FCP gets laggy and slow after bump basic text!

Hey

As soon as I add the "BUMP BASIC" text format, my FCP gets laggy, cant even do anything, cant move the text, or overwrite it, edit or something like that..

The export is like 2-3hr for a 1,5GB MOV. Its unbeliveable, what can I do?

Thanks

Hey

We need more information if you want actual help. FCP gets laggy when you add Bump Basic....

What macOS version?
What FCP version?
What year / kind of Mac are you using?
Are you using an external drive or your Mac's internal drive?
How much free space have you got?
What else is in the timeline (type of media / resolution)?

Any of these things can have an impact on editing performance, but if you're set up properly it should be pretty effortless.

morcsekovszky wrote:

Hey

As soon as I add the "BUMP BASIC" text format, my FCP gets laggy, cant even do anything, cant move the text, or overwrite it, edit or something like that..

The export is like 2-3hr for a 1,5GB MOV. Its unbeliveable, what can I do?...

What other effects are you using on the clips beneath the Bump Basic title? Are you using some compute-intensive effects such as Neat Video?

If so there are two possible issues:

(1) If you are using background rendering or even manual rendering via CTRL+R, a timeline with compute-intensive effects will be fast and smooth after rendering to cache. Then when you add a title it will become non-rendered over that range (see the render dots above the timeline). If you then try to manipulate the timeline before it is re-rendered, it will be very slow. The solution is temporarily turn off Neat Video or whatever other compute-intensive effects you have until that manipulation is done.

(2) If the timeline is fully rendered to cache, FCP should normally not have to recompute all effects during export. The timeline at that point exists in a fully optimized state as cached ProRes 422 media. However -- in some cases a built-in FCP effect (e.g, Basic Titles or Bump Basic Titles) will prevent that export optimization and require the timeline to be recomputed during export. It is normally that noticeable but if the timeline contains very compute-intensive effects, it can result in a long export time. This is not new behavior or a bug -- it's been like this forever. I believe the underlying issue is how the Motion runtime engine (which implements all FCP built-in effects) interacts with certain cache cases.  

Hey, sorry for being late with the answer.

Its Ventura 13.0
The Final Cut version is 10.6.5 altho its still trial for some days.
Its a 2020 M1 Macbook Air
I use internal drive, and doesent even have any external devices plugged in meanwhile using the FCP.
I have more than 200GB free space.
Its a 1920x1080 MOV file, with a H.264 codec, straight from OBS. So basically an OBS raw video.

I dont know what happened, but now if I open OBS its loading aswell for some time before I can click anything.. didnt do this back then.

I would first upgrade to the latest version of Ventura which is 13.2.1. Then try a test to see if it's an encode performance issue due to the OBS or output codec, vs a timeline computation issue caused by the Bump Basic title.

First turn off background rendering and delete any render files to clear up free space:

- Final Cut Pro>Settings>Playback>Background render - clear this checkbox to disable
- Also clear setting "Create optimized media for multicam clips
- Select library in left sidebar
- File>Delete Generated Library Files>Delete Render Files>All


Then duplicate the timeline (aka project), open the duplicate, select all clips with CMD+A, then remove all effects with Edit>Remove Effects. After that export the timeline using these settings:

File>Share>Export File>Settings,
Format: Computer
Video Codec: H264 Faster Encode
Resolution: 1920 x 1080

Time that and see how long it takes vs your previous results. For iterative tests you can just pick a subset of the timeline, say 10 minutes, which will enable faster turnaround on various test conditions. Then when some improvement is made you can test the entire timeline export.

In general an M1 MacBook Air should be able to export 1080p material at a good rate. However some acquisition codecs like OBS might be difficult to handle.

The only OBS material I had was 720p, H264, 30 frames/sec, 2.6 megabit/sec. On my M1 Ultra Mac Studio, 10 minutes exported in 43 seconds or 14x faster than real time using the above settings.. I then tested the same file and output settings on an M2 Pro Mac Mini, and it took 57 sec, or 10.5x faster than real time. Both of these machines were on FCP 10.6.5 on Ventura 13.2.1.

Hey! Thanks for the answer.

I did everything that u mentioned. Even uninstalled OBS, and FCP then installed again.

If I add Bump Basic its not laggy, but If I add like 500 characters i just cant do anything in FCP while its on the screen and its running because the frame drops, even the FCP gives a notice.

The sharing is still slow and its stuck at the text always I think, its like a 15min clip with two bump basic 500 character and it takes like an hour to share.. sometimes less, sometimes I cant even get it done because after 40 minutes its 6% .. 

With the edits removed the share is still the same speed.. stuck, and slow.

I haven't come across any OBS footage yet, but, generally when I have H.264 footage and something gets flaky, I optimize the footage and that clears things up immediately.

morcsekovszky wrote:

...If I add Bump Basic its not laggy, but If I add like 500 characters i just cant do anything in FCP while its on the screen and its running because the frame drops, even the FCP gives a notice.

The sharing is still slow and its stuck at the text always I think, its like a 15min clip with two bump basic 500 character and it takes like an hour to share.. sometimes less, sometimes I cant even get it done because after 40 minutes its 6% ..

With the edits removed the share is still the same speed.. stuck, and slow.

