GH4 - Retina MBP early 2013, super slow and very hot editing 4K

Hello everyone,

I'm super new to this forum and I'm very new to video as well. I have been loving my photography for years now but just got into the idea of video.

I got myself a GH4 which is an amazing camera (or at least that's what everybody says). I recorded some 4K footage and wanted to edit it in FCPX.. Note, I'm fluent with Logic Pro X but an absolute newbie to video editing and FCPX.
When I tried editing my 4K clip (20 secs long) any effect or color grading I'd try to do would take ages to render .. I'm speaking of almost 5-10 mins till it gets to 100%, my 15-inch Retina Macbook Pro early 2013 (2.7 GHz intel core i7, 16GB ram, 512 SSD, NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 1024 MB), it gets very hot up to 100 degrees celsius and the fans get incredibly loud and full on.
So I bought Compressor as I read about converting my GH4 files to ProRes first, so I did, again 100 degrees celsius, fans loud all the way up, and imported into FCPX and it's the same thing.. Does anyone have a suggestion please?

Hi Fanfares, welcome to the forum.
Sounds like you might have some problems.
Have you tried the easy things first? Rebooting, repair permissions, etc….
Are you storing your media files on your boot drive or do you use external drives? Do you have at least 15-25% free space on your drives? Not having space really causes issues.
Using any 3rd party apps or plug-ins? Try removing them and run again.
Are you running other programs at the same time? Experience the problem under any other usage?
Does Activity Monitor show lots of page swaps? How much RAM is being used, processor %?
Activity Monitor can be a good diagnostic program for some issues.
Has your rMBP been subject to lots of dust, cat fur, lama hugs and has it ever been cleaned out (serviced)? Unfortunately, laptops run hotter, accumulate lots of dust and are hard to clean out internally. They will also slow down if overheating. 100'C/212.F is pretty darn hot, so your system will throttle down speed wise. I would look at some form of cooling restrictions. Are you experiencing vibrations and noise when fans are spinning normally? This might indicate a problem. My 2012 rMBP is due for a cleaning.
ProRes should help, what about Proxy?
Finally, is this for a final rendering for export or is this background rendering? Exporting includes transcoding and it is petal to the metal till finished.
If the easy fixes don't help, you could try to re-install apps and OS; then it might be a service call to open the case.
Hope this helps, Greg

Holy smokes greg!!! This answer needs to be copy and pasted to many posts as the standard answer.
Nice going!

Fanfares,
My apologies for not mentioning a couple of other techniques for keeping your laptop cool.
First elevate your laptop and allow air to circulate underneath it. The MBPs are aluminum by design to act as heat sinks. Allowing air to flow across all surfaces including the bottom will help cool the computer.
You can of course buy a laptop stand including some with built-in fans that will do this or you can use readily available household/office materials. I go between a standing desk and sitting and my standing arrangement includes a mesh surface. When I notice my laptop getting hot while sitting I often elevate it on a wire cooling rack from my kitchen that I use for bread. Anything that raises it off a surface by 1/2"(10-12mm) or more will help.
The last technique is one I do but am not recommending. Use at your own risk!
You can place your computer on cold packs. This is highly effective but you risk causing condensation. Think of taking a cold can of beer/soda out of a fridge and placing on the counter on a hot day. It sweats due to the surface reaching the dew point that condenses moisture from the air. While unlikely (IMO) it is possible to cause this to happen inside your laptop. Dew point is highly variable depending on humidity, temperature differential, air movement and other factors. Inside the computer if all conditions are met, then liquid water would form on cold surfaces.
There is another reason not to do this and it is thermal stress. When you raise and lower temperatures all components will expand and contract. The faster this happens, the greater the induced stress, so you risk component failure. Solder joints are susceptible to stress fractures. Some of the earlier nVidia cards had this problem.
So as I said, (Don't do it) use at your own risk!

Congratulations on your GH4. Read many good things about it. Did you see Phillip Bloom's review? philipbloom.net/2014/06/30/gh4/

Hopefully someone shooting 4K panasonic and has a MBP can comment on transcoding times.

I occasionally shoot video segments on my Nikons. Love interchangeable glass, but Nikon still doesn't have video down. When I switched from film photography to digital, I stayed with Nikon due to loyalty and the fact that I have acquired lots of lens over the years. Macro shots of insects are incredible, but training them to stay in focus is hard, especially bees.

Hope this helps, Greg
p.s. Thanks Don

Hello Greg,

Thank you so much for your thorough reply. You are like a computer psychiatrist!
However, I feel good about the fact that most of the things you mention I have already tried..
My laptop is on a really high quality risen case that is designed to help with airflow, and it sits on a laptop stand with that has fans.. yet it goes up to 99 degrees celsius.. I have checked again permissions etc..
The CPU usage is often high above 100% (??), the RAM is all used up, it even shows up 22GB usage when I got only 16GB, no idea what that means!
It does get pretty loud and some vibration when it's working real hard.. And all this and I'm talking about rendering one LUT on a proxy file that is 20 seconds long, so I guess it should be much easier than exporting the real file with more effects and editing..

fanfares wrote: ..I got myself a GH4 which is an amazing camera...When I tried editing my 4K clip (20 secs long) any effect or color grading I'd try to do would take ages to render .. I'm speaking of almost 5-10 mins till it gets to 100%, my 15-inch Retina Macbook Pro early 2013 (2.7 GHz intel core i7, 16GB ram, 512 SSD, NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 1024 MB), it gets very hot up to 100 degrees celsius and the fans get incredibly loud and full on.
So I bought Compressor as I read about converting my GH4 files to ProRes first, so I did, again 100 degrees celsius, fans loud all the way up, and imported into FCPX and it's the same thing.. Does anyone have a suggestion please?

I downloaded 30 sec of GH4 4k material, dropped it into FCP X on my 2013 iMac, and it works fine. This is editing the native camera files, not creating proxies or optimized media. The material was H.264 .mov, 4096x2160 at 24 fps. Overall indicated bit rate from MediaInfo utility was 79.8 megabits/sec with peak bit rate of 106 mbps.

I added several effects inc'l sharpening and color correction and could still edit the storyline while those were rendering in the background. Using the JKL keys to rapidly switch from FF to Rev was pretty smooth and responsive. At the upper right of the playback screen there's a disclosure triangle which if clicked gives the option of "Better Performance" or "Better Quality". For camera native 4k material it definitely helps to have "Better Performance" selected. Studying the CPU and GPU load using iStat Menus during various edit operations on GH4 4k material, "Better Quality" causes much higher CPU and GPU load. This only affects playback quality within the editor, so it doesn't influence your final results.

Unlike Premiere Pro, FCP X uses background software rendering for effects vs immediate GPU rendering. However it's really good at background rendering and it usually doesn't interfere with editing. You needn't wait until the red render bars go away. Occasionally on Premiere I'd have to manually render the GPU accelerated effects to be sure of things, so it's not like one method is hugely superior.

However to investigate this further you might experimentally try waiting for the background render to finish and then evaluate the editing performance.

My 2013 iMac 27 is a 3.5Ghz i7, 32GB RAM, 3TB Fusion drive and GTX-780m GPU. I have an Pegasus R4 RAID array but just put the video on the internal system drive along with everything else. My iMac is some faster than your MBP but not enough to account for the described behavior.

The GH4 has several available codecs. If you used something different I'd suggest trying the one I listed above. It's possible FCP X might handle one better than another.