Extremely frequent spinning beach ball when editing project

I had FCPx v10.1.3 (2013 MacPro - Mavericks, not Yosemite) crash when I had multiple libraries open. I was working on one small project, but I had larger project open called "20Links" - 42 minutes, 779 clips.

Since the crash, this 20Links project has been sluggish, giving me a spinning beach ball for thirty seconds about every two minutes when I adjust something in the timeline. Very hard to edit with frequent pauses!

Any basic edits, trimming, extending clips, moving clips - anything is likely to trigger a spinning beach ball, which lasts for over 20-30 seconds. If I switch to other programs, they work fine - only FCPx is unresponsive. I check Activity Monitor and FCPx is using 33% of CPU and 4 gigs of RAM. I check the FCPx "Background Tasks" and nothing is running (no rendering, etc).

After some debugging steps I'm beginning to suspect I just added too much media and that caused the crashing:

I tried duplicating the project and working from a new one, exporting the project to a new Library and relinking all the media, re-optimizing, re-proxying and re-rendering and still the beachballs.

I've restarted in safe mode and repaired my disk permissions, I've loaded the project as another user on my Mac, I've closed my inspector, I've deleted my FCPx preferences, I've copy-and-pasted the entire project into a new project - still I get the spinning beach ball frequently with my edits on this particular content. Other smaller projects do not have this issue.

Finally, I duplicated the project 3x and then cut that 39 minutes down to 1/3rd, 1/3rd, 1/3rd to see if I could identify a segment that was causing a slowdown. When the project was broken up into thirds of about ~13 minutes, there was no longer a slowdown and I could edit fast and free.

I worked on those project thirds for a week, and then I reassembled them, and the full length clip was showing frequent beachballs again as I did basic edits. The whole project is 1094 items and 37:34 long.

I updated to Final Cut Pro X 10.1.4 and Yosemite 10.10.1 to and the issues remain the same.

Today I have a workaround to work on my piece in 1/3rds, but I'd rather work on the whole combined thing at once! I can assemble and export so I'm not totally stuck but I'd like to believe Final Cut Pro X can handle more than I'm throwing at it. How can I work on my whole 39 minute film?

Thanks for any ideas or insight you might have! FWIW I uploaded most of this documentation to bugreport.apple.com under bug #19041441. Cheers,

Justin

4GB RAM is nothing. You seriously need to bump up to 8, if not 16. You'd see performance increase then. When Apple says FCPX only needs 4GB RAM, that's bare minimum to simply launch the app, not do serious work.

System specs: GPU, CPU, system drive, media drive?

Do all drives have at least 15% of their capacity as free space?

Bummer that you are having trouble. Your project should be flying. However, I have seen this before. I suspect something is up with the specific media or element on the timeline.

A few questions:

How much ram do you have?
Where are you storing or media, and where are you storing your library? Drive type, connection type.
What type of media, is it all from the same camera? Do you have any odd frame rate media from say an iPhone, maybe GoPro?
What else is on your timeline? Audio, titles? Are you alot of titles? Any third party motion templates? Any CoreMelt or fx factory plugins? Any third party audio effects?
Can you post a screen shot of your timeline in pill mode?

T.

I've had a similar problem with a project I was working on.

I see you tried relinking already, but was it relinking to a new location? or just the original location?

I solved my problem by actually moving the physical location of my original media, then relinking to it's new location (I copied it from drive "A" to Drive "B", then deleted the media from drive "A"). I suspect that my Drive "A" is on it's last legs, so I now have nothing important on it. (It is an external drive, that travels around a lot.)

After trying all of the previous recommendations and answering their questions. That may be an option.

lastly though, a question of my own. What is the format of the drives being used? That may be a clue...

Best of luck.

I love it! Thank you all for your expertise, attention and questions.

I have a late 2013 Mac Pro running 3 GHz 8-Core Intel Xeon E5, AMD FirePro D700 6144 MB graphics, 64 GB RAM and 1TB Flash system hard drive. The project lives on a 2TB Promise Pegasus 2 drive, connected via Thunderbolt 2. All my drives have at least 20% free. I love the idea of trying another hard drive but I don't have any on hand and I'd love not to spend any more money after splashing down for this kit!

