FCPX 10.4.6 and now 7 constantly crashing on iMac Pro and Macbook Pro

We've invested heavily in this kit recently but our experience has been woeful to say the least. We're using 2 iMac Pros and a Macbook Pro all runnin Mojave 10.14.6 and FCPX 10.4.7 as of this week.

Every hour or so FCPX will lock up across the machines meaning a forced shut down. Normally during playback, the beach ball appears and it freezes or often the sound will continue playing and the picture freezes and the app becomes unresponsive - then another forced shut down. This is really disappointing considering the money spent and that everything is from the same manufacturer, it should all 'just work' right?

We're running all the media from an external thunderbolt G-Drive, one attached to each system. The annoying thing is we never get an error or a report, it just locks up and the macs have to be restarted to then carry on working. We updated to 10.4.7 this week in the vain hope of it fixing these stability issues but it's exactly the same and displaying the same behaviour the last version did across all Macs.

I'd like to get this officially looked into as it's killing our workflow but not sure who to turn to.

I am having this same problem. FCP 10.4.7 and Mojave 10.14.6 on an iMac 27 inch (Late 2012). Partway into the sharing process (to YouTube) the computer locks up. No warning, can't force quit... Must force a had shut-down with the power switch. Any suggestions? Thanks!

Just fixed my problem by upgrading to Catalina 10.15. Apparently, the upgraded FCP (10.4.7) can't be used with Mojave.

First step I'd take is using "FCS Remover" (free from digital rebellion) to wipe FCPX and companion apps from the system. Reboot, reinstall the apps from scratch.

Verify system drive has at least 15% of its total capacity left as free space on all machines.
Run the First Aid routine in Disk Utility on each machine.

Even if you're in Mojave, verify all third party plugins (the most common cause of this) are up to date for Catalina.

I run a variety of Macs at a TV station, not having issues.

DMM_MOM wrote: We've invested heavily in this kit recently but our experience has been woeful to say the least. We're using 2 iMac Pros and a Macbook Pro all runnin Mojave 10.14.6 and FCPX 10.4.7 as of this week.

Every hour or so FCPX will lock up across the machines meaning a forced shut down. Normally during playback, the beach ball appears and it freezes or often the sound will continue playing and the picture freezes and the app becomes unresponsive -...

Are you running Chrome? There are known issues with the Chrome browser locking out FCPX of the macOS VideoToolBox framework. This in turn causes extremely slow FCPX performance, instability, process hangs, etc. It is not limited to FCPX - any NLEs or transcoders that rely on VideoToolBox for encoding, decoding, and transcoding are potentially affected.

Your first step should be positively verify that Chrome is not on any of those machines.

Once that is done, please state what codecs are being used. Make sure all media drives are either HFS+ or APFS, not ExFAT.

As FCPX.guru said, a malfunctioning or incompatible plugin can destabilize or crash FCPX. Verify all your plugins are compatible and up to date.

Upgrading to Catalina has pretty much fixed all problems. Although there are still random freezes, it always comes back and editing has become a much more fluid process. These macs are all brand new out of the box, only running the Adobe suite, Resolve and FCPX. All media lives on external TB drives or a media server connected by ethernet. We are shooting on Ursa cameras and using ProRes 422 HQ throughout the entire process.

Thanks for the responses but at least for now I don't feel like we've wasted £35k and we are producing stuff!

JohnMacUser wrote: Just fixed my problem by upgrading to Catalina 10.15. Apparently, the upgraded FCP (10.4.7) can't be used with Mojave.

Just so you know, FCPX 10.4.7 does work perfectly on Mojave 10.14.6. We are using it without issues on (2) different Macs running Mojave. Your installation of Catalina likely solved another issue that was causing your problem.

dgwvideo wrote: .. FCPX 10.4.7 does work perfectly on Mojave 10.14.6. We are using it without issues on (2) different Macs running Mojave. Your installation of Catalina likely solved another issue that was causing your problem.

I also am using FCPX 10.4.7 on Mojave and very large libraries. I don't see any problems except the HEVC issue which Apple is investigating, and that seems isolated to certain HEVC variants. In general 10.4.7 is significantly faster on certain workloads, especially involving internal effects as typified by the BruceX benchmark. It is also faster at certain playback and encoding cases but this varies with codec and Mac hardware.