Help - FCP X Severe Lag & High CPU Usage Issue

Heya,

So I just finished doing the steps you suggested last Sunday (for me) - duplicating the events in to my external drive, etc. I now have about 288GB of Drive space on my computer.

Took a bit of guts, as even though I'm pretty sure it was safe, it's still a huge worry that I've lost the past 3 months work in one 'empty trash'. xD

So, I've opened an old project, and it appears to be %80 good in terms of not having lag. There's still quite a few moments where FCP has to stop and take a good long think about what it's doing (which never previously happened), but for the project I tested at least, it seems to be mostly fine.

The project library, however, is extremely 'laggy'.... Not quite as much as earlier, but still very noticeable. This is probably due to the fact that I just opened it for the first time since emptying/duplicating files etc, however. I'm not sure.

So what was the point of this, exactly? Other than to clean out my drive to a large extent.
The project that I'm currently working on (when I first noticed this issue) has been moved over to my external drive.
In terms of testing FCP X's performance now, it everything appears to be a great deal better... however, this is only on projects that have missing files (i.,e the ones I've moved to my external drive).

What now? I really need to get back to my current project. Can I move it over to my computer's drive, and continue editing from there? I'm not entirely sure if the problem is fixed, but so far, things seem to be okay. Then again, I've only tested files that are on my COMPUTER'S drive - As prior mentioned, I only have USB 2 - It'd be slow to load things regardless from my external hard drive.

Edit: Just took a look at another project without missing files. A little laggy, but mostly working (lag probably from the fact that it needs to re-render)
Also, project library is good most of the time, but needs to load a fair bit when scrolling down, which is a given (loading projects).

Sidenote: Would it be possible that this problem arrived from the project library? I remember opening quite a lot of various projects the day this issue started - does FCP perhaps cache everything you've opened until a certain point, or...?

Thanks!

You're not going to be satisfied with performance until you're running your projects off a fast external drive.

Just to be crystal clear on this point- running media and project/event files off your computer is never going to give you a great experience, and is not recommended regardless of how much drive space you have.

You may be seeing a performance improvement now, but to eliminate the lag you should buy a FW800 Drive. They're cheap it will pay for itself in a week by reducing your frustration level.

Also, as we mentioned above, make sure your media is optimized and not h.264 MOV files, these are VERY processor intensive and will further slow everything down.

All of the files included in the project I'm working on are basically H.264 files, actually. >.<
I think it's a bit late to change that now, though? It's all been optimised/transcoded in FCP, however.

Question, how does editing off an external FW800 help? I'll see if I can get one soon.

Until then, is it possible to move my project over from the external drive I currently have onto my computer, and work from there?

And if it's still got the extreme amount of poor performance then as before, It'll be worth waiting for a FW800 then, I suppose (Will most likely be bought of the internet, or else I'll need to find a chance to get a cheap one somewhere in town)?

Basically, you're asking your system drive to do too many things.

Play the media. Run the application. Read and write to the project/event files. Run any other apps going on in the background. Sync your time machine. Sync your Dropbox. Run the OS. It's all too much, and you get lag.

FW800 is over twice as fast in transmitting data than USB2, and has lower latency. It's the fastest port on your machine.

And yes, as long as you've optimized the footage when you brought it into FCPX then you should be ok. To check, left-click on one of your media files in the event browser and select the option for "Transcode Media". If "Optimized Media" is greyed out, it's already optimized. If it's not, then you're still using the raw h.264 files which will impact performance.