Beach Ball / usage - funny discovery!

I have been having performance issues with my FPCX system as long as I have had it. If I run anything but FCPX, I can forget about performance in any way. If I run FCPX as the only app, it works ok - in the beginning…

Tonight while trying to edit a title, FCPX was taking so much time to actually insert 25 letters that I typed (in less than 5 seconds), that I had time to start up activity monitor for some investigation.

I noticed that FCPX only was using 102,9% CPU (I have 4 cores i7), and that there still was around 6GB free memory. Yet, FCPX was taking more than 60 seconds to write these 25 characters in the inspector.

In my book, all cores should have been running at max power in order to end the task as quickly as possible. Or is that a wrong assumption to make?

Thanks!
Gunnar Kristiansen

iMac 2.93 ghz i7
16GB Ram
Lion 10.7.3
FCPX 10.0.3

I think what you're referring to is that under Lion and with your multicore I7, then the basic OS works to invoke the necessary cores needed to deal with open applications and tasks, and where not needed they remain idle.
It sounds like you have another problem if the system is performing as you describe, so I am not sure more cores would fire up to address a problematic task. Are you seeing other issues with FCPX? How are you setup to contend with playback performance, file imports, etc.

I have many issues with FCPX getting more and more sluggish, as time goes by. First of all, I need to restart my Mac, and make sure that FCPX is the only app running, in order to make it work as good as possible.

Still - after about an hour or so, lag on pointing, dragging, sliders, text input, play/stop etc. gets so slow, that I will have to restart my machine.

To me - and this is a guess - this has to do with bad memory handling, but this is only a gut feeling I have.

I have all my media on an external USB2 2TB drive (seagate).

But if I Google this issue, people with big Xeon Mac systems seem to have similar problems.

Thanks
Gunnar

Hi gunnar, i think your issues might all be down to the usb2 drive, it is not fast enough to handle the demand that is being made on it. As an experiment, can you remove the drives and open a new fcpx project/event on the hard drive of the mac. Nothing to too big, import some footage and work the files. Let us know how you get on with that. Cheers lee

I will try that experiment. But often when the system hangs, those discs aren't performing anything, so it's not like it's a "thru-put" issue.

I have even been working with 4x Full HD streams. And that plays back fine.

Can there be another technical explanation why these drives would cause the problem?

Your computer surely is adequate for any editing work. If you have been experiencing sluggish performance from the start you should start a troubleshooting process to find out where your bottlenecks are.

I agree with Lee that the very first possible bottleneck in your setup could be the USB drive. Although you can edit from USB no serious editor will do this with HD media. This has nothing to do with the speed of USB, it relates to the fact that USB transfers data using packet bursts and does not deliver a continuously sustained stream of data as is required for video. For low data rate media this is not much of a problem, but if you need high data rate continuous streams for playback or processing you will eventually get slowdowns.

It is very easy to test if the bottleneck is with your drive: just connect a decent FireWire 800, or even much better a Thunderbolt drive to your iMac, put your media (Event) onto that drive and see if this makes a difference or not. My guess is it will make a difference.

You can do a test with putting your media on your system drive and see if it makes a difference. But putting your media onto your system drive is not a good idea for regular editing. Because this drive is already used for your OS, your applications and any other processes. If you want to optimize your workflow your media should be on the fastest possible external (or separate internal) drive you can afford. Any workflow is as good or bad as its weakest component.

My iomega FW800 drive is SO noisy (2x500GB), and the power supply is dead

Any recommendations as for a new harddrive? I have always preferred Seagate for their stability. Never had a problem with that brand, but basically any other (IBM, Fujitsu, Maxtor…)

Does anyone know what is inside the Lacie rugged series? And will the FW800 version of those actually be good enough for video work?

Thanks
Gunnar

funkpost wrote: Does anyone know what is inside the Lacie rugged series? And will the FW800 version of those actually be good enough for video work?

I don't know what brand is inside, but I don't have any speed problems with my rubber boat. Rarely have more than two or three streams going on the same time time though. It is used to dump cards in the field and do some rough cuts when I travel. Just make sure you get the 7200 RPM series.

