Terry VerHaar
Well-known member
I am pretty much know here to be a big supporter of FCP-X, so you can imagine my frustration when I started seeing the dreaded spinning ball recently. And, this was not just an occasional slow down, this was a 3-10 second vacation for just about every move of the mouse I made.
I had not had anything like this experience in FCPX up to now so I was confused and frustrated. It's true, I had not worked with much multi-cam before, and this project is multi-cam. And, A camera was my Scarlet and B camera was a Canon 60D; another possible issue. I made sure to create proxies but it didn't seem to matter. I also made optimized media and set it to create optimized media for multi-cam clips as well. Surprisingly, none of this helped.
I moved some of the files (via FCPX) to make sure they were readily accessible without a lot of "hunting." Didn't really think that was an issue but I was willing to try anything.
I started to suspect my hard drives; same set-up I alway use but this time it was obviously sluggish. My boot drive (1 TB) was getting a little full so I went through several machinations to dump it. Got down to about 400G free. No help. Defragged it; still no help. Repaired permissions, dumped preferences. Still no help.
Getting desperate. What the heck, I "only" had 16G of RAM in my 2010 6-core Tower (4 x 4), so I upped it to 48G, its max (3 x 16). Ummm... sad to say, still the ball spins. :-(
Time to work on the other drives; internal 2 TB drives x 3. The application lives on my boot drive, the project is on a second drive and, while the actually media had been on a third drive, I had moved it to be be on the same drive as the project. I checked the integrity of all the drives, all OK, and then defragged them. Still... nothing.
I was seriously thinking of upgrading my GPU from the current Radeon 5770 to an nVidia GeForce GTX 680. The only think that slowed me down on that front was trying to do the research about which card would be the best one right now - and, of course, Jarred dropped the bomb about the new RCX coming. I am actually still munching on that issue.
But, alas, do not despair gentlepeople (sorry, watching Game of Thrones lately), the solution did present itself. I was muddling through on the edit - I actually think the RAM was making a bit of a difference - when for some reason I needed to go into my System Preferences and saw the CUDA preference and, as I am wont to do sometimes, I figured I would see if it needed updating. It is worth noting here that, unlike normal apps in the Mac environment, these preferences don't seem to let you know when they need updating. Bummer - as it turns out. So, I checked the update status and it updated from some 5.05 version or so to 5.5.
For joy, for joy. It seems to have worked. Everything is snappy again. As the song says "You don't know what you got 'til it's gone." Boy, it sure is nice to have it back!! I really do enjoy editing in FCP-X... again. :smiley:
EDIT: Oh, in case the moral of the story isn't obvious: Don't be a dummy like I was, check your CUDA preferences often!!
I had not had anything like this experience in FCPX up to now so I was confused and frustrated. It's true, I had not worked with much multi-cam before, and this project is multi-cam. And, A camera was my Scarlet and B camera was a Canon 60D; another possible issue. I made sure to create proxies but it didn't seem to matter. I also made optimized media and set it to create optimized media for multi-cam clips as well. Surprisingly, none of this helped.
I moved some of the files (via FCPX) to make sure they were readily accessible without a lot of "hunting." Didn't really think that was an issue but I was willing to try anything.
I started to suspect my hard drives; same set-up I alway use but this time it was obviously sluggish. My boot drive (1 TB) was getting a little full so I went through several machinations to dump it. Got down to about 400G free. No help. Defragged it; still no help. Repaired permissions, dumped preferences. Still no help.
Getting desperate. What the heck, I "only" had 16G of RAM in my 2010 6-core Tower (4 x 4), so I upped it to 48G, its max (3 x 16). Ummm... sad to say, still the ball spins. :-(
Time to work on the other drives; internal 2 TB drives x 3. The application lives on my boot drive, the project is on a second drive and, while the actually media had been on a third drive, I had moved it to be be on the same drive as the project. I checked the integrity of all the drives, all OK, and then defragged them. Still... nothing.
I was seriously thinking of upgrading my GPU from the current Radeon 5770 to an nVidia GeForce GTX 680. The only think that slowed me down on that front was trying to do the research about which card would be the best one right now - and, of course, Jarred dropped the bomb about the new RCX coming. I am actually still munching on that issue.
But, alas, do not despair gentlepeople (sorry, watching Game of Thrones lately), the solution did present itself. I was muddling through on the edit - I actually think the RAM was making a bit of a difference - when for some reason I needed to go into my System Preferences and saw the CUDA preference and, as I am wont to do sometimes, I figured I would see if it needed updating. It is worth noting here that, unlike normal apps in the Mac environment, these preferences don't seem to let you know when they need updating. Bummer - as it turns out. So, I checked the update status and it updated from some 5.05 version or so to 5.5.
For joy, for joy. It seems to have worked. Everything is snappy again. As the song says "You don't know what you got 'til it's gone." Boy, it sure is nice to have it back!! I really do enjoy editing in FCP-X... again. :smiley:
EDIT: Oh, in case the moral of the story isn't obvious: Don't be a dummy like I was, check your CUDA preferences often!!
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