Final Cut Pro Running Poorly

So I have been using FCPX for about 2 months now and Im not thrilled on the performance. I have a brand new 2.2ghz i7 quad core laptop with 1GB vram and a 750 5400rpm drive and 4GB ram. For a while, I was editing off of the internal hard drive, however i was getting terrible performance, choppy audio, and dropped frames. To try to resole this, I bought and external 7200rpm G-Drive to store my media while i edit to take some of the workload off of my internal. Helped a little, but still some glitchy performance. Next i added 8gb of ram... it helped a little, but i am still dissapointed that i can't edit a simple 3 minute project with out the program crashing or getting dropped frames warning due to disk speed to slow. Im not entirely new to the editing world and I am decent with computers. I have repaired permissions numerous times as well as deleted my plists. Still poor performance. I hear other PRO editors telling me that they are completely happy with how the new final cut is working but at the moment i can't say that i agree. I know its got to be my set up or something i am doing but i dont know what. Oh and btw, i am using final cut to optimize all media into apple pro res. Any body have any advice on what i can do to improve my performance. I would understand these kinds of hiccups on a large project, but not a 2 to 4 minute music video with minimal color correction and simple cuts.

Thanks

There are a lot of things that could contribute to your problems. If you search this forum you will find several threads that address your issue.

But we can start with a few things right off the bat.

First, any drive you use for media should at least be a 7200 rpm drive, and your media should never reside on the system disk. Sounds like you did change that.

Secondly, a firewire 800 drive is a minimum requirement to properly stream your HD footage. 720 HD is OK usually if there are not many streams in your timeline, 1080 HD will be more demanding.

Next, you can try to set your playback preferences for "Better Performance" as opposed to "High Quality".

You may also want to use Proxy Media while editing, and then change back to "Original or Optimized" before final output.

You can turn OFF background rendering and manually render if you need to, or just let FCPX automatically render when you SHARE your final output.

Make sure you have a minimum of open projects and events active at any one time, as this can slow FCPX on most machines, depending on how many clips are in each event.

Try making compound clips from several small clips as FCPX seems to handle them better than having many individual clips active.

Try deleting "Unused Event Render Files" and "Unused Project Render Files" by selecting the project and then selecting each event. This will free up disk space and lessen the load on FCPX.

If your background tasks are running (you can check this by clicking the circle in the timecode window) you can manually stop them by clicking the "X" next to the task.

Be sure you have the latest FCPX 10.0.3 version and the latest OS.

Try some of these and see how that goes. Report back and try to provide more specifics of what you are doing, type of footage, which OS, etc.

"Unused Project Files"? I've never heard of doing this. Where do you see this option? What does it do?

The one thing that you (dgwvideo) suggested that i had not done was upgrade to the latest version of the OS. For final cut Im on 10.0.3 and I'm currently installing the latest OS lion update. I would have used proxy media, but i had assumed that buying a top of the line Macbook Pro would allow me to edit pro res 422 1080p. I also didn't want to have to take up the additional disk space with proxy media. Just so all of the info is on the table, I'm shooting with a 7D mostly. Sometimes 60fps 720p and mostly 30fps 1080p. In most forums that i have read so far, it seems that it is older pre i7 machines that you are required to use proxy media to get a clean edit an my machine is months old. Do you think I'm gonna be forced to use proxy media because i didn't go with an iMac? I know all about Command 9 and i stop the activity in there constantly. BTW thanks for the quick response to the first post.

MBP's don't have the most powerful graphics onboard, which is one of their biggest weaknesses for video editing. iMacs are in the same boat, graphics chips on the system board, it's not a full blown top of the line graphics card. iMacs and MBPs are basically the same things, in that respect.

The other weakness is the FW800 drive. They've always been marginal in supporting HD video for editing.

I have edited with a new 17" MPB maxed out, with a LaCie 2TB T'bolt drive, and it screamed, one of the best machines I ever edited with, and using 7D footage that was Optimized.

I come pretty well along with proxies from HDV/MXF stuff on my 2010 MBP and LaCie FW800 drive. I wouldn't expect full-blown 422 HQ running on that system though.

Ben, when you beef them iMac i7 up with the 2GB GPU and 16GB RAM and have TB drive, they pretty much scream. I'm putting my bottle refund aside for one.

So i guess I'm saving for a thunderbolt drive now. I probably need to be a little more strategic on my editing as well. You would just figure that if FCPX is written for multicore processors and to take advantage of all of the resources that your machine has to offer that it might run a little more smoothly. Do you think if i use Pro Res 422 LT i might get some better results or am i just destine for proxy media?

LT might run better and is good enough in 90% of all cases. you don't work for national Broadcast or Hollywood? Do you?

Another thought: your 60p footage - I have it somewhere in the back of my head that FCP X is not too fanatic about it. Maybe that's causing you trouble also.

I'll give pro res 422 LT a try then. Your right I'm not doing any pro work right now so it's not too much of an issue. Right now I'm really just trying to get my projects done as quick as possible and to look good for YouTube and Vimeo streaming. As for the 60p footage, I dont use it too often and I haven't noticed much of a difference between it and my 30p stuff. To be completely honest, The dropping frames issue has gotten much better with every bit of advice I follow regarding both hardware and software settings and if I go into preferences and uncheck the warnings for dropped frames my workflow goes pretty smooth. It's just disappointing to know that if I leave the warnings on, I'm going to get many pop ups that are basically stating that my brand new computer just isn't as powerful as I hoped it to be.

Your MBP is perfect for editing, FCP10 can run blazing fast on any decent system setup and you are not really to blame.

I can see you understand what editing is about and you are doing everything you can to optimize your workflow. What many people today are forgetting is that your media drives are an essential part of your system setup, especially when working with full HD progressive media. The total performance of your workflow entirely depends on the performance of the weakest link in your system. And in your case I think your media drive is the weakest link because you say you get the "dropped frames due to poor drive performance" message.

IMO the system you have and the media you work with deserve the fastest media drive you can afford, and yes you will see a huge improvement when working with Thunderbolt. And while you are saving up for this you could consider working with Proxies to relieve your FireWire drive. I don't know why you would use ProRes LT, this does not make much sense to me. The Proxy workflow allows you to edit fast, even with slower drives, while maintaining the full original quality in your final master.

BenB wrote: "Unused Project Files"? I've never heard of doing this. Where do you see this option? What does it do?

This doesn't exist, BenB. It was a typo. It was meant to read delete unused project render files and delete unused event render files. I corrected the wording so future readers would not be confused.

Ah yes, that makes sense. Always delete render files from inside FCP X.

I'd like to ask the OP how many clips he has, in how many Events, and how many Projects, and what is the duration of those projects? Also, what third party plugins does he have installed?

FCP X doesn't really do ProRes LT, it was a "consumer" flavor of ProRes. It wasn't high enough bit-rate for HDV, but very high enough for DSLR H.264. It was a smaller file size than the standard 422, slightly smaller. But it was a borderline flavor, and I'd just ignore it from now on. On the other hand, there's no reason to use ProRes HQ or 4444 unless you're shooting on a RED ONE, Viper, Arri, or doing very, very high end film based composites.