Importing and transcoding is slow

I`m on a new MacBook Pro, spring 2022, apple M1 max. Importing and transcoding is very slow. Working on a raided disk Pegasus 6. Importing 2 hour clip from copy of memory card (Canon C300) takes approximately. 2 hours. Any tips?

The speed is limited by the capability of the memory card, which is quite poor.

Before I import I copy the memory card to the raid. It used to be much faster.

What format and size are you transcoding to, optimized media, H264 proxies, or what? In general the M1 Max and Ultra are very fast at transcoding to ProRes formats, although that can be limited by decoding speed on some media types.

There is a performance bug whereby transcoding from 4k formats to 50% H264 can be slow on current FCP versions on Apple Silicon, but 100% and 25% size are OK. Transcoding to 50% ProRes proxy is very fast.

Camera cards are often not that fast. If you are importing directly from the card and transcoding as part of import, it could be limited by the card reading speed. The way to examine that is copy the full card structure to a fast local disk then import/transcode from that. Also if importing from the card that implies "copy to library" so that's an additional step vs importing from disk using "leave files in place". For tree-oriented formats it's often better to first rewrap them using EditReady, then import using "leave files in place": hedge.video/editready

On my M1 Ultra, FCP 10.6.4 transcoding 4k/23.98 10-bit 4:2:2 XAVC-I MXF material from a Sony FX6 to 50% ProRes proxies ran at about 12x real time speed, or about 300 frames per sec. That media was first copied to disk then imported from there using "leave files in place", it was not first rewrapped.