View Full Version : slow render in FCP


Tom Rosson
August 23rd, 2007, 11:19 AM
Hi there,

Anyone got any suggestions about what might be slowing my mac down? I have 8gigs of memory and 2 dual core processors, but rendering seems slow- definitely slower than in the past. I have tried removing thumbnail cache files and cleaning up the drive in general. Any other good suggestions for getting things moving a little faster again. What else might I delete?

By the way, cutting pasting - really any adjustments to clips brings a delay with a winding icon, when it never did before...

Thoughts?

Thanks

Robert Lane
August 26th, 2007, 10:01 AM
There are several things that could be causing your system to work more slowly on renders over time.

- Make sure the drive/s you're working on are not more than 3/4 full; all HDD's or arrays will slow down as they become full and there's nothing that can change that behavior. If your working drive is getting full then you can either A) install a larger drive B) migrate your data to a new/empty drive C) use iDefrag to fully de-fragment the drive you have and see if that helps.

- Use Onyx for Mac and run all the maintenance/cleanup tools. Contrary to the age-old myth that Mac's don't need the same level of routine tune-ups that Win machines do, there are a host of cleaning and regular cache-deleting routines that will help keep things smooth and stable.

- Make sure you have the latest updates for both the OS and Apple software.

Hopefully you're not working from a single-drive system but if you are I'd highly suggest installing a second drive or connecting an external and have all your working and render files live on that drive.

Harry Bromley-Davenport
August 26th, 2007, 12:17 PM
I had the same problem and tried everything.

Finally I bit the bullet and erased my dive, reinstalled the software and all went well. It was hell, but you sound as if you're in hell anyway.

Sorry to be so blunt, but it sounds as if you've tried everything.

Best

Harry.

PS. Buy Diskwarrior and run it from time to time also.