bloated currentversion.fcpevent files causing FCP to be slow?

Hello, I'm completely new here, so apologies if I do anything wrong. I have a project where I've edited about an hour of stuff down to about 30 minutes. In the course of doing this, FCP has become very slow, and the library/project takes over 2 minutes to load. After spending hours searching, I discovered that the currentversion.fcpevent file is 4 GB, whereas in my other projects it's in the range 5 MB - 100 MB. I managed to open it in TextEdit, and I've copied below the point at which it becomes extremely repetitive, where I see the word "Gaussian".

Now when I started editing the project, which contains a lot of me talking to camera, I saw an annoying spot on my shirt, and spent a bit of time using a Gaussian blur mask to hide it, which involved automatically tracking the spot throughout about an hour's worth of clips. Was that really such a reckless and extravagant thing for me to do? Would tracking a spot through an hour of footage cause currentversion.fcpevent to be 4 GB?

Many thanks for any opinions!

<parameter name="Gaussian" id="2721971108" factoryID="21">
    <flags>4112</flags>
    <foldFlags>16908288</foldFlags>
</parameter>

</ozml>
_FFSingleMaskedEffect“$%&'Z$classnameX$classes_NSMutableDictionary£&()\NSDictionaryXNSObject$)27ILQS_eltÜãçèëìòöúû†¢≠π≈Œ‰¯Éöü™≥…Õ⁄*„G2222223</outputTangentTime>
                        <outputTangentValue>0</outputTangentValue>
                    </keypoint>
                    <keypoint interpolation="1" flags="0">
                        <time>54723669 30000 1 0</time>
                        <value>-1905.9896019244825</value>
                        <outputTangentTime>0.011122222222222223</outputTangentTime>
                        <outputTangentValue>0</outputTangentValue>

I have no idea about the points you are making but very often when FCP starts slowing down the culprit can be a nearly full hard drive.
If you have got automatic render selected (most people have), your drive can very soon become filled with gigantic ProRes files.
If your drive is more than 80% full this could be the reason for the slowdown, in which case you need to delete all render files.

rinzi wrote:

...I have a project where I've edited about an hour of stuff down to about 30 minutes. In the course of doing this, FCP has become very slow, and the library/project takes over 2 minutes to load. After spending hours searching, I discovered that the currentversion.fcpevent file is 4 GB, whereas in my other projects it's in the range 5 MB - 100 MB. I managed to open it in TextEdit, and I've copied below the point at which it becomes extremely repetitive, where I see the word "Gaussian"... when I started editing the project, which contains a lot of me talking to camera, I saw an annoying spot on my shirt, and spent a bit of time using a Gaussian blur mask to hide it, which involved automatically tracking the spot throughout about an hour's worth of clips....

CurrentVersion.fcpevent is a SQLite library for the project. It contains several SQL tables which in turn contain references to each clip, each edit and each effect in the project. The contents and schema are undocumented, however they can be directly displayed with a tool like SQLPro for SQLite  apps.apple.com/us/app/sqlite-client-by-sqlpro/id586001240?mt=12

As you said, normally the CurrentVersion.fcpevent files are quite small. However in one case a customer had many compound clips and created many extraneous additional timelines referencing those. That caused slow performance and a large database file. His solution was deleting the unneeded projects.

In your case I'm not sure what caused the large database file. However with FCP the best approach is not dumping a lot of stuff on the timeline and editing it down. You don't put a bunch of time-consuming Fx on clips which will ultimately not be in the final edit. Rather you use the rating and keyword system to mark and organize your clips (and clip ranges)  *before* putting anything on a timeline. 

After that curation and organization phase (which is fast if using the skimmer and shortcuts effectively), then you add that smaller subset to a timeline for final adjustment. Only then do you need to consider adding Fx. The Fx are only added to the needed clips in the final edit, which makes FCP run a lot faster.

That assumes you have an adequately powerful machine for the task. It would help if you gave details about the year, model and config of your Mac, also the version of FCP and MacOS you are running, and the codec specifics.

I'm sorry I can't give additional advice, as I'm leaving on a shooting assignment tonight. Maybe others can give recommendations. 

joema wrote:

 However with FCP the best approach is not dumping a lot of stuff on the timeline and editing it down. You don't put a bunch of time-consuming Fx on clips which will ultimately not be in the final edit. Rather you use the rating and keyword system to mark and organize your clips (and clip ranges) *before* putting anything on a timeline. 

Many thanks joema. It was worth posting here to get your advice for future projects. I've only learned to use FCP by trial and error. Yes, so far I've always stuck my talking-to-camera footage in the timeline and edited it down. I thought applying an effect to two very long clips (totalling nearly an hour) would be quicker and simpler than applying it clip by clip later. 

I'll try to learn rating and keywords (which I hadn't heard of) and the relevant shortcuts for next time. My 'solution' this time has been to export my project as a 4k mp4 (fortunately the project would let me do that) then import it into a new project. I'm guessing the loss of quality will be ok on YouTube. 

I have a MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2021), Apple M1 Pro Chip , Memory 16 GB, 1TB HD with about 120 GB free, using OS Monterey 12.6.8 and FCP 10.6.8 (I updated both to see if it fixed my problem, before I discovered the huge currentversion.fcpevent). My libraries and projects are all on a Seagate One Touch 5 TB drive, of which I've used about 1.5 TB. I use a different library for each video; very roughly I produce one or two 20 minute YouTube videos per month.

Thanks again!