Complex is the key word…FCPX does not handle complex timelines, in other words if like me you edit a 53m program on a single timeline with greenscreen, graphics and plugins it’s only time before you will eventually break the final straw on the camels back, rendering your project less than useless.
It all kicked off a few nights ago when I went to edit a tutorial about LED lighting, I clicked on FCPX (v 10.0.8) opened up to be confronted by the spinning beach ball of death.
I used an app called “Preference Manager” to trash FCPX’s preferances with no joy then had a brain wave to use a further app called “Event Manager” to hide the two timelines that were causing me the problems…now I have to stop you here and stress that without this app I personally would have been up the creek without a paddle.
Don’t take my word for it here is an entry from Digital Rebellions CEO Jon Chappell…
Jon Chappell (Digital Rebellion) “Some of you may have experienced the beachball of death when FCPX tries to load a project and eventually resorted to force-quitting the app.
In most cases, the app hasn’t hung at all but is just taking a really long time to open the project. If you leave it long enough (8-12 hours) it should eventually open. We recommend running our Project Repair tool to optimize the project file before doing this, as the optimization process lowers the file size and can shave off some loading time.
The reason it is taking so long is that the project has become too complex. A common cause of this is over-use of compound clips, especially compound clips inside multiclips. I have seen this lead to multi-gigabyte project files, even though the timeline was only a few minutes long.
Once the project opens successfully, begin the process of removing the compound clips. FCPX will hang for a short while whenever you try to do anything, but as you reduce the number of compound clips it will become more and more responsive.”
I emailed Jon and asked him “When I open FCPX it opens then beach ball of death. Is this a fault that Apple are aware of and fixing or is the software crap.”
We are due an update to FCPX if Apple can cure this problem it will go along way to restoring my faith in FCPX as a long form editor.
Same thing with Vegas Pro – you reach a state where one more tweak hangs the project.
My tactic is to do a “Save As” virtually each time I do anything, and then eliminate all but the last few saves.
+1 (nay, +1^10) for Digital Rebellion’s tools. And the somewhat prosaically named but wonderful “Backups for Final Cut Pro” from NP Associates LLC which does the ‘Attic’ or ‘Archive’ thing for FCPX.
http://npassociatesllc.com/backupsforfcp/
which should be a function inside FCPX from the get-go.
Sigh, yes – FCPX is the king of editing stuff that’s less than 10 minutes long. Well, sure, if you’re doing a 90 minute presentation, dropping PowerPoint graphics into a 3 camera record, FCPX can do that too, but a 42 min TV docco is pushing it.
Which is why so many of us were moving away from FCP7 – it too had issues with busy sequences. After about 35 minutes, a sequence would bog down. Apparently it was hitting this 3.5 GB of RAM limit that was part of its 32 bit architecture.
FCPX plays in a 64 bit park, but it’s quite obvious that there’s not enough optimisation going on due to the way it handles compound clips – each one is cloning off everything inside, so if you compound clip a compound clip, you may quadruple the data, but if you split that compounded clip, each edit doubles the data further. You can very quickly break the system doing this.
10.0.6 and up seemed to cure it, but it’s still a resource hog.
Having experienced FCPX’s dislike of long form complex projects (sorry, that’s my experience and sorry to hear your identical story Philip), yes – you can chop it up just like we had to in FCP7. Or you can search out another long form editor like Premiere Pro, but Adobe’s just gone and shot it in the foot, with both barrels, with its ‘Creative Cloud’ policy.
Wait for LightWorks for Mac? Wait for DaVinci’s full edit mode? Smoke for Mac? Please, no, not Avid?!
I am editing a very complex feature film using FCPX… i am over 70 min into the timeline.. multiple compound clips, lots of effects, high res jpegs, all running at Pro Res HQ and it’s working fine… no problems at all. I suggest there’s something not right with your set-ups… I have 16GB RAM in my 27 inch 3.4Ghz iMac and it’s smooth as butter to edit on.
Turn off render in background and manually render stuff that needs it when you take breaks….
For the curious, i have Effects from Red Giant, Pixel Film Studios and MotionVFX all running at once on the timeline which has over 60 compound clips and a 6 tracks of audio.