Please export a project XML and drop that on this secure write-only folder. I will not be able to see any of your media, just the overall timeline length, # of clips, effects applied, etc. Make sure this is a version of the timeline which manifests the problem.

To export the project XML, select the project in the Event Browser then do File>Export XML. Put that on the below DropBox link.

 www.dropbox.com/request/CiqDfFZwqO9GcHCvsifF

Thanks ! Just uploaded it.

morcsekovszky wrote:

Thanks ! Just uploaded it.

There is definitely an issue with the Bump Basic title. As you indicated it exhibits severe performance degradation as the title text reaches a certain size. It becomes unusably slow even on my top-spec M1 Ultra Mac Studio. I can render that to cache but it takes a long time - even on my machine. The CPU and GPU are both low during that period. It is internally bottlenecked on some software asset. 

There is nothing special or unique in your XML. I can reproduce it from scratch just using one clip and the Bump Basic title. I don't know why I couldn't see it before.

I examined it using the XCode Instruments profiler. The code path is spending lots of time in OZ-prefix classes. Ozone is the Apple code name for the Motion rendering engine. All FCP built-in effects and titles are implemented with Motion. There are also references in the Instruments trace to GLRenderer and OZLockingGroup. This implies a possible recurring multithread wait condition on some synchronization object.

The performance of the built-in Bump Basic title starts off OK then somewhere between 60 to 100 words the performance degrades exponentially. It's not just slow to execute but rendering to cache is incredibly slow even for a short clip. E.g, a 30 sec 1080p/23.98 ProRes 422 clip with no effects but the Bump Basic title and 160 characters in the title took about 10 minutes to render to cache on my top-spec M1 Ultra Mac Studio.

So basically everything you reported is correct. Your only current workaround is stay below about 50 characters or switch to another title. E.g, I briefly tested the Basic Title and put a Gaussian blur on the clip below it. That looks similar to Bump Basic and it ran a lot faster.

This case needs more extensive study such as testing multiple FCP and MacOS versions, Intel and Apple Silicon, are any other effects involved, etc. Unfortunately I am leaving on a field assignment for about two weeks and I cannot pursue it until I get back.

There are lots of experienced people on this forum, maybe they have some suggestions.

Okay...

I was working on a 2 minute project 1080p23.976 ProRes 422 HQ, with 48k stereo audio. I added the default Bump Basic title and entered 320 characters into the text box. The title on my system used the Helvetica Neue Bold font with size at 273.0. The title duration was 10 seconds.

I have background rendering turned off. Quality was set to Better Quality, using Original/Optimized media.

Playing the timeline became very chopy/sluggish once the playhead hit the title. I then rendered the title via control-R and it took around 40 seconds to render. Playback and timeline responsiveness was fine after doing the render. I exported the timeline using the default Apple Devices 1080p setting. The export took about a minute. Playback of the resulting m4v file was fine.

2019 Mac Pro, macOS 12.6.3, FCP 10.6.5.

Hope this helps, OP and Joe...

Cheers.

Addendum:

The OP might try recreating the effect of the Bump Basic title by using the Basic Title, adding blur to the underlying clip, and adding a slight zoom in on the underlying clip (Joe recommended this except for the zoom). Keyframing is likely needed and the zoom can be done with the underlying clip's transform properties.

The font that I used was Helvetica Neue Bold, which in not one of the fonts bundled in FCP. It's a system font. I wonder if a bad font or corrupt font cache could be part of the issue.

Since the Bump Basic title is one of the titles included with FCP, one could open a copy of it in Motion and maybe discover something there. Otherwise, it could be some other sort of issue/bug...

Thanks you for both of you guys !!

I will apply other text as you guys suggested, it was just so frustrating because I have done videos earlier with even 10-15 bump basic text form and no issue!! But I realised, it was only like up to 50-100 characters, and now i need to do hundreds.. so its a problem which isnt fixeable, but its OK no big deal i just felt the switch was too hard and maybe there is some underlying problem, but in reality only that it doesent really tolerate much characters.

ps: I tried other fonts, ended up with the same result so its not the corrupted file which is making my head hurt, haha but its no big deal I will switch and it will be just as good as Bump basic !!


Thanks really much !!

Joe, I also tried adding "Bump News" and "Lower Third Basic" titles to a sample timeline. Both of them behave the same as "Bump Basic". Before rendering, timeline playback is choppy and many frames are dropped (no warning dialogue appears). Rendering seems to take way too long, expecially considering "Lower Third Basic" is just fading in a black box over which the text fades in (and later both fade out).

I then tried Stupid Raisins's "Paragraph Pop 01". It has several separate lines of text and a large chunk of text in a paragraph, along with graphics overlays and animation. No problems with playback (without rendering).

So, it seems there is a bug with some of the Apple-provided FCP titles (something in Motion?) that affects both my Intel system and newer Apple silicon systems. Though, the effect is much less of an issue (rendering takes no more than a minute) and export is fairly speedy. The other difference is that I'm using Monterey 12.6.3 and I believe you and the OP are using Ventura. On my system the poor behavior beigns when the total characters in the text box exceed around 154.

Dave, thanks for doing that. I'll examine this more when I get back in about two weeks.