FCPX Rendering Sooooo Slow

First off PLEASE make sure all of the things ronny has said are taken care of.

Other than that, other things have been mentioned. I have background render shut off. I don't render the timeline unless absolutely necessary to see something, (an effect that needs it). Otherwise I delete all render files to a project prior to sharing...I've found that it is faster as many others. This is all on a machine that is a 2009 2.66 i5 iMac. Yours is much newer and more powerful and shouldn't be stalling.

OK I will run a check list of all the things you have asked and try what you say tonight. However are you saying if I have thirdparty effects in the inspector not on the project it can slow machhine down. Should I remove all my 3rd party effects from FCPX.

For now I know I have done the following.
1.1)installed more ram - up to 24G RAM (2x 4GB, 2 x 8GB)
1.2)connected from the imac thunderbolt port a thunderbolt-firewire adaptor, connecting to a firewire cable to the G-drive.
1.3)purhased event manager x and turned off all events and project that I am not working on. Only leaving the latest event open and relating project.
1.4) imported new clips to a new event and created new project for those events with not edits. The clips in the project are straight from the event.
1.5) and turned off rendering


Should i do the following
2.1 Delete or remove all 3rd party plugins from FCPX? Just so you konw I am not running any thirdparty effects in the project I am working on. I have experience first hand 3rd party effects really slow the machine down and will be staying away from then until i comfortable to use them again.
2.2 delete render files?

That's a good checklist.

Ya know I just went through all of the comments. This hasn't been mentioned. What kind of footage are you using and from what camera?

Don

I am using a Canon XA10.

So far, so good. And Don has made a very sensible remark. When you import the Canon footage do you convert ("optimize") to ProRes?

- Ronny

Also... How did you export it? Straight from the camera? Or did you drop and drag the MTS files. ?

Don Rumsey wrote: Also... How did you export it? Straight from the camera? Or did you drop and drag the MTS files. ?

i would click the import button on FCPX under events (middle left), click the files i need an imported selected files.

???

also havent been at computer past few days so will troubleshoot thiw weekend and get back to you with findings.

ronny courtens wrote: So far, so good. And Don has made a very sensible remark. When you import the Canon footage do you convert ("optimize") to ProRes?

- Ronny

not that i know of

ok done all my checks and everything seem ok.

1) i feel background rendering was bogging me down however still a little un sure. I am in the process of buidling a new project so I will take some note through this process based on my new benchmark with what is in place and confirmed now.

2) on another note I have noticed FCPX with out of no where just freeze, rainbow wheel will pop up and have to force quit the entire program.

3) and lastly when editing a project sometime the scrubber will lock up and not allow me to scrub and I have to exit project and come back in to allow control again.

The last time FCPX behaved like that on my iMac was because my internal 2 TB harddrive was on it way to the graveyard. Everything in diskutil indicated a healthy drive, but it was still dying. Luckily i'm running OS and programs from a SSD, so replacing it with a 4 TB hard drive was easy.

So have you tried to use another USB 3.0 external hard drive?

I'm having same problem with my iMac, Cpu usage of fcpx when rendering on Mavericks doesnt go above 60% and Its too slow.

I use a lot of motion projects and 3rd party effects.

Any idea how to force fcpx to use all the cpu?

Thanks a lot.

Much of the rendering task is done by the GPU and for all we know it is at 100%. I have iStat on my machine which lets me see GPU processor and memory use. There are probably other ways to check out GPU use, too.

More here: www.fcp.co/final-cut-pro/news/610-mark-s...ores-with-compressor

FCP 7-based advice, I would think it applies to FCPX as well:

Try putting your project files (not the media, just the pointer files) on your system drive (say A), put your media on a separate drive (say B or C), and never read/write from the same drive. So, if you are editing media from drive B, you should render and export it to drive C. And, yes, never edit via USB 2.0 cable, ever!

Any feedback on this?

There is no gain from putting your project file on a different drive than your media drive. Larry Jordan taught this, not because there was a performance gain, but because it was an easier way to explain (in his words) how to organize files, and why we need a separate media drive. But mostly to explain his personal method of file organization, most of which was super helpful to FCP 7, and is not valid for FCP X. A lot of folks misunderstood and thought it meant you can't or shouldn't put your FCP 7 project file on the same drive as media, for some technical reason. No, it was for organizational reasons only. I have had this conversation with my respected colleague and peer Mr. Jordan more than once.

Media and project files can go all on the same drive with no performance hit. Read/writes to the project file itself are next to nothing.

FCP X doesn't work like FCP 7, you can't put your "project file" separate from your Event. Events and Projects are linked together intimately. A project in FCP X is not the same thing as a project in FCP X. In X it is only a Timeline. It doesn't contain your media, like it does in 7.

Not sure what you mean by "never read/write from the same drive." That is basically impossible, since your system reads and writes to any drive with data being used, at the same time. Rendering and exporting to a third drive won't really help, either. That is a myth in FCP 7. Since you couldn't playback during renders or exports, it made no difference at all. With FCP X, systems are much faster, and even using background rendering and exports halt automatically during playback, so there is no conflict there, either.

Yes I agree with that... I tryed leaving project files in different drive than event files (a thunderbolt drive) but It's the same... CPU works very little. I'll check GPU thou.

Thanks a lot but anyway to increase speed? FCP7 was far far faster for rendering than this...

And now Im also having that Quicktime -50 error ... that obligues me to delete render files from time to time..

That is interesting, as on the same Macs I've worked with, FCP 7 was much slower than FCP X. But then, they all had really nice GPUs.

Specifically what year and model of iMac do you have? What GPU is it running?

I have an iMac 2.7 Ghz i5 with 12 GB RAM

GPU is: AMD Radeon HD 6770M 512 MB