Final Cut Pro X Performance

I'd really appreciate some advice and discussion with your own experiences of Final Cut Pro X.

I'm only just learning how to edit my footage, and have only really been working on projects that are a few minutes long.

My footage is AVC HD files out of a Panasonic GH2. I create optimised media (not proxy), and have recently selected playback to quality rather than performance.

I'm running all of this on a brand new 2011 17" Macbook Pro with 8gb of RAM. It has the 5000rpm 750gb system drive, and my media files are all on a 7200rpm 750gb drive in a firewire 800 enclosure. I can get about 60-70meg peak bandwidth out of both disks, however whenever FCP is using the disks i rarely see this go over 30meg.

I see stuttered playback, which often causes the video and audio to go out of sync. I'm so used to this now that i just have to play the same thing over and over, till it eventually gets those frames in memory cache (I can see further playback isn't reading off the hdd at these times).

I presume that it could be disk bandwidth thats causing the problem. I tried defragging my system disk, but i was hoping that having the media on an external disk would relieve any dependancy on the system disk once its loaded. It seems that the program is still quite regularly touching the system disk however.

Frustratingly if memory helps, i'm sat with 2gb inactive according to iStat menus, yet FCPX isn't trying to take this memory, sat at only 2gb memory in use.

I may switch back to performance biased playback, although when i'm experiencing these problems i can see that the CPUs are in no way overloaded, i presume that option is mainly for CPU and GPUs that are struggling to draw the video.

The latest 10.0.0.1 patch has definitely improved things a bit, before it even things like the titles browser would be very stuttery where as now its much improved.

I wondered what anyone else was using and what kind of performance they were getting. I'm contemplating getting an SSD though can't really afford it and this would only be for the system drive, not the drive with the actual media on it.

Your help is appreciated. Clearly this machine SHOULD be able to eat up all of this load, though I do wonder about my harddisks, well the media drive is clearly fast enough, but perhaps the firewire 800 interface isn't helping.

Hi, don't know if this helps but I'm running on a 3 year old (GPU by the skin of its teeth) iMac with half the RAM you have and FCPX sweet with speed and closer to realtime than FCP7 ever was.
Can't really help track your issue but I also have footage coming over a Firewire 800 cable from a 7200 drive with no real problem. The only time I find the app freaking is if the edit is playing and I spend a bit of time live messing with audio levels (however, this project is mixing some serious audio content). Overall, way faster and even when I break it, it takes me right back to where I was, flawlessly.
Good luck:)
Lee

Just a thought but what happens if you run it from a safe boot?

Does safe boot try to remove a lot of other things from running? How do I boot into safe mode?

To be honest i do leave my browser open with too many tabs. Though I have flashblock turned on so they're not using my CPU up too much. I also think the problems i'm seeing are mainly HDD based. It just frustrates me that FCP doesn't want to use MORE memory when its available to it.

I'd hope my machine has enough power on tap to not require me to shut absolutely everything else down. I may try a totally fresh booted machine and see if its better, or still capable of being broken.

Agreed though, generally the software is fairly snappy. It's just audio distortions and skips and playback freezing for a few frames whilst audio continues that frustrates. I wonder if anything else on the system could be hurting it

this page seems to make it unlikely that FCPX would even run in safe mode

support.apple.com/kb/ht1564

"Safe Mode in Mac OS X v10.5 or later also disables Quartz Extreme (hardware accelerated graphics). Applications that depend on Quartz Extreme will not open"

and even if it did I don't think it'd have any sound

"However, certain Mac OS X features do not work in Safe Mode. For example, you can't use DVD Player, capture video in iMovie, use audio input or output devices"

I've just shut pretty much everything down and had another go...

It ran a LOT better, not totally unexpected. I guess i need to start thinking, work mode make space and clear it all out.

What else do you have running on your setup when you're getting decent performance?

I know it'll just be Chrome and 30+ tabs that's the culprit. In fact i have a sneaky suspcion something like facebook with its perpetual refreshing and updating could be touching the disk and generally being a nuisance.

Next time i'll try staggering what apps i close and see how performance varies.

Anyone else's experiences with getting the best out of FCPX and any hard working software would be appreciated.

Hi Jimbobuk
Safe boot is worth doing in order to run a repair on your disc permissions.
restart holding down shift key until you see the small timer icon. The machine will take MUCH longer to start up, don't panic. Go with it.
As soon as you are on the desktop, do cmd+shift and u
In Utilities open disc Utility app and choose your hard disc from the left hand list.
Click on repair permissions.
Once its done, quit the app and restart.

Doing any sort of video edit is hard work out for your machine. I would recommend not running anything other than FCPX when you are doing a session. It will make a difference.

Happy times

Lee

Hi!
In my experience Safari interferes a lot in the memory and IO (input output) of everything else, especially on FCP X.
When i close Safari my FCP X is much smoother then with Safari running.
I hope Safari gets updated soon and gets lighter on the resources of our machines.
If i have less then 10 tabs FCP X still works OK, but i always have to be careful, and i also think that Facebook seems to be problematic too.
You are not alone on that Safari problem.

