Event suddenly takes over an hour to open

Hi all - i am working on a very large event. Usually it opens in about 30 seconds or so.

Last night I backed up and switch off.

This morning both the Event and the backup failed to open. After trying all the recommended trouble shooting steps i decided to just leave it opening.

After almost an hour and a half it finally loaded.

What would it mean for a project to suddenly take an hour and a half to load and what steps should I take to fix it?

A drive about to die. RAM gone bad. A ghost in the machinery. I'd have the hardware checked out at my local Apple store, if it does anything odd again.

Right away, here is what I would do.
1- Open a bottle of American southern sour mash whiskey, grab a rock glass.
2- Verify there is enough free space on every drive.
3- Trash pref with Preference Manager.
4- Run Disk Utility to repair all drives.
5- Run Disk Warrior and rebuild the directories of every drive.
6- Recycle the empty bottle.

That gave me a laugh

I narrowed it down to a single bad compound clip.

Uncompounded it, and all is now well. Interesting...

Hey! I wasn't finished yet!

7- "Break Apart Clip Items" for big ass Compound Clips.

OK, now I'm finished...




That was odd, lesson learned.

I was using a neat video plugin which I believe should not be used within a compound clip (I could be mistaken but that rings a bell). I think that is what created issued with my compound clip. Still not 100% sure of this but it is my theory at the moment.

Ah, now THAT is interesting. A specific plugin inside of a CC. Test it, recreate it and see what happens. Create a new Event, so that if it goes south, you can just trash that Event in the Finder.

I have seen outdated and bad plugins take forever in the timeline to render, and slow the whole timeline scrubbing to a crawl, but never in a compound clip causing the event to load slowly. It does make sense though that it might do that. If that can be verified, a feedback report to apple should be submitted.

I haven't been able to replicate it - at least not with a single clip in a fresh event with that plugin in a CC.

Wow...it's happening again

I have opened and closed the event several times since the problem was last solved...but it's back.

Sitting here waiting for the event to load. I fully expect it to pop up sometime in the next 60-90 minutes provided I just wait it out.

The thing is that after the last episode of slow loading I clicked on a compound clip that caused a beach ball and several minutes lag. Once that beach ball disappeared I immediately "uncompunded" it and deleted it from the event. All was well.

Now the problem is back. I have uninstalled Neat Video's Denoise plugin suspecting that to be an issue but no dice.

I'll keep this thread updated but any suggestions in the meantime are most welcome.

*edit: Here's a crazy thought...what if there is an undocumented limit to the amount of compound clips FCPX will handle in one event? Maybe I'm clutching at straws here but that would make sense to me because I deleted a compound clip and the event started working and I remember creating one last night.

Anyone know of this being a thing?

•edit2
Well the project opened exactly as before. Beachballed exactly as before. Then when I got rid of the last compound clip that I created everything is running smooth as butter.

For the record I have 112 compound clips in this event. Well, I have 113 and then deleted one.

Maybe this is an example of why it's a bad idea to do your editing in Compound Clips?

I've never felt comfortable about straying from Apple's recommended workflow.

For this reason I've never adopted the Compound Clip Edit Philosophy or the Sparse Disk Image workflow.

To me it's like tweaking your car with aftermarket parts. Yes it might go faster for a while but if it's outside the manufacturer's specs you're asking for trouble.

Actually in this case I'm using compound clips exactly as is recommended. My editing is being done on 10 Project "Timelines" - one per episode.

Then maybe it's a hardware problem mate.

Second memory board on my poor old MacPro has gone south.
Every time I tax the old girl with something complex she spits the dummy and restarts. Remove memory from second board she's sweet. Go figure

I know you're not on a MacPro but it's all I can think of right now. When there's overflow into dodgy memory that's when things can slow down or just stop. So maybe try pulling a Dimm?

Do you use Event Manager? Does everything work as it should if you don't load this rouge Event?

Yes everything works fine except for this event. And I'm doing intensive work outside this particular job. It is definitely somehow related to this event.

*edit and update.

I decided to remove some the the largest compound clips that i could now dispose of. This caused the system to hang in much the same way as loading an event. around 45min each time I deleted several clips.

Then I decided to bite the bullet and restart knowing that it could take another hour and a half if this had not worked. Thankfully, it sprang to life.

So for now, all if fine. For now.

This is the same result I have 48 hours ago so I'm not holding out too much hope. The one thing that is different to last time is that instead of deleting what I thought was just one dodgy compound clip I have now deleted many. If it is true that I can only use a certain amount per event I may be in the clear but I really don't know for sure the cause. I will update further if I have more to tell.