Very slow response when typing in titles

My bad. I always post all my youtube private until I review it. Just forgot that. You should be able to view it now.

Hello - new here - just googled slow response in FCP X titles - thought it was just me. Clearly it's not.
I have a new i7quadcore iMac 12GB 10.0.3 - 4 x Glyph FW drives - text entry slows to 30mins and spinning ball mostly. Now I've read some others have the prob I'll do some more research on my my symptoms

A quick workaround is to type your text elsewhere and then paste it into the FCP X title.

I'm having a chronic version of this on 10.0.3 in Snow Leopard (wasn't quite this bad on 10.0.2). Can't try Lion yet - too much of my current stuff wouldn't work.

So... From rebuilding project, to trashing prefs to reinstalling FCP - on qualified kit with 8 GB RAM and plenty of disk space on an SSD.

On more complex projects, up to 5 minutes to type out captions - having copied from a text source and pasted into the Inspector's window via Text Wrangler to ensure 'clean' copy/paste text.

Now have a situation where FCPX won't open an entire project because I had the temerity to change some text - the project file AND the backup are no good.

Two colleagues can recount similar stories. I must simply shrug my shoulders and assume that FCPX isn't ready for prime time when the going gets tough. I'll just move to Premiere.

That is a drag. In the end I think those of us who make a living doing this simply need dependable tools. It doesn't matter if it has tracks or not. Magnetic or non-magnetic timelines. Frankly it doesn't matter the brand of the tool, just that it works and is dependable, weather it is a screwdriver or a NLE.

Hang in there.

There are similar stories for MC and PPro. FCPX is a brand new app running on a brand new Framework technology, there will be growing pains. But it has matured amazingly fast, and will continue to do so.

in my experience i think FCPX needs really a lot of RAM. we had one customer getting in the end 64GB! of ram to avoid spinning wheels after working a while. After half a day, it 'consumed' somtimes 48GB RAM... With the update 10.0.3 it seems to be lot better, hanging around 32GB but i think for bigger projects you need at least 16GB RAM, better go 32GB RAM. Lukely there are 8GB modules available at decent prices. Also visible waveforms consume a lot of RAM.

Well, I've been keeping a very close eye on things using Activity Monitor, and FCPX hasn't really gone over 4 GB yet - even when I'm working on a dozen projects at the same time.

As I need a portable solution (MacBook Pro 17") I have seriously considered getting a non-Apple 16GB upgrade, but managed to get a block of edits out of FCPX by only loading one project at a time, and be...ee...eee..in.nnnn..nnnn.....ggg... extreme........ly.... pa...aaaa....t...ie.....n....t.

To redo the whole managed project in Premiere is only slightly less painful, but I have 10 interviews to cut into a 4 minute programme with cutaways and B-roll today, and that will fly as, thanks to @Tpayton I will not touch compound clips ever again.

Well, not until Adobe Prelude is out.

And THAT will probably need 16GB RAM, so....

I've noticed slow response with titles too. This usually happens with titles that are part of templates I've built in motion and imported. I find what works for me is to turn off the video in the timeline with 'v' before typing in the info panel - works faster that way for me.

Is this only related to the project file or also to the related event? I am currently editing a large documentary. The event database is 600MB and the project file around 80. Most of my time editing so far has been in the event, creating compound clips (nested sequences) of content so there isn't a lot of action in the project file right now. When I am editing a compound clip, my workflow is like this:

- Create new compound clip
- Append footage to compound clip
- Edit/cut the footage inside the compound clip
- Duplicate compound clip and +1 version number

The problem is that my system is really slow with this particular project (imac i7 + 2gb GPU + 16GB ram + external FW storage). When I make a cut inside a compound clip timeline, it 'thinks' for like 3 seconds before it applies it. And sometimes I also get the spinning beach ball. Another side effect is that FCPX takes like 3 minutes to start with only this project.

What can I do to fix this? I was wondering... I have put like 400GB of footage (all my clips) inside one event. Is it better to create multiple events, i.e. time-based so you get more but smaller event files? The 10.0.3 update improved speed and stability but the performance in big projects is simply not the same as in smaller projects. I don't think the application should take such a performance hit because of this.

The FW800 disk has a 70mb/sec writing speed. I wonder if a Thunderbolt disk with 300 - 550mb/sec write speeds will solve some of my issues in big projects? Does anyone here have experience with that? I don't want to spend lots of $$ on something that doesn't solve my issue.
Other solutions: don't use compound clips, split up projects, split up events, don't use markers... some of these things are hard to give up.

I think Apple got most things right but this is a serious issue that needs a fix. One thing I noticed in 10.0.3 is that when you cut while playing footage, the thumbnail rendering is queued until you pause playback, after which it renders thumbnails and waveforms. This improved things a bit for me.

Looking forward to your experiences with this issue.

I have had this problem. However, today I learned something that worked for me. I opened the Activity Monitor and saw I had about 5GB in memory associated with FCPX. (I had copied and pasted a timeline, or some such.) I quit FCPX and reopened to find the memory back at about 800MB and tested the titles. FAST again! This might answer why it's an intermittent fault. Maybe the memory gets clogged up?

(Sorry about the loose terminology, I'm a director not an editor!)

I hope this works for you. BTW what a wonderful forum. I'm so glad i found this place.

H

Hmmm... well that doesn't work anymore! Seems totally random.

H

Disk Warrior...
And have the Apple store verify you don't have a bad RAM card or something.

A little bird told me that there are certain people that make a certain NLE that are fully aware of this reproducable issue and they are working on a resolution.

Disk Warrior and RAM? I'm getting no errors at all with some heavy duty 64 bit audio editing.

All I get a spinning ball ** when in FCP-X ** - always when entering text in titles when there is some rendering still to be done. It must be a FCP-X bug. I went to the Apple forums but saw no other reports there. Are they even awar of this problem does anyone know?

randallp, how many fonts do you have active? I've known people kill their machines stone dead performance-wise by having hundreds of fonts active. At an ad agency a junior art director was moaning about his machine that had "died" and asked me to take a look at it. He'd activated about 25,000 fonts on it. I found that very funny. I didn't ask where he got all the fonts from...

There have been many reports of people having performance issues when they have large amounts of titles in FCP10 projects. This has been so since the app was released. It IS a problem and Apple is aware of it. Let's hope this gets fixed very quickly.

Best wishes

Ronny

Audio editing pales in comparison to the heavy lifting video editing does. I'm simply making suggestions that have worked for my students and clients. Event Manager X and Disk Images help a lot, too.

Well, that's an interesting question about Fonts - would I have had to activate them in some way (I've not knowingly done this!)? How can I tell please? I just use what arrived in FCP-X (and only 2 or 3 at that).

And whilst I agree that video does really stress a setup, some very HD audio (48 tracks recording at once with numerous plug ins and re-wires) also puts on quite a load both on processors and disks. I've never had a beachball at all apart from with FCP-X.

I see that Apple seemingly know about this so let's hope they sort it soon.

I'm just SO pleased it wasn't just me! (I hate being that person)

The fonts FCPX sees are system wide. It doesn't sound like that's the problem, though, if you are unfamiliar with activating fonts (unless you dragged a large pile of them into your font folder in the library).