+1 on Safari being a Hog, it wrecks Aperture 3 performance as well.

Is there a way of assigning FCPX all the computers memory & processing power? In the previous version of Compressor you could do this with Apple Qmaster but you don't get this with the new one.

What is the total capacity of each drive, and how much od that is free space?

As i said, 750gb for both, 5000rpm for boot drive, 7200rpm for AV drive over firewire 800. Don't have the AV drive connected at the moment but is about 450gb free i'd imagine. My boot drive is overloaded at only 240GB free at the moment, though i'm trying my best to free up more and more of that.

I think it was just other processors being greedy, even though its a machine that should be comfortable, some things clearly just chip away and effect realtime performance whilst not really being THAT significant on the CPU usage.

My ($ is no object) advice would to pick up a G Raid 2TB get a RAM boost, and wipe fcpx off your computer, never use it again, and get FCP7 or dare I say AVID.... I think im gunna be sick....:sick: But seriously I have soooo many friends telling me about the numerous problems with FCPX outside the obvious "pro-sumer" downgrade, with slow down problems, freezing, crashing, saves not executing when FCPX says its saving and these guys are all on Four Cores with more Ram then one has wet dreams about... seriously ditch FCPX.... if thats not an option... try redistributing the Memory wealth either using the built in utilities or you can download 3rd party software that will do the same thing with a more friendly interface... sry if I sound douchey but FCPX is regarded in the professional realm the same way Porshe would be regarded if they stopped making sports cars and started making child's big wheels...

There does appear to be an inconsistency in user experience, I've just delivered a documentary for cinema screening with full multiple language surround audio. The edit was huge and FCPX was flawless on a relatively modest setup. I can't complain from extensive (but wholly subjective) experience but neither can I answer for wider user frustrations. Hope you get similar good mileage:)

Hey Colinstone213, why are you even here if you have FCP X so much? Honestly?

I work very closely with Apple, Universities, broadcast stations, etc, etc. The problems are not that bad, and not that wide spread.

In fact, Apple's own marketing information shows that the overwhelming majority of their own professional clients: stations, universities, etc, who threatened to go to Avid or PPro when FCP X was first released, to date, haven't at all, and are starting to like FCP X very much.

Now, if someone wants to troll and lie, find. But it's a very coward thing to do. If you were that hateful of FCP X you'd not even be here, you'd be off on your Avid forums. Right?

You're speaking of others who you claim to know who've used it, but not your own experience. This may get me censored here, but I think you're making this up and simply being a troll. It all defies the facts I have available to me.

Fully agree with BenB.

For sure there are several issues with FCPX but I do confirm too that I'm having a lot of pleasure with this soft and it's really possible to enjoy working with it.

After, I'd say : YES OF COURSE...Apple do have to move its ass to solve quickly (at least) the stupid issues we're facing (Skimmer becoming crazy at a zoom level and some crashes during the use) because it's irritating...But all of it doesn't prevent from taking pleasure

Yes I like FCPX

Hey jimbobuk, going back to your original post, can I offer the following suggestions?
Put quality setting to performance.
Turn off background rendering.
Turn off audio skimming (which you have probably done anyway cause it will drive you insane)
Change the timeline view to the minimal content setting (no icons, thumbnails) obviously when you are doing precision edits you will need to enable other flavors to keep an eye/ear on what's happening

Keep active only the tools you need for the job at hand (no scopes till colour correcting etc)

Turn off optimization of video and audio at ingest, you are the editor, you make those decisions and 99% of the time the optimisation has been done in camera already, you won't be setting up the shot with poor lighting/white balance etc

Turn off shot recognition, it is good but it's not bringing much to the table for the processor cycles it is using

If I can think of anymore I'll write them down

You asked earlier 'What else am I running' when I am editing? Nothing:)

If nothing else, there's bad RAM or hard drive, which I've found lots of. Disk Utility doing repairs, and Disk Warrior run three times will prove it out or not.

I'm also finding third party templates/plugins to be culprits, too.

jimbobuk - Did you call Apple about this? I would, they have been very helpful with other folks problems.

FCP X hater guy - have you actually ever used the software? Or done any training? I opened up Resolve for the first time and couldn't do a thing, and got frustrated pretty quick because I couldn't figure it out. Same with Maya. Is it now garbage software and too complicated for it's own good, or perhaps it is my problem?

jimbobuk, I feel for you. However, I am afraid that the problem may be within your setup. It sounds like something in the background is the cause of your problems. Another note is that you may have to check the health of your RAM. Problems with buggy RAM chips aren't new in editing.

For FCPX haters, let it go. FCP 7 will be history for more reasons than I can list here. FCPX is going through growing pains now and currently is in the catch up mode. Yes, some needed tools are missing at the moment.

When FCPX has caught up, it will leap out like a real Lion. I have done a few projects over 30 minutes long all on the new FCPX and it worked very well. I even did a project in a war zone in the back of a personal carrier that was being shot at every five minutes!

I'm glad my people aren't on the highways still driving Model Ts. What a traffic jam that would be.