FCPX sluggishness is the only thing making me longing for Premiere

interestingly I'm having the exact same sluggish performance issues on my
hackintosh

-i7 3.4 Ghz
-dual 270x 4gb cards
-32 mb of ram

have never been able to figure out the problem
which essentially started with mavericks and never went away

use to run like butter on mountain lion

To me this seems to be a memory leak situation. After working on a project for about an hour, FCPX starts slowing down considerably. Closing and restarting the program usually gets it back to where it should be. I'll restart it about 4 times during the course of the day. A big PITA.

As I've posted in a couple of other threads, don't rule out hardware in performance issues either. I had playback issues that took me weeks to resolve and turned out to be a USB3 hub - but only if my AVID FastTrack Duo was plugged in.

As it stands though, FCPX does seem to eventually slow down. i know I can take the same project to another machine and the performance is fine so it seems to be operating system related. Fingers crossed, Apple will fix it in an upcoming release.

Meanwhile, it take a few months for my system to slow enough to bother me and spending the couple of hours it takes to do a clean install two or three times a year is something I can live with.

Man I wish a clean install only took a few hours. For me it's an all-day ordeal in frustration. I live on this computer. It's not solely dedicated to editing. And FCPX needs to run on such a computer.

Over in my FCP X Editors group someone says they found temporary a solution. Comes from Craig Scott:

"After much frustration with a major PERFORMANCE ISSUE in Final Cut, I'd thought I'd share my solution.
PROBLEM: a gradual deterioration of editing/playback performance (lagging and choppiness) until finally it's necessary to close the app and relaunch. I suspected everything from my thunderbolt drive's performance, multi-cam issues, playback quality choice, etc. ...and to my surprise, working with poxy's also showed zero improvement.
SOLUTION: Turn off the inspector! Use it when you need it, don't leave it open. I hope this info helps someone else like me who may have been in the habit of leaving it on."

With the inspector turned off is for me like driving a car without steering wheel, but that is only me

Nice that you guys are sharing your experiences and possible temporary solutions

Next time I encounter slowdowns I will try the inspector solution to see if I can see any difference.

Please do FreshT- I would be very interested to know if your initial post on codecs (MTS) and the 2013 Mac Pro performance is actually the memory leak being seen in 10.1.4.

I know I can confirm the extra program restarts, but it has never been so bad that we had to do clean re-installs of the OS to temp fix the performance slow down.

This issue (or one very similar to it) was present a ways back in like 10.0.2- and was fixed promptly, so I would imagine it is again a priority for the hard working folks at Apple.

Cheers,
Dustin

Makki wrote: With the inspector turned off is for me like driving a car without steering wheel, but that is only me

I get what you mean but if you design a workflow you could much of what's needed in a project before before constantly needing the inspector. Obviously there comes a point where that's not an option. Another point is to learn the inspector shortcut to quickly pop it open and closed as needed.

This may help: Final Cut Pro X Slowdown

It appears the update to FCP X will be Tuesday so hopefully that addresses some things.

thefcpxeditor wrote: This may help: Final Cut Pro X Slowdown

It appears the update to FCP X will be Tuesday so hopefully that addresses some things.

Wait how do you know there is an update coming on tuesday? just curious

wow!
Thanks for the tip 'thefcpxeditor'!
been editing for a few hours and no sluggishness yet!
using command +4 to click the inspector on and off
and so far results are solid
AGAIN thanks!

thefcpxeditor wrote: Over in my FCP X Editors group someone says they found temporary a solution. Comes from Craig Scott:

"After much frustration with a major PERFORMANCE ISSUE in Final Cut, I'd thought I'd share my solution.
PROBLEM: a gradual deterioration of editing/playback performance (lagging and choppiness) until finally it's necessary to close the app and relaunch. I suspected everything from my thunderbolt drive's performance, multi-cam issues, playback quality choice, etc. ...and to my surprise, working with poxy's also showed zero improvement.
SOLUTION: Turn off the inspector! Use it when you need it, don't leave it open. I hope this info helps someone else like me who may have been in the habit of leaving it on."

Welcome. Glad it helped out!

Apple has an official presentation at the FCPWorks area in NAB on Tuesday. Denver Riddle (who is also presenting there) also just sent out an email about NAB and says in it, "Apple will also be introducing a new update to Final Cut Pro X!!!"

thefcpxeditor wrote: Apple has an official presentation at the FCPWorks area in NAB on Tuesday. Denver Riddle (who is also presenting there) also just sent out an email about NAB and says in it, "Apple will also be introducing a new update to Final Cut Pro X!!!"

Thank you good sir for the inspector tip and the update on the fcpx!
Premiere Just came out with info on a good update so I'm excited to see what fcpx has up their sleeve

It would be much more useful for Premiere users if Adobe would fix the stability issues and the many bugs in Premiere rather than just adding features. I'm quite confident that Apple won't make the same mistake and they will concentrate on things that really matter. Further improving performance is one of these things.

- Ronny

ronny courtens wrote: It would be much more useful for Premiere users if Adobe would fix the stability issues and the many bugs in Premiere rather than just adding features. I'm quite confident that Apple won't make the same mistake and they will concentrate on things that really matter. Further improving performance is one of these things.

- Ronny

Im with you on that one, Even if it did include some nice features it needs to be stable..

ronny courtens wrote: It would be much more useful for Premiere users if Adobe would fix the stability issues and the many bugs in Premiere rather than just adding features...

That is correct. Although I've experienced some periodic slowdowns in FCP X, I also had CS6 crash *many* times. It was consistently fast when it was running, but it was hardly a paragon of reliability.

Software is very complex -- the features, user interaction, and system configuration can be envisioned as a multi-dimensional space. There are regions of stability within that space and regions of instability. Two people running the same software on the same hardware can have different reliability experiences because they are exercising different underlying code paths.

There are many debugging and analysis tools available to programmers, but finding these issues can be hard, grueling work. The entire team -- from development to test and support -- must prioritize bug fixing and reliability, which is especially critical for professional apps.

Just analyzing a crash dump does not always lead to problem resolution. This is because the actual failure point can be so far downstream in time (on a computer scale) that the precipitating event is obscured or long gone.

In software engineering there's a debate called "fail fast", where the designer must decide between early shutdown for better diagnostics vs keeping the program running for user benefit. Few outside software engineering know about this, but it's extremely contentious. Modern OS's have structured exception handling and can continue for quite a while after throwing an exception (whether exposed to the user or not). This helps the user but degrades diagnostic value when it finally crashes: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail-fast

So don't think just because FCP X crashed and you reported that to Apple, they have everything they need to fix it.

As end users our most valuable contribution is collaborating to produce consistent problem replication scenarios. Any portable replication scenario -- even if it only happens 1 in 5 times -- is worth a lot. Fixing software is typically an iterative process and a replication scenario is worth much more than a crash dump.

Sorry about the confusion folks, I was just going off of what I read on the posted session schedule:

"Apple Product Marketing will present an update on Final Cut Pro X.”

I actually have no idea what they’ll show but I’m looking forward to finding out and hope I'll see you there.