Beachballing after doing anything in the browser

Hey there,
At my wit's end. When adding a keyword or really doing anything in the browser I get a beachball. I've tried
- resetting preferences
- re-rendering waveforms
- beginning another project.

imgur.com/a/KlGGl7q

Not a great video: i thought it would have audio.

I can't work out what's wrong. It's a 16" mbp and the project is on the internal SSD.

It's got about 500 clips so far but that's me trimming down. It should be able to handle it. How can I work out what is causing the beachball?

Any ideas?

I would suggest putting the project on external HD. Library and files.
See if that helps.

The event BLUE PLANET contains 963 clips. Nothing wrong with that. But if they are all loaded in the Browser and waveforms have to be generated, and if you then drag a clip to a keyword ...

... you will have noticed that a tiny animation starts. The software does not know how you intent to finish the dragging, on which target you intend to drop the clip.

You can save FCP some effort by working in list view at that organizational state. Only one filmstrip has to be depicted, only one waveform.

But I am very grateful that you brought up the topic, and I add a related request of my own, a thing that I always found annoying and hope I just didn't understand yet:

Are there really only two ways to apply keywords to clips? I find the keyword editor more comfortable to work with, but just >9< keywords? Why can't there be more? I always found dragging stuff very annoying, and there should be an alternative way to do that if you have, say, 20 keyword collections on the left side.

Does anybody know ?

Be sure your internal drive still has at least 15% of its capacity left as free space. But year, a fast external drive will be better. Your editing work is competing with the OS for drive usage.

I create my keywords first. Then highlight one, import, and what you imported is automatically assigned to that keyword. Not sure that helps.

william.caversham wrote: ....When adding a keyword or really doing anything in the browser I get a beachball..... It's a 16" mbp and the project is on the internal SSD....

Are you running the Chrome browser? It can saturate the MacOS VideoToolBox framework, thereby causing unpredictable slowdowns.

Make sure all items are on locally-connected drives, whether internal or external. Verify any external drives are performing normally. All should be either HFS+ (MacOS Extended Journaled) or APFS, not ExFAT or anything else.

If any external USB-C drives are not using the original OEM cable, this can sometimes cause a severe step-down in performance to USB 2.0 rates.

As FCPX.guru said, verify you have plenty of free disk space on all drives.

Run Disk Utility First Aid on all drives. To run this properly on the internal drive you should boot in MacOS Recovery mode and run from there. This is safe: support.apple.com/en-us/HT201314

If you have never rebuilt Spotlight indexes on ALL drives, do that. These are often used for various lookup functions. If indexes are stale or malfunctioning, certain tasks could be slow: support.apple.com/en-us/HT201716

FCPX.guru wrote: I create my keywords first. Then highlight one, import, and what you imported is automatically assigned to that keyword. Not sure that helps.

It does, thanks.

Just found this out by accident: in williams example, though he had more than 9 keyword collections, he can make good use of the keyword editor nonetheless.

Like that: he wants to assign Innuendo to a clip. Instead of fetching the clip(s) - dragging multiple selections at once is particularly clumsy - and dragging it on the collection in the list, he could type "inn" into the field on top of the editor. With these three letters, the editor will auto-complete Innuendo as a suggestion, and all he had to do to add the clip to this collection was to hit return. He needs 3 letters because there also is a keyword named Intro. For Maverick, he'd just have to type "M" and for Clever Fish "C" because there are no other keywords starting with these letters.

Why would anyone create a keyword-collection Non-Specific ?

Axel wrote: The event BLUE PLANET contains 963 clips. Nothing wrong with that. But if they are all loaded in the Browser and waveforms have to be generated, and if you then drag a clip to a keyword ...

... you will have noticed that a tiny animation starts. The software does not know how you intent to finish the dragging, on which target you intend to drop the clip.

You can save FCP some effort by working in list view at that organizational state. Only one filmstrip has to be depicted, only one waveform.

But I am very grateful that you brought up the topic, and I add a related request of my own, a thing that I always found annoying and hope I just didn't understand yet:

Are there really only two ways to apply keywords to clips? I find the keyword editor more comfortable to work with, but just >9< keywords? Why can't there be more? I always found dragging stuff very annoying, and there should be an alternative way to do that if you have, say, 20 keyword collections on the left side.

Does anybody know ?

Great this makes sense.
I'm going to have a go at that.

Re your other thing; I've long wanted to use the iPad next to me to mark Keywords. Why not just have the iPad filled with buttons for the different keywords?

ALSO does anyone else wish you could colour code things without having them as roles? I want to use colours for my own purposes; to demarcate what I consider to be separate parts of the edit (that will contain different roles anyway)

Just an update; the problem seems to be resolved when I change the view from "hide rejected" to "all clips" which would seem to back up Axel's point that it's redrawing the waveforms that makes it beachball.