I have my events folder on one FireWire800 drive and my project folder on a separate FireWire800 drive.
Hope this helps show that FCPX is fine for long projects.
S.
HDW: Sean the point is that you don’t know when it will break, I had my 53m timeline working fine for weeks till I opened it “one more time” ! You won’t be aware of this till you go to open it. Make sure you backup your edit every time you use it.
I have 32G iMac running Thunderbolt drives, I no longer use FW800 partly because it’s no longer supported and partly because of the tendency to fail in a regular basis.
I’ve sadly had this issue with FCPX too.
Mine came about that I created a complex project in FCP7, so complex that I was getting horrendous render errors (7 would randomly untended large portions of the timeline for no reason, not great when sitting with a client!) I was getting nowhere so I committed the cardinal sin of using 7toX and transferred the project across to FCPX.
It took a few hours of tidying up the timeline, but a seemed to be fine, and hurrah no render errors. A further week into the project however, the dreaded beachball error. Almost overnight, with no real reasoning FCPX now took anywhere up-to 1 hour to open. Lots of research later, I found out what we all now know – FCPX is awful with large projects. Take that event out of the library, opens in 30 seconds. Include it, hours to open.
I had to endeavour (and cross my fingers that it didn’t crash!) and now the project is signed off, FCPX is back to relative normality. With other big projects looming, I’m in the same boat decision-wise – what software to pick that’s actually up for the job. I don’t mind the Adobe charge, it’s just the time needed to master the software!
HDW: Premiere Pro is not that far from FCP and you can even choose FCP keyboard shortcuts…FCPX will be fine as long as you edit in smaller chunks i.e. A 50m program could edit in 10m timelines, render a QT from each edit and butt five 10m QT’s together on a separate timeline…job done.
I’ve never had FW800 drives fail and i’ve been using them since they came out…and this isn’t my first longform project on FCPX. I always keep a backup so i’m covered. Do you keep projects and events on separate drives? It makes a difference…
Fingers crossed i don’t run into this issue…
It’s gotta be said, you suffer a lot of failing gear and storage from SDHC cards to FW800 drives and FCPX itself… You don’t live next to a powerline or railway or something do you?? 😉
HDW : I am just honest to share my problems, I have not had a lot of problems with SDHC cards…the more you use the more likely you will encounter a problem, the world of manufacture is not 100% perfect.
My redundant FW800 Lacie drives were very poor, I lost 3 in the space of a year, interesting about the storage of your projects and events. Takes me back to my early NL editing days when you needed to run SCUSSI drives for video and one for audio.
Nesting and double-nesting + has always been a recipe for disaster. Far better to render a sequence out where one can and add it to the second project/sequence.
IMO
HDW : I have no nesting, just layers containing green screen, graphics from Motion and audio.
If you want to see a speed increase, have projects, events and audio all on separate drives. No point forcing one drive to do all that shuffling and expect it to do it all in sync immediately…it just causes bottlenecks which is where the spinning ball and lack of realtime playback comes in.
If you had this set up in FCP7, it doubled the speed you could work… it’s similar with FCPX, not because of the software, just simple physics. One drive (spinning or SSD) cannot access 3 different pieces of data at the same time..and feed them into the virtual memory or RAM ready for playback instantly.. that all takes time. But 3 separate drives (not usb) either FW800, E-Sata or Thunderbolt can all work at the same time and leave the system drive to serve FCPX itself.
Also, when working on audio apps like Logic, you should ways have the audio on one drive and the video file you are working on, on another drive. Same reason… it falls over otherwise.
Apart from not keeping Events/Projects on your system drive, you might consider restarting FCPX, deleting Event and Project render files etc etc.
You can manage your events and projects manually. It’s really easy once you understand the FCPX file structure.
I’ve made an ‘Offline’ subfolder in my user ‘Movies’ folder. Inside that are ‘Events’ and ‘Projects’ folders.
Quit FCPX, then you can move an event, a project (or a folder of projects) out of FCPX’s folders and put it onto the respective ‘Offline’ subfolder.
Next time you launch FCPX it won’t find those Events and/or Projects that you moved.
You can use this method to speed up FCPX launch times and work out which Events/Projects are corrupted etc.
