Very slow response when typing in titles

Anyone else having really slow response when typing a title in FCP X? Here is what is happening:



I am actually typing at the same speed in both Text Edit and FCP X.

A few more details. Looks like the CPU usage is very high when typing.

I have tested this on a similar machine MacPro 10.6.8 and have no problems, nor is the CPU usage high. I have uploaded a little video screen capture to show the results but i will take some time before I can embed it here.

Are you sure you have no background tasks running?

Ronny, thank you so much for check this out on your machines. I can see now I have something funny going on. If I figure it out I'll report back.

Thanks for your report on a top of the line iMac working so much better than the MacPros with FCP X. Have you seen any difference in Lion versus Snow Leopard on the MacPros?

BTW. My MacPro is a 1,1, 2.66 GHZ Quad Core, 13 GB Ram and a Radeon 5770.

Just tried this on my mac pro 2.66 quad. 12 gb ram. the tittles were fine when the story line was one clip deep but when there were two other connected clips above it its response was slow like tpaytons example.
Docent exactly help but just thought I would report what happened when I tried it.

@robs:
Any information is useful. Yes I have experienced some slowness on titles myself on a complex project that we were subtitling. Temporarily disabling (V) any clips we didn't need to see while doing the titles solved the problem.

@tpayton:

All our production MacPros are running 10.6.8, so I cannot really compare the performance of Lion and SL on these machines. I won't be switching any production machines to Lion until the OS gets a few further updates and FCPX code is further optimized and debugged. But on the Lion iMac test machine I have had no problems so far. Looks promising

To add to the weirdness of this all, I grabbed my MacBook Pro, 2007 model, with an GForce 8600M GT, 128MB of Vram (therefore unqualified) only 4 GB of ram. Titles are.... fast and as smooth as butter. I stacked a bunch of them on top of each other. Still silky smooth.

Then I even opened the same project I had on my MacPro, on the MacBook. Slow as Molasses.

I was able to create a new project in the MBP and get it to slow down, but that was laying it over keyed and scaled footage. On the MacPro I was able to speed things up by creating a project on the internal drive and just over regular footage.

I was able to slow down the MacPro by putting a whole bunch of elements on the timeline (about 100). But then I tried it again and I couldn't get it to slow down.

BTW. I'm working exclusively with Proxy versions here. But doesn't speed things up if I choose original or optimized playback.

This looks like a big old bug to me. Intermittent and very odd.

In legacy FCP rendered parts of the timeline become Qt files - i.e. regular footage -. FCPX deals with renders in a completely different way. This could explain why rendered portions of the timeline are still taxing the CPUs, and the more complex the timeline gets the more the system will gradually slow down.

Yesterday I was typing text over a 2K ProRes444 animation file. No problems, very fast. I will continue working on the project today and will test how typing titles gets affected the more complex the project gets.

Did you try deleting the Project and Event render files?

Thanks Ben. However, I can now reproduce this issue with different events, multiple machines, different OS's, etc. By get this... plugging in a FireWire drive. Not using any events on the drive, but just plugging it in. No joke. If I didn't do it myself I wouldn't have believed it.

This is such a bizzar issue that I want to withhold any judgement, and I'm figuring there has to be something else to it. Maybe the drive has corruption, etc. I'll be testing more today and report back with a video.

Really odd!

Now this is one of the strangest thing I have heard. Please keep us updated.

I have had the same issue, using firewire and an internal drive. Moving all Events and Projects out of FCPXs view (using Event Manager X)) resolved it but is less than useful. Just plugging the firewire drive in had no effect. Loading a 100GB event ( PAL DV and stills about 1300 items) slows things down a little. Loading the Project file (no render files, .fcpproject about 1.2GB in size) brings things to a virtual standstill - about half the speed shown in the video above.

I'm running a late 2009 iMac dual 3.06GHz Core2@ Duo with 8GB RAM and a Radeon HD4670 with 256MB vRAM. Not the most stellar machine but I thought it would be able to handle a 50 minute DV project. As it is the project file now takes 35 minutes to load and FCPX is gobbling all available RAM ( although 2.5 GB inactive) to the point where it's unusable.The project file may be corrupt. Issue appears when booting from both 10.6.8 and 10.7.2. Yes I've considered a new machine but from what I can see on activity monitor and have read on this and other forums the issue is probably memory (leak?) related. I've ordered 16GB of RAM and will report back when installed.

Rob. Wow. 35 minutes to open FCP X, that is a drag. So is that the one with 1300 items? I have a similarly sized project, but 10.0.1 fixed most of issues.

I'm normally open my 1300 edit project my MacPro, but I did edit it on an 2008 iMac, 8 GB of ram and it took perhaps 3 minutes to open.

