FCPX 10.1 and 10.1.1 renders way slower than under 10.9 and just use two CPU cores

Hello fcp.co members!

Since the upgrade to 10.1 and 10.1.1 FCPX renders are very slow! I also upgraded my Mac Pro from a 4 core to an 8 core and added RAM and installed a 4 Drive SSD RAID-0 but it is slower than my old configuration with 10.0.9.

10.0.9 ist using alle the cores but 10.1. and 10.1.1 don't....

Attached is the activity window of a render in process. It takes forever to render something

Has someone experienced something like that? i read in the Apple Forums that some guys are also having speed issues when rendering.

Best regards,

David

Is it possible that this issue only occurs with "old" MacPro? My iMac doesn't have any problem. If anything, it even seems to be faster.

My iMac is also faster with 10.1 and 10.1.1 than earlier versions.

Yet many of the Apple Discussion Board users with big slow-downs also have iMacs (and MBPs)…haven't seen many from those with MPs. Don't know why some have great results and others terrible results. A bit of a mystery. Some people (who know a lot more than me about these things) have noted that clean OS installs seem to be associated with better FCP outcomes.

Russ

I am using a mid 2010 Mac Pro dual 2.93 12 core and have great improvement rendering and with overall general functionality of 10.1.1. GPU is ATI Radeon HD 5870 and I am maxed out on 64 GB ram. OS is on OWC 512 SSD and media is on a raid 5 OWC enclosure with 24TB. Much quicker than 10.0.9 was with same configuration. Also using the system with full optimized media and viewer at High Quality, but you can change the viewer to Better Performance to trade off for a bit more boost.

For me, setting compressor instances to 4 seems to be the sweet spot. You might try setting this lower and experiment as Apple recommends. FCPX performance ( all versions ) have been known to be very hardware specific, particularly with GPU and media drives. Also, be sure AppNap is turned off for compressor and FCPX in the Get Info panel of the apps.

We also discussed that in the Facebook FCPX group and there seems to be a link between updated libraries and bad performance, f.e. I created a new library and imported media and created proxies and all cores were in good use, whereas in an updated library creating proxies was very slow with barely used CPU's.

Also Philip Hodgetts from Event Manager X confirmed that, that there is an issue with updated libraries and performance, so there is not a consistent link to MacPro's vs. imacs.

But even in new libraries 10.1.1 is not using the CPU to the max as 10.0.9 did but it is a great workaround to speed things up!

David,
Since you upgraded your CPU, make sure you have the proper kext in you library. What does your "About this Mac" System Report say? Does it recognize the new CPU and report the proper # of Cores? What identifier is showing up?
You may need to manually add the kext files to utilize the new CPU.
Hope this helps, Greg

Hi Greg,

I updated the logic board firmware and the CPU is recognized properly:

dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/51263697/Scr...01-20%2021.56.22.png

It really is due to the update process of the libraries of FCPX. I tested that on my other two macs and they showed the same behavior.

Thanks!

David

Hi David,

We have a bunch of updated projects we are revising now and so far none of these seem to work or render any slower than new 10.1 libraries we have created. I just have rendered an updated project on a 2012 MacPro and I could clearly see all 12 cores being used.

I can also say that since we updated I have experienced none of the slowdowns some people have been reporting on any of the 16 bays we have here. So I think this must be some very specific issue you are having. This makes me wonder: did you do a clean install of Mavericks before installing 10.1?

- Ronny

Hi Ronny,

I did a clean install of mavericks after upgrading my Mac Pro. But since there are more people on the net reporting this issue that really seems to be a bug in some kind of way, especially because it appears in the same way on my Macbook Pro and my girlfriends imac.

I also can relate this issues to projects where a lot of third party plugins were used.

Thanks for your help!

Best regards!

David

Thank you for posting your findings, David. Every piece of information will indeed help in pin-pointing the root of these issues. Good to know you did a clean install, this proves that not all performance issues are related to this.

But your remark about the third-party plugins is interesting. Some plugins use their own render technology, and as Mavericks works in a very specific way for distributing render operations over CPU and GPU this could explain why all of a sudden the plugins don't use all CPU cores for rendering anymore. Could you see if there are no Mavs related updates available for the problematic plugins?

- Ronny

At the moment there are no Mavericks related updates for my plugins, but i did a test with a new library and tested each plugin on a file and they all rendered fine, so I guess I'll just finish the projects that are rendering slow and let them render over night.

I already transferred all the other projects and media to new libraries, (I really love the way FCPX handles media in the library way, it's so much snappier), and they seem to work fine from what I saw, I did however not tested it 100%.

Thanks again for the nice atmosphere and helpfulness in this forum!

It's now 11 PM here in germany so I get myself some sleep and see you tomorrow!

- David

Okay, good to know and thank you for this information.

Same time here in Belgium, so I'm signing off as well

- Ronny

I have this problem too. When I start FCPX (with new or updated libraries) all works well. After a while I work everything becomes very slow. I need to close and restart FCPX.

My main hardware is MACPro 2008 8 cores. With 10.9 was much responsive.

Alex,

How did you install Mavericks on your 2008 MacPro? Over the older operating system?

- Ronny

Hi Ronny,

Yes, Mavericks is installed over the old one. I'm tryng to disable App Nap and see if the problem is there.

I think there are some other minor bugs in this version. For example sometimes I cannot run the timeline. I have to go to the library, select one clip and then return to the timeline. Then it runs again. Not a big problem, just a little bother.

Thanks!
Alex

Disabling App Nap for FCPX is a must, although this will only prevent FCPX from stopping in the middle of a long export.

Installing Mavericks over the old OS has been causing issues such as yours for more people. Create a new admin user account, launch FCPX 10.1.1 and see if you still have any problems.

- Ronny