Also while you are there, you can easily delete render files from Projects, optimised files from Events, etc etc.
When I archive from FCPX I personally get rid of all the peaks, thumbnails… Everything except the .fcpevent ad .fcpproject files and there backups. I do it all manually to dual USB hard drives and use Toast to do a CRC check of the copies.
Odd. My workflow for working on long projects is to edit in scenes with each scene in a compound clip. I know this was not recommended in FCP7 but FCPX handles compound clips differently and my experience is that compound clips makes things run better not worse. I recently cut 16 multicam music videos with as many as 6 angles each and all of those projects was laggy until I made them into compound clips.
COMPLETE AND UTTER NONSENSE.
I edit an hour long MULTICAM show PER WEEK and have yet to experience anything you describe nor do I know anyone that has. Maybe an occasional slow down after long hours, but a simple restart of X and everything is fine again. You clearly need to get a better machine or clean the one you have up.
HDW : Only an idiot would type such a reply as yours when you can clearly see from the posts that this is not localised to my machine.
I also use and love Event Manager X, but the fact it that it doesn’t do anything you couldn’t do yourself by dragging folders in and out of the Final Cut Event and Final Cut Project folders. So to say you would be “up a creek” without it is just not true. It can make the process faster and easier if you have to move a lot of projects and/or events, but you can always do it manually.
You mentioned plugins in the first paragraph. Which ones?
I’ve edited hour long docs with, green screen multicam interviews, plenty of ken burns stills, etc. and it works like butter. Then other times even on a small project there appears to be some critical point where elements are added to a timeline and things quickly start to go south.
I’ve finished up 2 feature length films (2000 shots plus) with rediciously amounts of compound clips, audio effects, adjustment layers, multiple shape masks, etc, each in compound clips for each scene (20-25 for each). In the second film, finished last fall right as 10.0.6 came out, everything went unbelieveble well until the last 2 days of a month long edit. I got the project out but it was like pulling teeth there at the end. Still trying to figure out what happened and caused the slowdown. But when events grow to over 250mb, it seemed like it reached the breaking point. Some certain fxplugins also migh be a problem, but frankly I haven’t had a chance to thoroughly trouble shoot yet. Too busy working. 😉
Working on a new feature right now, still shooting, but an event of dailies with 1500 clips, dual system sound, and the like, FCPX is singing on a 2007 MacBook Pro (not even qualified for fcpx) with only 6 GB of ram. Go figure.
HDW : I use a raft of plugins from Apples green screen to Ripples callouts.
Following on from T. Payton et al, I’d like to sing the praises of the Digital Rebellion tools.
Render files that go bad and odd imported graphics seem to be a regular issue. The tools fix that.
The second thing which is a different sort of complexity is when you’re managing many different projects on different drives. For example, the usual Agency Reel that combines one’s own projects plus third party material, often over the course of a year. My current record is dealing with 7 different client drives into one project, that goes through 10-30 revisions over the course of a few days. Then gets picked up a month or two later for a ‘slightly different version’.
If one little microproject gets some duff renders, or starts missing a few files here and there, trouble brews. When I can, I do try to concatenate assets – but it’s all time, and time is money.
So, yes – large monolithic projects (multicam, etc) make for one kettle of fish. Managing a multitude of little projects that never seem to go away, adopting some from other editors and wrapping one’s own projects to pass on, generates the very intense feeling that FCPX didn’t have agencies in mind when it came to multiple projects and versioning/archiving.
“HDW : Only an idiot would type such a reply as yours when you can clearly see from the posts that this is not localised to my machine.”
Quite the slippery slope you got there. Since only an idiot would assume I’m an idiot after reading all the OTHER comments. There are (clearly) a LOT of people that do not have the needed skills and knowledge to run a professional system that others do. So to be so completely solipsistic and make this out to be some GLOBAL FCP PROBLEM is just ridiculous. Especially in such a sensationalistic, tabloid-style manner… “Shocking discovery!! Oooooooh!”
[facepalm]
FCP definitely has areas to grow, but there is plenty of FUD (fear uncertainty and doubt) being propagated on the forums and twitter when much of those comments are made from either ignorance or user error.