On the desk, I use LaCie D2 Quadras over FW400 (Time Machine) and 800 (Editing). They also perform pretty well and are very quiet due to passive cooling. There were some quality issues with LaCie, but they seem to be resolved.
If you want RAID, check out their Little Big drives. They aren't as quiet as the D2 though.

I strongly, highly, avidly (sorry for using that specific word on this forum) recommend OWC drives. Durable, reliable, and the best customer service around for "when" you run into trouble. I've been getting my drives and RAM from them exclusively for a decade now. Them and Sweetwater for my audio gear have been my solid go-to vendors for many, many years.
eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/1394/US...SATA_FW800_FW400_USB

I've been traveling monthly for 15 years now (I have so many frequent flier miles and hotel points I could puke), and I have had one of these puppies with me for the past 4 years, still runs strong, love it for portability. I carry all of the Apple Pro Training Series book DVD files on it, training aids, paperwork, animations, etc, etc, etc. Has yet to fail me.
eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MS8U7750GB16/

I also edited for two weeks on someone else's brand new, maxed out 17" MBP with a LaCie 1TB T'bolt drive. That out performed my 2008 Mac Pro 8-core that has twice the RAM and way more GPU power.

I'm just up to this in reading the thread, and had a quick question here. I'm about to upgrade (myself) my iMac 27" 3.4 i7 2GB GPU, 16GB RAM with an add-on SSD. So If when working with 1080 files I run my OS + FCPX on the SSD and have my media files on the internal existing HD 7200, will this be ok, IYO? also, do I check copy media to FCPX or not on ingest?

because i have the same issues as funk post....things get progressively worse as the project increases and time passes....

waternyc wrote: I'm just up to this in reading the thread, and had a quick question here. I'm about to upgrade (myself) my iMac 27" 3.4 i7 2GB GPU, 16GB RAM with an add-on SSD. So If when working with 1080 files I run my OS + FCPX on the SSD and have my media files on the internal existing HD 7200, will this be ok, IYO? also, do I check copy media to FCPX or not on ingest?

Golden Rule: Your "scratch" disk should not be on your system drive, so, yes, it is better to use your spinning drive instead of your SSD.

Copy media: I don't do it. YMMV.

You only need to copy the media into the Event folder if you are NOT Optimizing. If you Optimize, there's no need for the originals.

So I take it a good workflow would be to Optimize & Proxy on ingest and then backup the optimized media on a separate drive?

That's what I do Marc, Optimize and Proxy everything, it allows anyone to make the best of their hardware whatever the specs. I do it straight off, work with optimised media, and the proxy's are there if needed.

Personally I have no need to for the original, modern ingest codec, rushes. The only reason I can see for anyone keeping these is is they have limited archive space, want to delete their optimised/proxy versions and archive these for later re-linking.

But I've yet to look further into how camera archives work, I'll get the time one day and may change what I do on that regard.

A Camera Archive is simply a disk image of your original card from the camera, period. Nothing fancy about it.

Right click one and go to Show Contents, you should see pretty much an exact duplicate of your original card. Not transcodes, nothing.

That's pretty much what I knew about them already Ben, but I got the impression from somewhere I was reading, or maybe watching (can't remember where) that there is other stuff that can be done.

Can you create a camera archive from just a pile of video files that may have originated from here there and anywhere?

I had a feeling from what I read/seen that this may be possible, a collection of footage from various sources could perhaps be transcoded to match and a camera archive could be created from that.

Like archiving the optimised media for a given project in a single file.

I've taken a quick look and started to think, maybe it was just a hopeful thought on early FCPX research a number of months back. If so it could make a good feature request.

A project archive at minimal size with instant optimisation/proxy re-creation if desired.

As for OWC: Still - I'd like to know what is inside.

Any clue who sells these drives in EU?

Thanks
Gunnar

The OWC drives use different mechanisms depending on which model. The AL Pro Mini drive use to be supplied with a Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM drive. I suspect there may be other devices put in the enclosures from time to time based on market availability and cost, but I think you'll find a brand name product on most of their high end drives, if not all.
I use several OWC Mercury Elite AL Pro Raid drives for my archives and they have all performed flawlessly throughout the years. OWC tunes these drives and ensures the latest chipsets (available at the time) are in them.

As for where to buy in the EU...haven't a clue.