When FCPX is under strain, what symptoms do you see?

Hi all - I am starting this thread to try to gather more knowledge about how FCPX behaves when the limits of it's performance are being pushed.

I do not have any experience of FCPX on any systems other than my own so i am not sure that the symptoms I am experiencing are the same as other people's.

Specifically in my case I am noticing that when playing back unrendered footage in FCPX often I will notice it takes more of a toll that just a dropped frame. Most noticeable is a lagging mouse and crackling (sounding like 8 bit) audio.

By "lagging mouse" I am describing the behaviour of the cursor on screen "sticking" and "dragging" rather than faithfully following the mouse as I move it. The whole system seems to be taxed, whereas I would expect only the playback of footage to suffer.

I have had it suggested to me that mouse lag in this circumstance would be symptomatic of the system "not allocationg resouces properly".

My opening question would be this: When your FCPX system seems to under heavy strain do you notice that your symptoms are confined to FCPX or are they system-wide?

I experience latency in the program responding to input, especially trying to navigate through Filters, Transitions, Generators and the like. I have been told by Apple that using a program like Event Manager X to move Projects and Events "offline" helps. I can attest to vast improvement in performance when you reduce the number of Events and Projects that are loaded by FCPx when it starts.

Thanks for chiming in. That's interesting.

I routinely use Event Manager X and keep open projects to a minimum but I am surprised to hear that it would have any effect on navigating the UI.

Love to hear other stories...

Not loading up too many Events and Projects (remember each is a mini-database) keeps your RAM and other resources free. When FCP launches, parts of these databases are loaded into RAM (as much as possible). As you open each, the full database is loaded into RAM (but never unloaded unless your run out of RAM).

Stuttering playback, distorted audio playback, GUI hesitations, excessive rendering times, crashes, all are symptoms of hardware resources not up to par. There's not much to it.

Get all the RAM you can (personally I think over 16 GB is overkill, but then...), the most powerful GPU you can, and the fastest drives you can. That's about it.

Posting your hardware specs would do a LOT of good in this thread.

I agree with BenB. However, I have an SSD system drive, Xserve Fibre Channel RAID, and 32GB of RAM, and the zippiest GFX card available running on a MacPro, and the UI latency drives me crazy at times. That's when I shut down and dump Events/Projects with Event Manager X. Then the spinning beach ball goes away.

XSAN RAID? What are you using for your MDC's?

Get all the RAM you can (personally I think over 16 GB is overkill, but then...), the most powerful GPU you can, and the fastest drives you can. That's about it.

Posting your hardware specs would do a LOT of good in this thread.

I understand what you're saying but I do want to keep the thread broad -otherwise it will become a series of solving individual issues for individual users with individual specs dealing with particular footage.

I know it's almost impossible to talk symptoms without talking specs but if we could keep the thread focused on "the manner in which FCPX struggles when it does struggle" that would be great.

I'd like to gather a list of symptoms and sort them into 2 categories:
1. Known, common and to-be-expected symptoms with solid solutions and
2. Symptoms that don't sound right - where really "FCPX shouldn't be behaving like that"

So having said all that I am running FCPX 10.0.7 on a 3.4 Ghz i7 iMac with 16GB of RAM and an R6 Thunderbolt Raid giving me 500MB/s, just as a benchmark for my issues. I run as few project as possible using Event Manager X.

My common symptoms include playback slowing when FCPX is trying to playback a certain level of unrendered footage in real time (Category 1 and no surprises there). What is surprising to me is that I experience UI lags and most disturbingly hesitation hesitation in the cursor as I drag the mouse around the UI. This is often accompanied by what can only be described as bit-crushed audio. After the issues arise due to challenging circumstances for FCPX the are more likely to arise with (for example) footage that doesn't even need rendering having trouble playing back and playing "bit-crushed" audio.

So there you have it. My specs and my symptoms.

Without necessarily going into specifics to solve my problem, I'm really wondering what others experience when FCPX is under strain - whatever "strain" may mean to your particular system and particular project.

I think you're asking for a packaged, neat list of things, for a system that has too many moving parts to do that with. But, my 2 cents for what it's worth. It all does in fact boil down to RAM, drive, GPU, software versions, third party add-ons, that's it.

I think you're asking for a packaged, neat list of things

I'm really just looking for other people's experiences so I can get a more complete picture of how FCPX struggles when it does. I honestly don't expect answers, and I'm definitely not expecting to solve every issue there could possibly be - I'm just trying to gather more experiences beyond my own .