I have tried to help many folks on the Cow and FCP.co who have posted in desperation or anger when FCPX seemingly stopped working and hosed their project. Many people have found my name and called my office directly. The problem projects have run the gamut: a feature films in Canada, India, corporate videos, commercial spots, etc. After talking with them on the phone and screen sharing, or getting a copy of their project, EVERY ONE of the major disasters were resolved without data loss.
The most common problems are incredibly complicated Motion projects as templates, poor organization, bad cables, and of course slow OpenCL video cards. The only real problem I have seen has been some FXPlug Plugins that store data in a FCP Event or Project.
I’m not saying that FCP doesn’t have problems, but I think the forum posts and twitter has so much FUD in communities it is a bad place to take the pulse of FCP.
With that said, If ever you have a problem with FCP that you think is hopeless, look me up and give me a call, I’ll hopefully be able to talk you down off the ledge.
I agree with Shorty!
I have edited many many 120 minute long 4 cam conferences with all sort of graphics and b-roll and never had this issue. I bet the problem with HDW is that he is trying to work FCPX like he did with FCP7 or CS5. FORGET EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT EDITING when you enter FCPX. You must learn from scratch. I bet the boys from Ripple training would tell HDW that he is over sensationalizing this.
HDW : “FORGET EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT EDITING”…What a stupid statement and for the record FCPX is not a million miles away from FCP7 editing wise but the way it stores projects and events is far superior than the older FCP-7.
Gosh! You Still have faith in Apple!
Yesterday my 44 min India project crashed in fcpx.
3 hours of work gone. Half a year ago I made a multicam of one hour and 10 minutes, no problems there. This time I used a lot of photos with Ken Burns effect and HY-FX plugin. I hope by splitting it up in two 20 min pieces the job can be finished.
By the way HDW, I like your website. Bought a fs100 after reading your posts.
Shorty… The only one that has changed this into a tabloid post is you with your constant use of retelling the truth, using capital letters and believing their can’t be any problems because it hasn’t happened to you.
HDW has used quotes and has others stating they have had similar problems. The whole point of the site is to inform.
“Yesterday my 44 min India project crashed in fcpx.”
Bruno, How did you loose 3 hours of work? Did you open up FCP after the crash and it had not stored the changes for the last 3 hours? Did you check the auto backup that is created every 15 minutes, to see if that was in tact?
The real shock is that you are still using FCPX. Adobe is king.
@T.Payton
I did open after the crash and it had not stored the changes. I did not check the auto backup.
After splitting it up there was no problem anymore. I made two pieces of 22 min. A mix of SD images (2007) and HD, music and photos.
Hello folks! I know I’m way behind but I’m about to make the plunge into HD & FCPX. I am currently determining if a MacBook Pro or iMac should be my choice of tool to edit on? I found this site because I shoot a video every year with about 200 costumes shot against blue/green screen and the final product is about 13-15 minutes in length. It also can have on average 6 layers of keyed images over a background with titles atop much of the shots identifying the costumes. Each of there layered shots last about 4-6 seconds followed immediately by more costumes.
I have seen many posts advising how to split audio/FCP/& video files across multiple drives. Sounds logical to me. But I have not used FCPX yet. I am still in the dark ages using FCP studio version 5 of FCP. I plan on shooting with a JVC gy-hm150u camcorder which boasts 35mbps EX-Cam video.
I have seen folks using older MacBook Pro machines so I’m leaning towards a MacBook Pro. Will the new 13″ machine be sufficient or do I need the 15″ video card to be sure? Or should I just get an iMac?
Any help appreciated.
I do similar green screen work frequently. By far FCPX has the best green screen workflow I have ever experienced. My old workflow was Keylight in After Effects and then placing in FCP legacy. I used to have to render my green screen footage overnight. With FCPX it is a simple matter of dropping on the Keyer on a clip, making adjustments and then concentrating on the edit.
If you don’t need portability, the highest end 27″ iMac is an excellent machine, faster and a bit cheaper than the high end MacBook Pro Retina.
I think you will be happy with either machine.
