Is it faster to use an external hard drive?

I teach middle school video (FCPX since last year) and I've configured the iMacs to have a unique username for each class period so that the kids can't easily mess up the work of another student. I've tried to read as much as possible regarding the darn spinning beach ball or the slow speed. I've told the kids to not check anything (optimize or proxy) on the initial project screen, and when the speed is terrible, I've told them to turn off background rendering. We're using MP4 files instead of AVCHD, and at times, I tell them to close all other applications.
This year, I'm wondering if I should use some funds to purchase an external hard drive for each machine. Yes, I've waited too long to ask, but hopefully someone will know if that external storage will help with speed and reduce the beach ball appearances.

Do not use MPEG-4. Either optimize or convert external if you're short of drive space. Convert to QuickTime with uncompressed audio. Maybe ProRes LT will work for you. AVCHD is a good choice and imports easily in FCP.

Thanks Tom! I can easily switch my Canon Vixia HF R300s to AVCHD. For some reason, I thought it would be faster to use MP4 files. School doesn't start until next week, but I'll go in tomorrow and run all the updates that came out last year. I'm thinking that I'll tell the teams to create one event for the class term (12 weeks) and just put all projects in that event. I'll tell them to check optimize for each project and render in ProRes LT. I'm fairly certain the machines are not short of drive space. I've noticed others writing about trashing preferences, and turning off Spotlight. Frankly, I'm getting overwhelmed. I've seen you speak at CUE & loved it, so I'll follow your advice to the letter. Thanks again!

Projects don't go in events. If they're using separate users on the system drive, they won't see each other's work.

If you shoot AVCHD you probably won't need to optimize. You can only optimize to ProRes 422. If you wanted T you'd have to convert externally. ProRea optimized files will take a lot of space.

Thanks.

Hi LoriJean,

Adding to what Tom says, some further tips to work better when you get spinning beach balls:

1. In Playback Preferences make sure Background Rendering is turned OFF, at all times. Whenever the students need to render anything they can do it manually. Background rendering slows down your system.

2. In Playback Preferences make sure Playback Quality is set to "Better Performance".

3. Turning Audio Waveforms OFF in Preferences > Editing will make FCPX run smoother when the students are not working on audio. If they need to see the waveforms it's easy to turn them back on again.

3. Make sure the system drive of every iMac ALWAYS has at least 15% of its total capacity available as free space. E.g. if the system drive is 500GB it must always have at least 75GB available. If not the system will start to slow down gradually and it will eventually crash.

4. That's why we advise to keep Events and Projects on a fast separate drive instead of the internal one. Not only with FCPX but for any editing system. As the edits progress new media and render files are added to the Event and Project folders, and the drive fills up quickly. Overly full system drives are the single most important cause of spinning balls and crashes.

5. You haven't told us what kind if iMacs you use or how much RAM you have inside them. If you only have 4GB RAM and you have a budget the absolute best thing you can do to make FCPX run faster is to add 4GB of RAM to each system. If you make sure the system drives don't get overly full, having sufficient RAM is even more important for comfortable editing than working from an external drive.

- Ronny