fcpx badly optimised for the new mac pro?

I'm experiencing low playback performance on fcpx 10.1.2 on my new mac pro:
I'm on a 8-core, 64GB, d700 (project and files are all on the main drive. Im on the latest maverick update.

Im working on prores 1080p and adding some effects to a clip and my playback really drops, so far I have been testing a few plugins such as hawaki "auto-split" or coremelts "track & slice X". I instantly need to render the effects to see the results, the funny thing is the same plugins runs smoothly on my macbook retina.. It made me wonder maybe the 3rd party plugin isn't optimised for the new mac pro but then I tried hawaki auto-split on Premiere cc 2014 and I was getting way better results than fcpx..

This may seem like a trival thing but paying this much money for a product and having a bigger project with different plugins this gets really annoying..

Anyone else experiencing any issues?

None whatsoever. 10.1.2 is running like a charm on our new MPs.

Are you only having issues with these particular plugins or do you experience playback lagging in general?
Have you tried moving your media to an external Thunderbolt drive? An SSD system drive is probably the worst place where you want to store FCP X media.

- Ronny

To be honest it feels a little unsnappy in general.. but mostly some of the plugins.. I have a thunderbolt drive but I might have to bring the mac pro with me sometimes so I choosed to have on the main drive. This might sound ignorant but why is it a bad idea to have it on the main drive when its so fast? the project is on the main drive with all the files consolidated.

I's really annoying me to have paid this much money to feel that I would rather work from my macbook retina..

thx for replying so fast

Because if the OS, your software, the plugins and your media read from and write to the same drive, one of them has to wait some now and then.

That's why it is a golden rule to have system and media separated.

Your boot drive has to take care of running your OS and any open applications, creating temp files, loading preference files, transferring data from RAM memory to the hard disk,... All these are priority actions, so whenever the OS needs something the boot drive drops everything else, such as reading media files, to do this.

Furthermore reading media files requires a huge amount of continuous bandwidth, so if the boot drive is too busy any media playback performance will drop significantly. Larry Jordan posted a test some months ago, and I quote:

"When I was testing the new Mac Pro earlier this year, I noticed that the speed of the internal SSD drive would drop by 70% when the OS suddenly needed something. An SSD drive that is used as the boot drive does not deliver the same speed consistently; it can fluctuate wildly."

Add to this that FCP X constantly writes small chunks of data to its database. If your Library is on the system drive this constant traffic adds to the strain that is already put on this drive for handling all the tasks it already has to do, and if you also add your media on this drive your media playback performance will certainly drop.

And last, but not least: SSD drives have a limited number of writes. When that number is exceeded the reliability of an SSD drive starts to deteriorate. This has nothing to do with playback performance, but it's another good reason why you should not store your Libraries (especially for larger productions) onto an SSD drive as FCP X constantly writes to the Library database.

- Ronny

Thanks for the information! will have that in mind in the future, did try to move the project to my thunderbolt drive but its still slow, should one assume its the 3rd party plugin thats poorly built for the new mac pro? but then again the same plugin works fine with adobe premiere..

If your external Thunderbolt drive is a single drive, it still is not optimal as a media drive. Ideally you will have at least a two drive RAID 0 configuration to get enough throughput. 4 disks are even better. Thunderbolt is fast but single drives max out their speed pretty quickly.

Be wary. Lots of single-disk Thunderbolt portable drives are even 5400rpm, putting another roadblock in the way of good performance.

thx for the help guys

Well it shouldn't be the external drive,
its a pegasus2 r4 that reads and writes around 800MB/s

Ive tried geek bench and I'm on par there as well so its not the computer itself thats performing slowly, thats why I began thinking that maybe its fcpx thats not optimised. But then again fcpx I was told were just that.. optimised for the new mac pro..

As I said we have no problems with FCP X on new MacPros, even on long and complex projects. And I know quite a few other people who will be able to confirm that same experience. So yes FCP X runs perfectly on the new MacPro and the real question is: why do you have these issues while others don't.

1. As said above: do NOT store FCP X Libraries and media on the SSD system drive. FCP X constantly writes to the Library, this will affect playback performance. Move your FCP X Libraries and media to a fast external drive.

2. As soon as you have removed your Libraries and media from the system drive, clean up that drive. You can use a free utility like Onyx to remove all the old caches, temp files and whatnot from your boot drive. Regular system maintenance is always good for better performance. A system drive should be used for the system and nothing else. Especially if it's an SSD drive.

3. Make sure you are running the latest updates of your OS, FCP X and all your third-party plugins.

4. After updating anything do a Repair Permissions. Although theoretically this is not required anymore it has solved performance issues for some people on this forum.

5. If after this you still get bad performance with FCP X on your system: create a new admin user, run FCP X with the new user and see if this solves the issue.

- If it does solve the issue this means you have corrupt or conflicting preferences in your old user account (not to be confused with FCP X preferences).

In that case you should reconfigure your system for the new user and delete the old account. Do NOT copy any settings from the old account into the new one, that makes no sense as you will be copying any corrupt files as well.

- If it doesn't solve the issue: wipe the drive clean and re-install everything from scratch. Don't install anything you don't really use (trial software, unneeded plugins...) and keep your system lean and clean.


- Ronny