import. But now I'm getting the beachball again — and I'm too deep into the project to reimport everything again and lose all my keywords and tagged favorites.

I need urgent help please or else I'll have to slide back to FCP7 and do everything the old way.

Mac Pro OS X 10.8.1
2 x 2.93 Ghz Quad Core Intel Xeon
16 GB 1066 MHz DDR3
FCP X 10.0.5

What graphic card are you using?
How many monitors?
Be sure all Events and Projects are NOT on the OS drive.

My system is pristine Apple, no add ons. The graphic card is what ships with the Mac Pro: AMD Radeon HD 6750M.

And I have just one monitor, the Apple widescreen.

I only have the OS drive, I'm afraid, but it's 2TB and all my files are on it. It surely cannot be a condition of using FCP X that all Events and Projects have to be stored externally?

I suspect that the spinning beachball is a simpler problem than it seems on first sight — though damned I can figure out what to do about it. Wish I were a more nerdy.

I'd up that graphics card to something more powerful for sure. I just installed an ATI Radeon HD 5870 and noticed definite improvements over my old HD 4870 GPU.

Also, you need to store your Events and Projects on a "secondary" drive, not the OS drive (I never said external). This is true of all NLEs. A hard drive can only read/write so much data per second. It's a limited data pipe bandwidth that flows between the CPU and drive's controller card. Video editing requires multiple audio and video streams that eat up that bandwidth fast. Making the data bandwidth for the app and OS to do their work go even slower. Everything slows down.

Thus, putting Events and Projects on a secondary (preferably internal) drive frees up bandwidth so everything can run smoother.

FCP X will run on a MacBook Air, but you won't do much HD multicam work with it. Same thing, if you cram too much video work onto an OS drive, you'll not get very good performance.

Also be sure all connected drives have at least 10-15% of their total capacity as free space.

Disk Warrior once a month doesn't hurt, either.

Thanks for those tips, Ben. Certainly worth bearing in mind. I'm not sure they address my present predicament, though. I don't see how the factors you mention could account for a spinning beachball that persists over restarts.

My FCP X moved from seamless smooth response and performance in one session to the spinning beachball in the next. In between, there was a shutdown and restart is all. This means that the application gave consistent acceptable performance with all Events and Projects on the OS drive. If it's a bandwidth problem, then (a) the issue cannot develop suddenly; and (b) should have been apparent from the get-go. In either case, a restart should have addressed the beachball, even if briefly.

I'm sure your suggestions would greatly enhance overall performance, though at considerable cost since I'd have to a new graphic card and secondary drive, but I'm not clear if that's the straightest simplest route to addressing my specific beachball problem.

By the way, I'm finding Digital Rebellion very useful as a kind of Disk Warrior for the FCP X.

Yes, it all pertains directly.

Create a new user, login and work with it. This solved my beachball problems.