Somewhere there is something very wrong with the internals of FCPX. I am working on a relatively simple company video that lasts about 6 minutes. The most complex part is a video with transparent Layered Photoshop overlay for logo, some text, a voice-over track and some background audio then cross disolve to another clip with the same elements. These all render relatively well and quick.
But I’m currently looking at the progress circle that’s indicating 65% for a simple 40 seconds part with 3 sequential Ken Burns pictures with a Horizontal Blur over it. This is now been going on for 2 hours and 15 minutes for just 65% of these 40 seconds! Again, just 3 Ken Burns effects, blur text, nothing else!
I have no idea what is wrong, but when this video is finished, it’ll be the first AND LAST video editing I do using FCPX.
Just by chance, is the photo in cymk color space or rgb? I had an issue once years ago with some images that turned out just to be because of the color space was not rgb. It may be something that simple.
Sure, Ruben, it couldn’t just be that your machine (GPU in particular) isn’t cut out for the job, right? What are your specs then?
And quoting LONG RENDER TIMES of all things as THE break-point for ever using X again is painfully hilarious and only makes you look extremely ignorant and childish, sorry. And of course it could never ever be PEBCAK. No way.
And no, Leo, you don’t EVER want to use a machine with shared graphics (as in the 13″) if looking to edit. Especially not with FCP X. Dedicated graphics (as in the 15″) will increase FCP X’s performance exponentially. GPU (i.e. a lot of VRAM) is the number one crucial component. After that RAM, then disk I/O speed and then CPU.
I think it’s just RGB, since the pictures are maps I made in the Apple Maps app using the default screenshot function that saved them as a PNG.
But I found that (in this case) the problem was with the horizontal blur text effect.
After replacing the horizontal blur with two other text effects (echo and typewriter) the 40 seconds rendered within a minute and after deleting the entire horizontal blur from everywhere the project didn’t crash once during the entire day I’ve been working on it.
No need to be so hostile, Robinson.
Since other, more complex combinations of video are perfectly well handled by my machine, I think it is capable enough. It’s a MacBook with 8 GB RAM, a 256 GB SSD and a 500 GB HD (replacing the DVD bay). I’m using a full HD external screen as my second screen, so there is also enough room to do some decent editing.
And since this is my first time using FCPX, I think waiting for almost 4 hours for a simple 40 second clip with some text effect is a pretty good reason not to ever use it again, isn’t it?
I’m normally mainly into music and using the very same MacBook to produce songs with up to 40 (!) tracks, all soft-synths with effects etc and never ever had a single problem running Logic Pro 9 and now Logic Pro X on it.
So I think it’s pretty safe to conclude that an Apple product (FCPX) running on another Apple product (MacBook) as lousy as this means that it is not “finished” yet and hence a good reason not to use it again.
Thank you for the response. I have done some asking of a friend who uses FCPX in LA and he basically told me that Apple has changed the way things are done under the good in FCPX.
First a little history. Years ago I had helped my boss at that time choose and install an Avid System which used a SCSII raid and you needed a very good video card for rendering. (A system that cost about $18 grand at that time). The Mac processing speed was not as important as the video card. So a couple years later I left there and had bought my own G4 Mac (his was the last of the old Mac line before the G3’s). So I decided I would be “smart” about my purchase and buy a fast G4 but not the fastest they made. I figured FCP was going to follow the same model and you would buy faster periferrals if you wanted better performance. Was I wrong! So Apple, who makes the system, machine & software wasn’t into tweaking software to use other people’s equipment better than their own. So that paradigm didn’t fit then.
I was considering a MBPro just because it gave me options to take it along for the ride when needed. But I can still take an iMac for the few shoots I may need to bring FCPX along. I just kept telling myself that you need the quad core processors even if they are i5 processors and not i7 processors. But my friend says that with the new version of FCPX has been rethought from the ground up. So NOW the better video card makes a big difference since that does the rendering. The processors do other things. It used to be the processors did most if the work.
So I thank you for being on the same page as I hate having conflicting information before making a major purchase. That makes me feel much better. That puts about 5 check marks in the iMac corner. I can’t spring for the top end 27″ but the step up 21.5″ model with 1gb video ram & 8-16 GB ram is looking like my choice.
