Progress bar stutters, FCP locks up

Hi all, was hoping you could help me with a problem I've been having lately.

Been working on this project for a client, and so far FCP X has been behaving pretty well. However in the latest cut I'm working on I've been running into this problem rather consistently.

Basically what will happen is I will be working away, and FCP will I guess start auto-rendering or something and suddenly the progress bar starts flickering at 100% and eventually the beachball appears and the app locks up completely and I'll have to force quit.

Here's a video of the problem in action: www.dropbox.com/s/4wpxe95azn74nyh/FCP%20...rogress%20Lockup.MOV

I had experienced it once or twice in the past but thought nothing. On this current "project" it's happening frequently (perhaps because I'm having to add subtitles?) and really slowing me down.

I'm going to switch off auto-renders for now and see if that helps, but I'm curious if anyone else has run into this issue? I did dump the render files for this project yesterday after it happened a bunch of times but first thing this morning it happened again... Could it be because I have a lot of projects in one event/library? We have to make several different shorts from the same material so I've got about 22 different "projects" in the event (various versions of the various edits).

Any help people could offer would be greatly appreciated.

Hey, Adam.
I think your initial thoughts are correct. Turn off auto render.

As a rule, I always work with auto render turned OFF. I find that FCPX works more reliably when I can control when it does any processing. I also find that It's not even necessary to render my timelines unless I have very heavy composites being used. In that case, I would have to render out anyway to get real-time playback.

As another rule of thumb, I always close libraries that are not needed for the job I'm currently working on. Any additional libraries will only harm your system's performance because FCPX will be trying to keep track of the assets within. Why make your system work harder than it needs to?

So, I think your intuition was right. Please let us know if you have made these adjustments and still have the problem.

Cheers,
Scott M

Bug. I've had this issue twice. First time trashing preferences worked (Preference Manager from Digital Rebellion). Second time, I had to use "FCS Remover" then reinstall the app.

Turning off "auto rendering" only effects the rendering of the timeline. It does not effect other background tasks. I think this old wive's tale has been propagated long enough.

You can leave background render on and set the "start after" time to something that's appropriate for you. I have mine set for 15 seconds and my timeline only auto-renders after 15 seconds of inactivity. This works great for me because it does not render when I am working in the timeline but if I stop working in FCP and do something else, when I come back my timeline is often fully rendered.

If you don't believe this, change a clip's speed and set the quality to optical flow. Even if "auto render" is turned off FCP X will still analyze the clip. Or analyze a clip for 'balance color" with background render turned off. FCP X will still do it. In these cases the background task will automatically pause for playback but will start up again when playback is paused. But turning off "auto render" has no effect on these functions.

Scott Markowitz wrote: Hey, Adam.
I think your initial thoughts are correct. Turn off auto render.

As a rule, I always work with auto render turned OFF. I find that FCPX works more reliably when I can control when it does any processing. I also find that It's not even necessary to render my timelines unless I have very heavy composites being used. In that case, I would have to render out anyway to get real-time playback.

As another rule of thumb, I always close libraries that are not needed for the job I'm currently working on. Any additional libraries will only harm your system's performance because FCPX will be trying to keep track of the assets within. Why make your system work harder than it needs to?

So, I think your intuition was right. Please let us know if you have made these adjustments and still have the problem.

Cheers,
Scott M

So far this seems to have done the trick. There must be something about auto-rendering these text layers that borks it up. Rendering them manually doesn't seem to cause any issues *knock on wood*

anickt wrote: Turning off "auto rendering" only effects the rendering of the timeline. It does not effect other background tasks. I think this old wive's tale has been propagated long enough.

You can leave background render on and set the "start after" time to something that's appropriate for you. I have mine set for 15 seconds and my timeline only auto-renders after 15 seconds of inactivity. This works great for me because it does not render when I am working in the timeline but if I stop working in FCP and do something else, when I come back my timeline is often fully rendered.

If you don't believe this, change a clip's speed and set the quality to optical flow. Even if "auto render" is turned off FCP X will still analyze the clip. Or analyze a clip for 'balance color" with background render turned off. FCP X will still do it. In these cases the background task will automatically pause for playback but will start up again when playback is paused. But turning off "auto render" has no effect on these functions.

Thanks, I had noticed this. Though as I mentioned it does seem to be related to the auto-render starting. I say seems to because since disabling that I haven't had the problem but it could be a coincidence.

In spite of what I said about auto render, I think there is something buggy about rendering in 10.1.1. I've had some weird things happen that seemed to just "go away"...

adamschoales wrote: Been working on this project for a client, and so far FCP X has been behaving pretty well. However in the
I had experienced it once or twice in the past but thought nothing. On this current "project" it's happening frequently (perhaps because I'm having to add subtitles?) and really slowing me down.

A couple of suggestions.

1. It looks like you are using the "Custom" title as your caption. Custom is quite "heavy" i.e. large and complicated, so I would strongly suggest you get the excellent caption titles made by Andreas here as part of X-Title Importer.

www.spherico.com/filmtools/TitleExchange/XTI/index.html

2. Since you are having trouble with titles, it could be your font.

3. You said you have 22 projects in an event. Try moving that one project that you are having trouble with to it's own event. (create a new one). See if that helps.

tpayton wrote:

adamschoales wrote: Been working on this project for a client, and so far FCP X has been behaving pretty well. However in the
I had experienced it once or twice in the past but thought nothing. On this current "project" it's happening frequently (perhaps because I'm having to add subtitles?) and really slowing me down.

A couple of suggestions.

1. It looks like you are using the "Custom" title as your caption. Custom is quite "heavy" i.e. large and complicated, so I would strongly suggest you get the excellent caption titles made by Andreas here as part of X-Title Importer.

www.spherico.com/filmtools/TitleExchange/XTI/index.html

2. Since you are having trouble with titles, it could be your font.

3. You said you have 22 projects in an event. Try moving that one project that you are having trouble with to it's own event. (create a new one). See if that helps.

Thanks, I will definitely try that App you mentioned. This piece (and a second which hasn't been completed yet) will be subtitled so having a decent subtitle plugin will help a lot. I had skimmed online prior to starting and the first one I found was "too pricey" for my boss (why pay anything when we can just use the type tool) so I went with the default.

I will also try those other suggestions should the problem come up again, though since turning off Auto-render I've yet to have the problem again.

Thanks!

adamschoales wrote: I had skimmed online prior to starting and the first one I found was "too pricey" for my boss (why pay anything when we can just use the type tool) so I went with the default.

Found this by chance.
Funny argumentation I more ore less hear that daily.
What means "too pricy" compared to "free".
If you spend (waste) hours with something "free" instead paying some bucks for the "too pricey" solution and save several hours – where is the difference? What are your hours worth?

Just a thought.
- Andreas

I was having the same problem, and my video would also not "share" (720p apple devices) - it just failed part way through...

Luckily the m4v file was functional up to the point that the share failed - it turns out that the last frame of a video clip i was using was causing the problem. Once i'd shortened the clip by one frame, the timeline would render fine and stay at 100% and the video would "share" again.

It was a clip form a phone and i'd chosen optical flow to retime the frame rate - i think there might be a bug with optical flow where it causes a render error when there isn't another frame to look at beyond the current frame... that's just a suspicion though, I haven't had the time to check this theory