Problems with sudden slow downs in rendering

Hi everyone, just joined this forum after watching for a few months. I have been using FCP 6.5 for about 3 years and I am making the transition to FCPX over the last 2 months. I am running it on a 24" imac (iMac8, 1) with 4 gig of ram under Snow Leopard. Whilst 6.5 ran well with the computer I know that I am probably pushing it with FCPX , still, except for one problem which I will get to, it has run remarkably well so far.

My problem is that during a render the render will suddenly slow down to 1/10th the original render rate. I can't pin this slowdown to any particular action at the moment. To cure the problem I have to trash the preferences and restart the computer which is a real pain as it can happen a number of times during a session. Has anyone had this happen to them, and is there any cure?

All suggestions welcome.

Ian

FCPX is very hungry for RAM and your 4GB is probably not enough in this case.

In general try not to render if you can keep working without doing so. Rendering is very slow in FCPX, whereas if you export without rendering you will find that you can do so very quickly (the GPU kicks in which makes a huge difference).

I agree with 4GB RAM being just minimal for FCP10. That's why restarting your computer gets you back on track: when you shut down your computer the RAM cache gets flushed, so when you restart all your RAM is available again. Trashing the prefs has nothing to do with this. RAM is not expensive anymore, if you want to work in the 64-bit world that's the first extra thing you need to add, if this is possible. This not only applies to FCP10 but to all 64-bit video applications.

If you cannot add RAM, or your system is a tad too old to comfortably work with FCP10, you can always create Proxies and edit with the proxies until your edit is locked, then switch back to your original/optimized media.

Thanks for your comments and suggestions.
It appears that I can up the amount of RAM to 6 gig despite the published limit being 4 gig (imac 8,1) so I will do so and let you all know what happens.

regards

Ian

An iMac of that age will also have a GPU that's not that powerful. Bear that in mind also.