Well I've noticed pretty good performance since 10.0.6 on an 8 Core 2009 tower with the ATI Radeon 5880 and a ton of ram (events on external esata drives). Things definitely do start to kluge down when I am trying to type titles and open filters on a shot that has a couple of filters/layers already on it. I try to kind of render as I go to keep things peppy.

One thing to think about: FCPX handles a lot of formats natively these days--even when you select optimize on import it leaves them in their native format (i.e., NOT Pro Res). I've always thought that reduces performance since I imagine the machine having to transcode on the fly for playback. But I'm not a hard core computer person so I'm not actually sure that is the case. And there is no way to force X to transcode to Pro Res if it has decided it doesn't need to. But maybe it really does, right?

Put another way--is your source material Pro Res or another format?

cheesenightmare wrote: I'm really just looking for other people's experiences so I can get a more complete picture of how FCPX struggles when it does.

How it struggles may depend on why it's struggling. A not powerful enough GPU or a GPU without much memory may give different results than a system with plenty of graphics processing power, but not enough RAM. If the hardware configuration is one that only limits FCPX you may only see FPCX slowdowns and stuttering. If the HW configuration limits the entire system you'll see beachballs as the processes are swapped in and out of disk. The latter is technically not an FCPX issue (but you'll get mad at it anyway ).

@cheesenightmare
I think your system specs are suitable enough to run FCPX smoothly. You don't discuss your media and where it is located, but I am assuming it is on your external Thunderbolt drive (projects and events) and not on your operating system disk (which is where it should be).
EDIT - to clarify this statement, the media should NOT be on your system disk.

My guess is that you have either a corrupt project, or bad FCPX preferences or corrupt render files.

I would check the following:

- Turn OFF background render in your FCPX preferences.
- Select "Better Performance" in preferences as opposed to HIGH QUALITY. Switch to HIGH QUALITY if you need to clearly see a transition, effect, or color grade on some footage, but for straight cutting, leave it at Better Performance.
- Trash your FCPX preferences and restart FCPX.

When you say sluggish when playing unrendered material, clarify what codec the media is and how much of it is unrendered in the timeline. Also, what result do you get with playback if you render the timeline?

See if any of this helps.

Thanks for the suggestions @dgwvideo

Over the break I will spend some time really trying to optimise this whole system.

In the meantime my list of how FCPX struggles when it does would go like this:

Expected:
Dropped Frames when trying to playback real time effects


Not so expected:
UI becoming less responsive
Mouse lag
Audio going fuzzy and grinding to a halt. Like this: www.givethatmanajob.com/Public/issues/StutterPlayback_a.mov

What codec are the video files? What is the audio codec used in them?

@benb these are 1080p h264 movs, default settings from an iPhone 4S (I don't know exactly the details at the moment, I'm away from the desk) but I have experienced these symptoms with a number of different formats.

I must stress again because I know there are a lot of helpful folk who will want to try to diagnose what they see that I am actually note trying to fix the shown issue. I'm trying to share the symptom and that's all in the hope that other people might chime in with "yes this happens to my setup too from time to time" or "never seen a symptom like that"

The sample I gave is not an existing project, just a sample. It happened -not fr the first time - when I was noodling with some random footage and I thought - I better screen capture that behaviour and run it by some other editors and see if others are experiencing similar symptoms.

So the more general question would be who else as experienced similar symptoms regardless of the cause?

cheesenightmare wrote: I'm trying to share the symptom and that's all in the hope that other people might chime in with "yes this happens to my setup too from time to time" or "never seen a symptom like that"

Different people editing exactly the same footage will see different symptoms depending upon their operating environment. How much disk, what disk speed, what disk interface, how much ram, how many cores, which gpu, how much gpu ram, what other programs are running, how fast is your internet connection... all of those items can and will effect the symptoms you see.

Example: I get beachballs for about 5-10 seconds once in a while. Has nothing to do with FCPX. It's the time it takes one of my raid drives to power up in sequence up all of its disks when waking from sleep.

Different people editing exactly the same footage will see different symptoms depending upon their operating environment.

Yes exactly - that's exactly what I'm interested in learning more about: what symptoms people experience.

Example: I get beachballs for about 5-10 seconds once in a while. Has nothing to do with FCPX. It's the time it takes one of my raid drives to power up in sequence up all of its disks when waking from sleep.

I see what you're saying. I expect there will be a variety of symptoms some commonly explainable but I think we'll know those ones and not feel the need to raise them. What I am trying to tease out is ways in which FCPX specifically struggles when it does.

I am trying to simulate being in an environment running many seats of FCPX where you could spot patterns. I am alone. I suspect many FCPX editors are also. That's why I want to hear about people's experiences about how FCPX struggles for them when it does. Emphasis on "how" rather than "why" so that patterns might be identified.