markers slowing down fcp?!
 

Hi,

I noticed sometimes fcp7 becomes sluggish, slow responsive, mainly when scrubbing, to a point it was impossible to work and very depressing.

I went thru all my system, trying different hard drives, settings, compressions, and nothing seemed to work.

on the edge of reformatting or even getting a new computer (now Imac core 2 2.8, 4 GB), I played around and found that the timeline markers cause that sluggishness!

I now have a timeline with about 500 markers, and scrubbing is horrible. I delete all markers, smooth like butter. keeping in mind that the scrubbing area I test is not in the markers area. video is ex-xdcam. anyway, the snapping is also turned off.

I need those markers to edit by the beats of music, but then it becomes impossible to edit.
sequence is about 1.5 hours.

first I wanted to let you know about this problem, if anyone has this problem. also, I would be happy to hear any possible solutions, since I need those markers. maybe other workflow?

thanks, yossi.

Break the project down into smaller sections each with their own timeline; by song, by movement, by chapter, whatever. 500 markers is quite extreme and surely the FCP programers didn't anticipate someone using that many markers. What are you editing?

Hi William, thank you for your reply.

I'm editing a wedding, having 3-4 songs with beat markers on them. the thing is that it slows down the entire timeline, even scrubbing in an area without markers. I could never believe that markers take so much memory and cpu power. breaking to small pieces is a solution, thanks. I wish there was something else which would be less uncomfortable.

thanks again, Yossi.

I build most of my large projects in sections. Really helps keep things orderly and prevents catastrophic editing blunders when fatigued. A wedding will be easy to edit in sections, nesting sequences makes it simple.

Each marker contains a set of information that apparently is dynamically updated while the timeline is being scrubbed. Sort of like how activating the visual audio waveform on the timeline slows it down as well.

Yeah... This is a problem I run into a lot as I cut to music with beat markers too. Sections are the best way. I also tend to do a pre-cut to pick out best clips before trying to sync to music. That way you dont have to scrub as much. The other solution is get a more powerful Mac! My MP 8-core 2.66 seems to do the trick! Ha ha!

More RAM seems to help as well.