How to speed up performance in Long'ish Projects.

Hey Gang,

I was curious if there were any more suggested ways to improve the performance of Longer projects in FCPX.

We are already have Fast computers and GPUs. (iMac pros and 2013 Mac Pro)
We are already working in Proxy mode.
We are working off a Lumaforge Jellyfish, which seems to have a stable and fast connection.
Closing the inspector makes no difference.

I've also deleted FCPX prefs, and cleared our cache, and even tried moving libraries off the Server.

But whatever we do, as projects approach the 20 or even 15 minute mark, there is a noticeable slowdown in performance, edit operations become increasingly laggy and inconvenient. And as the project gets longer, the problem gets worse.

Any help would be appreciated.

At this point I'm just gonna let apple know.

Thanks,

Need more details about the media, how effects/titles heavy are the Timelines?

I work off a 2015 rMBP with a OWC RAID and do half hour and hour long TV shows with great performance.

FernKraft wrote: ..We are already have Fast computers and GPUs. (iMac pros and 2013 Mac Pro)
We are already working in Proxy mode.... as projects approach the 20 or even 15 minute mark, there is a noticeable slowdown in performance, edit operations become increasingly laggy and inconvenient. And as the project gets longer, the problem gets worse...

I edited a 23-min 4k H264 project (using proxies) that contained many hundred edits on an i7 2017 iMac 27. Some clips had 10 stacked keyframed color correction effects. This was built from a library containing about 8,500 4k H264 clips, 220 hours, and 20 terabytes. Storage was a 32 TB OWC Thunderbay 4 in RAID-0.

Overall performance was OK, but toward the end as I added CPU-intensive effects like Neat Video, Imagenomic Portraiture and Digital Anarchy Flicker Free, it became somewhat sluggish. However this was mostly due to the few highly compute-bound effects.

In theory if you're using proxies the camera codec matters less, at least until the final encode when it must be read and transcoded.

Although it's generally not necessary (or even a good idea) to have background rendering enabled, on certain timelines it may be beneficial to manually render that with CTRL+R. The entire timeline will not stay rendered but it may improve editing and final export performance.

If you have imported "in place" any bare AVCHD clips, that can hurt performance dramatically. To avoid this, import from the file bundle or re-wrap with EditReady then import using "leave files in place".

Using the latest versions of FCPX, MacOS and Pro Video Formats can improve performance, especially on some codecs and some hardware (like the iMac Pro). Starting with Mojave, Pro Video Formats is updated from System Preferences>Software Update.

Fernkraft.

Background render off. Close all Libraries except one you are working on if possible. Quit all un-needed apps except FCP. Are your dosks going into “sleep” mode after a whule? When mine go into sleep mode it takes ~5-10 seconds for access again.

Lots if effects, etc.

One thing I’ve done when I have a long (>20 minutes) is to create a new Project for each “section”. So lets say you have a video that has 3 parts- “When I was a child”, “My Teens”, “Me as a Grumpy old man”, create three seperate Projects . When you are done, just copy and paste into one “Master” Project for output. Make sense?

Hello Marcel,

Can you export an XML of the problematic project and send this to me?

ronnycourtens@mac.com

Thank you!

Generally FCPX is pretty speedy for me even on giant projects. However the only time it ever starts chugging for me is when it begins taking up a lot of memory, usually over 30GB of RAM. And this only happens when FCPX has been open for a very long time (weeks). Quitting it and reopening it usually fixes the issue.

Thanks Gang,

Redifer,
Tried all those steps; this happens immediately after a fresh restart, for both the server and computer.

Ronny Courtens,
I'll send over a few sample projects to you shortly.

Jonathan Levin,
I've tried breaking the project up into "acts" before, perhaps I'll keep that idea in my back pocket as I move forward.
Some of these projects have literally no effects, and could not really get any simpler. Some of them are literally just 'string outs' of content from some of our editors that still like to work in sequences while organizing and culling footage. That being said, the problem is not unique to those projects or workflows.

Joema,
I'm using the latest Mojave and FCPX for one machine, and the other main one is using the Latest High Sierra and FCPX.
All our clips have been imported by FCPX into an External library from camera Archives wherever possible. Nothing odd about our media workflow in that regard.

Fcpx.guru,
As mentioned above, some projects have almost no effects or Titles. Even when removing Titles, long projects remain sluggish. Our footage comes from various cameras (as we often pull from old footage). But most recently we have started using the EVA1 and GH5, GH5s, for our shoots. These codecs are quite 'dense' so most of our editors use proxy, which is ideal anyways, as not all our computers have 10Gb connections, or the resources to handle the original codec. I'd understand using the original 4K footage being slow, but using proxy seems odd to me.

Thanks,

After all that, I think I'm narrowing in on the issue... I'll report back when I know more...