The media is coming from four different cameras:

• Lumix GH2: 1920 x 1080, 23.98p
• Sony HDRSR1: 1440 x 1080, 29.97i
• Apple iPhone 6: 1080 x 1920, 30p (yes I shot portrait video, on purpose
• Apple iPhone 5s: 1920 x 1080, 30p

tpayton, your question here: "What else is on your timeline? Audio, titles? Are you alot of titles? Any third party motion templates? Any CoreMelt or fx factory plugins? Any third party audio effects?" is apt: I have a ton of stuff in my timeline - music, titles, generators, effects - third party, my own Motion experiments. Here's a picture of the timeline for my full 39 minutes:



No 3rd party audio, just maybe 3-4 sound effects from the FCP/iMovie libraries. Titles, I have 71 across the project - a lot of Alex Gollner's " 2 Text Boxes ", some speech bubbles plus Motion titles I made myself.

In terms of Generators, I have all kinds of things and it's hard to pick out just the 3rd party stuff. I contacted the folks at Intelligent Assistance to ask if Producer's Best Friend could export a list of 3rd party effects & generators used in a project and Gregory Clarke there got back to me (very nice) suggesting a "Titles & Generators" sheet might be a useful addition to the product. So I don't have a very clear sense of how many, or which 3rd party stuff I have included - there's 795 pieces of video in the project after seven months so I don't remember it all at this time :S

I have so many things going on in my timeline it's hard to see which things might be upsetting which other things. I'm glad I'm able to work on the film in 1/3rd chunks, but I miss skimming, watching, editing and exporting from one big project. Thanks for your time and thoughts here!

perhaps a silly question, but have you confirmed that none of the new 1/3 segments of the broken up project is not causing any beach balling?

And because I'm drive paranoid, perhaps check the S.M.A.R.T status of your drives, if possible.

sweet setup by the way

Lots of stuff here. Overall you're throwing alot of stuff at FCPX each of which can cause problems.

30 fps iPhone video has been known in previous versions of FCPX to cause slowdowns and render export errors. Best practice is to make optimized. Even transcode externally if problems still persist. iPhones are cool and all but they need some care when combined in large projects.

It is easy to overdo it with Motion elements in a project. Its very powerful but can suck the life out of project. Also a ton of titles that have lots of elements can also over do it. It looks like you have some 3D stuff in motion also, things like motion blur and DOF can bring Motion and therefore FCPX to a crawl. Best bet is to pre-render complicated motion stuff as individual files, ProRes 4444 for example, not ask FCPX to do this.

As far a list of effects here is what you need:

www.spherico.com/filmtools/X-Files/X-FXHandler/

- T.

Thanks for the additional thoughts here!

FernKraft - none of the 1/3rd segments is beachballing - hallelujah. I'm able to edit quickly again, even if outputting is now more of a chore (assembling three pieces before hitting command-E).

I'm so excited to be able to edit quickly, I've been working happily in 3rds and avoiding the overall timeline issue I raised here. tpayton, I think you likely put your finger on it - too many Motion projects, 3rd party generators and effects, wacky titles, layered effects. In 2013 I quit my job and bought a green screen precisely because I was excited to layer a ton - it looks like I'm successfully pushing my computer's limits.

At least the iPhone stuff is transcoded, optimized and proxied, so that shouldn't be the issue. I've attached a reading from Final Cut Library Manager - my original media is 504gb, optimized 868gb and proxy is 109gb.



I feel like I'm still tweaking so many pieces of this film, I'll likely wait to render out my effects. After corresponding with the developer, I purchased a copy of Producer's Best Friend to track down all the various plugins I'm using; X-FXHandler might have been enough, but now there's a "Titles and Generators" tab in Producer's Best Friend since the last version, so I can see how many various plugins & etc I'm using. I wanted it initially to be able to thank free plug-in makers in my credits; now I might need a readout of all my plugins to speed up my editing!

I'm definitely learning more about how FCPx and Motion work - thanks for the suggestions and coaching here folks.

In our workflow, working in segments is actually very efficient, and for me it helps keep me focused on the scene. You might consider testing by putting your sections in compound clips (put them in their own event) and then creating an assembly from those compound clips. That is what I prefer to do on a longer project. However because you are having some odd Motion template issues it might exasperate the issues.

Concerning the motion template issues. I have seen some poorly created/designed Motion elements to cause an "overload" for lack of a better term. Sometimes this manifests itself with a "loading [motion template name]" display in the viewer and background tasks that just goes on and on. For example, It's important to realize that if you have 100 instances of a 500K motion template, those are all being loaded in order to playback on the fly, and occupying 50MB of RAM (and probably somewhere else, weather those are rendered on the timeline or not.) Much better to pre-render those elements as separate files if you have large amounts motion templates/compositing of stuff like that, OR if it is a title template, use a simpler one if it is just static text. Yes our computers are powerful but computing power is not infinite. Just be smart, and try to be efficient about what you are doing.