FCPX 10.1.1 - Unable to see the contents of my events

This is a strange one. I was trashing some old projects and events and at a certain point (I don't know exactly when it started happening), I was unable to see the clips contained in the events that remained. This ONLY happens when I click on the event at the very top of the list (the one that's called "so-and-so HDD's updated projects and events"). In other words, if I do a fresh launch of FCP, I can cycle through all of my events and the clips show up just fine. But as soon as I click that top event, clicking on any subsequent event does nothing, only the clips contained in the top event will be displayed.

There are two other minor issues that I'm noticing, posting them here in case they're related to the main one.

1) An event from an old project that I had completely removed is still present in FCP. It's empty and I am unable to trash it. Like, when I right-click and select Move to Trash, nothing happens. It also doesn't have the purple square with star icon that all my other events have.

2) Sometimes when I try to launch FCPX, it gets stuck at the "Restoring layouts" part of the splash screen and just hangs. I have to go into Library/Application Support/Final Cut Pro and trash the Layouts folder in order to get it to launch.


So far, I have tried restoring my last backup and removing the Currentversion.flexeolibrary file, but that didn't help. Do I need to just completely remove and reinstall FCP? Is there a good way to do that?

Can you provide more info about your setup such as OS version, computer model, how much ram you have and what type of drives you are using? Are your projects and events on separate drives? Also, what type of media are you using, such as codec, frame rate, frame size, etc. You may have an issue that is related to your hardware setup not being entirely suitable for running FCPX with the content you are trying to edit. If you've not had issues previously and this just all of a sudden began, then maybe your setup is not the issue.

There are some quirks with mavericks when trashing preferences that were not issues under previous OS's. Have you tried using Digital Rebellions free Prefs Manager program to trash prefs? This is one of the best ways, but if you're using Mavericks, then shutting down your computer after trashing prefs and powering back up after a couple minutes might help. There are other files that can be trashed as well, and you can also try logging in as a new user to see if the problem still exists.

Give those tips a shot and then post back the outcome along with the other information requested.

Here are my specs:

2013 Mac Mini
Core i7 2.6Ghz
16GB RAM
6TB WD MyBook Thunderbolt Duo External HDD
Mavericks 10.9.2

I'm working with MP4s encoded in H264 (25fps) which I've transcoded to ProRes 422 using either FCPX or MPEG Streamclip. Some of the transcoded media is quite large (50-80 gigs), but that was before I wised up and started transcoding just the clips I needed with MPEG Streamclip and dropping them in FCPX.

I've tried trashing my preferences and restarting FCPX, then trashing again and shutting down/rebooting my mac. Still no luck.

I'm not sure what graphics card is in a Mac Mini, but that may be contributing to some of the bottleneck. At this point, I would suggest you create a New User account in the OS, and launch FCPX to see if you still get the same problems. If things now work better, there may be a bit of reinstalling apps and so forth required, but as a quick check you may find out if the problem is with some corruption in your present user account.

You should also check the following (perhaps first):
Make sure the checkbox for "Prevent App Nap" is selected for FCPX, Compressor and Motion (assuming you have the other 2 apps). In the Finder, Control-click the app and select "Get Info" and select from there.

If you are using Compressor, check the preference settings for enabling additional instances of Compressor. This is hardware dependent and the options vary from computer model to model. If it is greyed out, you don't have the option of adding more instances, but if you do, selecting fewer instances frees up more system resources.

If you use time machine, disable it when running FCPX as it will use up some resources that FCPX could benefit from.

Check your WD external drive (where I assume your media is stored) to be sure you have at least 15% minimum free space on the drive. On a 6TB drive, nearly 1 TB should be left free for the drive to successfully manage itself. This holds true for the OS drive as well. If space is getting full beyond the 15% free area, your system quickly begins to slow to a crawl.

Hopefully some of these suggestions help to narrow your issue down a bit.

Thanks for the suggestions. I ended up removing that library and starting over. Seems to be working now. Luckily, I only had one project in there, which is backed up on the external in case I ever need to look at it again.