Why FCP X became very slow

Hi, I'm currently on a project. It's a simple project, just a 5 minutes slideshow of pictures with a background song.

The problem is halfway through the process, my fcp became very slow, it never crash though. But it so irritating when I insert a text, adding transition.

At the end when I'm almost finish, even my mouse scroll is lag.

I googled about this, I find something about storage problem, but I still have about 40% of my drive space.

So why is this happening? Anyone got a clue?

Thanks before for sharing.

I'm currently using

Processor 2 x 2.4 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Memory 6 GB 1066 MHz DDR3 ECC
Graphics ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024 MB
Software OS X 10.9 - Maverick
Storage 1 TB SATA

My workflow : create event - create project 1920 x 1080 24fps - import asset ( a lot of jpeg picture, wav audio, tiff image, avi video) - rough cut - insert transition,text,effect,audio,video - share

What is the original frame size of your stills? Are they much larger than 1920x1080?

Unrendered generators, a lot of stacked title clips and picture-in-picture effects with oversized stills are very RAM hungry. For such an effect-intensive project I think 6 GB RAM is barely enough.

Try rendering your timeline and see if this brings back enough speed to finish your edit.

- Ronny

Are you optimizing your imported media? AVI doesn't belong in FCP.

Following up on the RAM idea, open Activity Monitor and check whether your free RAM is being depleted during the course of your project. People who have more a lot RAM than 6 GB will sometimes report that they need to close and restart FCP to be able to work on RAM-instensive projects.

Russ

Tom Wolsky wrote: Are you optimizing your imported media? AVI doesn't belong in FCP.

That's probably it. Transcode or optimize and it will likely be better. Certain codecs make X sad...

Hi guys, sorry for the late reply.

@ Ronny : Yes, all the picture are more than 1920x1080, is that a problem? I never knew it would be a problem.

@ Tom Wolsky & plysat : Yes, I'm using avi video. But now I changed it to mov.

@ Russ Haskell : Yes, the RAM certainly depleted a lot (you can see from my screen capture)

At the end the project is a success. But certainly I'm worried for more project to come if problems like this still occurred.

Anyway, why is FCP X take so much memory. Before I open the app, my memory is about 2.5G but after I opened it, it jumps to 5.8G and finally it stand at 5.99G :woohoo:

Thanks again for the reply and suggestion, it been a real help for me.

I'm glad you have been able to finish the project. The slowdown you had seems to be caused by a combination of factors, so this is for future reference:

1. Oversized stills eat up a lot of RAM. The larger the size (in pixels) of your stills the more RAM your NLE will need to cache them in memory. That's why it is best not to make your stills much larger than the project frame size, unless you need to do stills animations such as zooming in or panorama panning.

2. Optimizing your footage makes life easier. This has less to do with RAM usage but with processor load. Whenever you use a format that is not natively handled by FCPX (such as AVI) your processor needs to decode this format on the fly, taking up a lot of processing power during playback.

The combination of fully depleted RAM caused by the large stills as well as many unrendered titles and generators above them, and the overcharging of your processor by using non-optimized formats, would certainly explain your system slowing down.

- Ronny

Now I will always remember no oversize stills & always optimized. But certainly it give me a double job to change all the stills to a more suitable sizes. I need to batch all the stills in a image processor like photoshop.

Thanks again.

Yes, it does take some extra work to resize the stills and to optimize your video, but you will find the smoother editing will easily make up for this time. This is not only an issue with FCPX, it is an issue with any NLE where you use stills.

- Ronny

You can use a nice utility like GraphicConverter www.lemkesoft.de/en/products/graphicconverter/ to batch resize images easily. Or, for free do it wit OS X Automator. Here's how: www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/how_to_b...mages_with_automator