I was going to try to bring my project to my local Apple Store and see what happens on the current top of the line iMac. Might be worth a try if you have an Apple Store nearby.

Also, is your Radeon HD 4670 qualified for FCP X?

I just saw you said your Project File was 1.2 GB. That is not good. Did you convert this from 10.0.0? Copy and paste it to a new project, see if it comes down in size. Should fix it.

My 1.25 hr project with 1300 pieces of media and about 2500 edits is only 126.9 MB. Of course the FCPXML is only 1.2 MB.

No it's not good T. Yes, according to the Apple support page the card is qualified.
Project isn't copied from 10.0 but is duplicated. I think the duplication may have doubled the size.

I've been duplicating projects as backups, but as it was taking an age, I reduced the frequency so will lose a lot of work reverting. The FCP XML doesn't seem to preserve the position of text in custom titles either.

My strategy was to to break the project into 4 compound clips and paste each into a separate project, with only one project visible to the app at a time.

The memory hogging has prevented me from doing the, the machine locks when trying to copy and paste.

I feel your pain. Wow. I was there a month ago about ready to toss my Mac out the window.

Why don't you try this. Hide your event so all your media is missing. Then copy and paste your project instead of duplicating. Then quit FCP X, hide all your duplicate projects, and show just your event and your newly copy and pasted project.

See if that helps.

Also it could be your event is hozed too. You could try to copy and paste your event too, and then relink to your new event.

Thanks, I think I'm felling the pain of everyone at the moment. I'm going to give that a try. If it doesn't work with that project I'll try an earlier one and wear the loss.

I did move my Events from the internal to external FW800 drive so that may have had an impact. There weren't any initial problems and even when they appeared launching with just the Events visible was fine.

To be on the safe side I will go ahead and create new Events.

Ok so I gave up trying to open the original project. Imported FCP XML I'd exported shortly before everything went haywire and created a new project.
Split project into four and copied to four separate 10 -15 min projects.
RAM again maxed out and process very slow. About an hour to copy and paste all four sections. Another 15 minutes for FCPX to quit. No Events online at this point.

Created three new events and dragged ( moved) media over from two old.

Opened everything up and the good news is FCPX conformed everything correctly.

Bad News: The FCP XML didn't preserve transforms, keyframes (grounded my flying logo), audio levels, audio fades, compositing modes, changes to default title font, size, position.

So I have a bit of work to do but no big deal.

Able to have all four projects open at one time and flick between timelines with around 2.5 GB RAM free. For an experiment I created a new master project and copied all 4 part projects into it. By the end of the process,with 5 projects open RAM was again maxed and things were slowing down. Again 2.5GB RAM was sitting there locked but inactive.

Quit and loaded single master. Able to work on. Titles still a bit sluggish. CPU usage does spike from about 10 - 20% idle to 180 -190% ( both cores near max) when typing. Playback of same title unrendered sees about 70% CPU usage. Is FCP X tracking every keystroke for the infinite undo and writing that to the database? Would have thought the pixel pushing was Open GL using the graphics card.

So I'm going to stick to loading and working on 15 min sections at a time. With 16GB RAM I should be able to copy and paste into a master project, if not I'll render out each one and reassemble the four clips.

The other thing I did which was probably a mistake was edit the VO file inside FCPX.
The project is a mine induction of around 45 minutes in length and I was provided with one large 60 minute aiff. Rather than tidy this up in Soundtrack Pro or Audition I cut out breaths, gaps, adjusted levels within FCPX using the range tool. I'm no audio engineer but it worked well enough. I then turned this into a compound clip, put it on the primary storyline and attached the appropriate clips, titles and stills as connected clips. I added markers every 10 to 20 seconds and used the timeline index and the event browser to quickly match up what I needed. Much quicker than it would have been in FCP7 or Premiere Pro. The problem arose when I had to insert some third party clips and animations into the primary storyline and cut the big compound clip up, each time I got to stare at the rainbow ball for about 10 minutes.

Presumably this is because FCP is creating an entirely new and complete copy of the compound clip with the 200 or so references to the original file. I'd imagine the problem would be worse if you created a compound clip of selects then cut that into the timeline. Best to use favorites and keywords in the event browser.

So, with apologies for the post length, my guess is most of the performance problems with FCPX are related to the underlying media database, especially interactions between events and projects, and not the rendering engine.

Compound Clips to have their own render files inside the Event. File menu has an option to delete them so they'll re-create in case of corruption.

I do VO work daily in FCP X for hours and no problems. Not the app, must be system config.

How do you know RAM was "locked"?

Doing very large projects without issues.

www.fcproxuniversity.com/FCPro_X_Univers...rding_tricks%29.html