Oh and there will soon be an update to FCPX. 10.1 and I am waiting for that release so I don’t get charged twice within a relatively short time frame. AND the possibility that 8 GB of ram may well be enough ram to work with FCPX. Mostly, my friend expects them to incorporate or address the issue of loading only projects you wish to load and not every single event you have saved. That would change the ram needs drastically.
Thanks again for chiming in on this.
It’s also possible that an internal hard drive may not spin as fast as an external OR be read at a fast enough speed. If it were a stock HDD from Apple and it were installed in a proper place on the system, and you still had speed issues, yeah, I could see the reason why you’d be pissed. lol But without having a MBPro or FCPX I am only speaking in theoretical terms from other experiences.
It does seem you found other issues which may be caused by third party plugins or software issues where the software wasn’t written to take advantage of the proper hyper threading or whatever routing if the rendering system may need for optimum functionality? I hope you give FCP another chance on other projects just because a wider user base is preferable by all users. It increases experiences where we all can stand to learn and grow from.
No, actually you clearly don’t even have the minimum of technical expertise or understanding to judge what is good or bad and why Ruben. Your quoting nothing but entirely irrelevant specs shows that. So unless you have an MBP that’s less than 12- max 18 months old, your GPU is simply not up to the job, plain and simple. Any GPU with LESS than 1GB of VRAM is useless with heavy FX, especially if they’re 3rd party FX, like it or not. As with ANY modern NLE (FCP being the most modern of all) the majority of work is done on the GPU. An having merely 8GB of RAM isn’t helping much either. Video editing ain’t MS Office.
Well mr. know-it-all. According to the specifications required by Apple my MacBook meets all the requirements, also the “merely 8GB” is twice what is recommended and four times what is required.
I’m not using 3rd party plugins and one text effect over a Ken Burns effect can hardly be considered “heavy FX”, now can it?
But since you seem to know better than Apple, maybe you should apply for a job there rather than waste your time lecturing people with not even “minimum technical expertise or understanding” in here.
You may throw in some fancy blabla, but clearly your only expertise is how to be annoying without knowing what you’re actually talking about.
I edit feature films, complex music videos and promos all with FCPX on a 2.5 i7 macbook pro with SSD’s and thunderbolt. I edit 30% faster than I ever did with FCP7, my producers and directors love the editing time compared to the problems we encountered before with Avid & FCP7
Just because you’re not hearing from a bunch of us that are having good luck, doesn’t mean the odds are stacked for FCPX being a bummer. This shit is hard, and it takes troubleshooting, experimentation and innovation.I had to face a lot of fear to move to FCPX. My post prod super suggested against it. My workflow makes me money. If it works better than yours, I’ll have your clients.
Hi there,
Does Event Manager work in the same way on FCP X 10.1.
I ask because it seems he can’t work its magic of hiding events and projects on the latest version of FCP X.
Is that right?
The new Libraries feature in 10.1 basic incorporates Event Manager X directly into the application so it’s not needed any more – you can open and close libraries directly in the app.
As of October 2016, this is still an issue for me – despite the latest version of FCPX and a top of the line Mac Pro. Editing a feature-length doc, I’ve run into all sorts of slow downs and FCP-X related frustrations. Even selecting a few clips to move or delete is sluggish. I’ll try breaking the project into shorter segments as suggested, but it’s pretty unfortunate that the program can’t handle a complex time line 🙁
I have to agree, this is a real bug bear of mine… I do lots of concerts at 90 mins + as the editing gets more complex, just plain cuts, but using multi cams.. the whole thing grinds to a halt, especially zooming in and out…. its driving me mad…. it can’t be. right.
a 100 mins concert with over 2000 edits…. when you zoom in the beach ball… Ive tried everything, bought the fastest IMAC with maxed out RAM And graphics card, thunderbolt raid. The activity monitor says that I’m not tickling the computer, and the hard drive can handle 360mb/s…it has to be Final cut.?????? or hopefully I’m doing something wrong.
I do 4-hour long 7-angle multicam edits each year on a Mac Pro and Pegasus RAID with no issues.
http://www.fcp.co/final-cut-pro/articles/1572-using-multicam-in-final-cut-pro-x-to-edit-the-bioneers-25th-anniversary-conference