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MP 5,1 slow on FCPX

P

pertusis1

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jul 25, 2010
455
161
Texas
At the risk of this becoming one of those threads where all of the power users express their sense of abandonment by Apple, I do have a question about the 5,1, and whether good options exist for improving the speed of FCPX. First, a little background.

I am a computer hobbyist, but I don't use my computer for a living. On the other hand, I hate waiting, and I hate stuttering screens. :mad:

I have a 5,1 that I have suped up over a few years, now with the following configuration: Dual 3.46 GHz 6 core, 48 GB ram, XP941 boot drive with several large spinning drives for data (photos, video project storage). I have a MacVidCards 7970 attached to a 30" ACD. Thanks again to all of the tips and suggestions gleaned from these forums! Up until recently, I could not have been happier with it. I initially used it for converting a bunch of Hi8 and Digital8 tapes to DVDs and archive files. Compared to the MacMini (maxed out 2.7 GHz 16GB ram, SSD), it cut my 1-hr export time from about 24 hrs down to a little better than real time. I'm done with that project, but my kids are starting to do all sorts of stuff with FCPX like object tracking, layering, etc. I was watching some of their stuff today, and noticed significant stuttering as they played back their video. They tell me that as they edit, they only keep the change that they're currently working on active to avoid this stuttering.

Like many people here, I'm waiting with bated breath to see what Apple comes up with in the mMP, but I'm wondering if anyone has suggestions for improving their workflow experience. I plan to keep my 5,1 for quite a while yet, and don't mind spending a bit of money. From what I can tell, though, the Nvidia cards (even the new ones) are not likely to improve things at all in FCPX, and it seems that reviews are mixed with the 580x. I thought about getting another 7970, but last I looked MVC doesn't even sell them anymore. I suppose I wouldn't need a flashed card since my current card gives me a boot screen.

Thoughts?
 
Wait for High Sierra and get an RX 580.
It's natively supported and has good FCP performance.
 
I've been following the High Sierra on cMP thread. I'd be very interested if anyone has been able to run comparative benchmarks between 7970 (which tends to do well on FCPX) and RX580.

Just out of curiosity, does anyone think my spinning drives could be a part of the problem. I tried to get around that by loading up on memory, but I'm not sure where the bottlenecks tend to be.
 
worth looking at activity monitor to see whats going on, if your working with a lot of layers then your project may be limited by drive speed (you will see a lot of i/o reads in activity monitor)
this can also be tested by geting a project that is slow and moving it to the SSD and see if that helps.

having a SSD with the working project on can relay help or just telling FCX to render the project.

im not shore what the optimal drive setup is for FCX maybe project drive and media drive? tad out of the loop there
 
HMMM, not a bad suggestion to move one project over and do a direct comparison. I'll let you know how it goes.
 
It's most likely the HDD's not being able to keep up with all the layers/effects on the timeline. Switch to pure SSD storage or have your projects on external USB 3 or eSATA drives. Make sure HDD's are 7200 RPM too.

Your GPU is also pretty old. Consider getting one of the Pascal Nvidias, as they have native Sierra drivers for them now.
 
I'm going to try the SSD solution today, but I thought I should point out that my concern may have been a bit premature. Last night, I was using some other software, and felt like my system was running slowly overall. When I dug into the activity monitor to see what was going on, Pages had an open process that was using a lot of CPU even though Pages was not open. I tried to close the process, but could not. When I tried to restart my computer, I got an error message about saving "" to a folder before restarting. I reset the finder, then shut down and re-started. Everything is faster again. I hate to admit it, but I wonder if I didn't have a corrupted file gumming up my system rather than an intrinsic hardware problem.

h9826790, can you explain what you mean by use proxy. I understand what the word proxy means, but I'm not sure I understand it in this context. Thanks.
 
You can set FCPX to create 'proxy' media - lower quality media which is good for editing and possibly grading. It contains links back to the original high quality media. Then on export, FCPX will apply your edits etc to the original, high quality data. So you can edit more easily, but still get the same quality on export. This works well for editing 4K media for example, especially if you don't even have a 4K screen.
 
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