FCP 7 "Responsiveness"

[Reed Gidez]

I have a somewhat perplexing issue with FCP 7.0.3.

When I click on any of the items in the top menu bar, there is a LONG pause before the program responds. Likewise, when I am cutting between cams in a multicam edit, there is a bit of a delay when the chosen angle kicks in. It show up correctly in the timeline but I am not seeing in the preview as it happens.

Things used to work smoothly. I have trashed my preferences and the situation remains the same. I have also created another user account and run FCP in that account and all seems OK so I suspect some hidden preferences are corrupt or perhaps preferences from a plug-in?

Has anyone experienced this or heard of this? Any suggestions?

I am running a Mac Pro 2x 2.8 GHz quad core Intel Xeon with 16 GB memory. Capture and render is NOT on the system drive.

Thanks

Reed

[Battle Vaughan]

I have experienced that kind of thing when the hard disk that holds the files gets pretty full....if you have 10% or less of the disk space available, FCP goes wonky. A badly fragmented disk might, I conjecture, cause problems as well.

[Reed Gidez]

Originally Posted by Battle Vaughan

I have experienced that kind of thing when the hard disk that holds the files gets pretty full....if you have 10% or less of the disk space available, FCP goes wonky. A badly fragmented disk might, I conjecture, cause problems as well.

My hard drive is not even at 50%. I did speak with a tech at Apple (not a FCP specialist) who suggested I trash my cache folders. Did that and still this annoying sluggishness. It only seems to happen with FCP and only when logged in to my main user account. I may end up creating a new user and restore personal folders to that new user. Just don't want to go that route if I don't have to.

I even ran FCS maintenance through its paces and still no relief.

[Reed Gidez]

A call in to Apple resulted only in instructions to delete my cache files. This did not help.

I also purchased FCS maintenance pack from Digital Rebellion. Lots of great little routines but not sure that it helped. I did use the uninstall routines to remove FCP and reinstall but that did not help. Didn't make matters worse but I was back at square one. I then decided to run the disk utility from the Snow Leopard install disk and lo and behold, problems with permissions were uncovered and repaired and now everything is back to being quite zippy.

Not sure why Apple did not suggest this but all is well. Guess that's where I should have started looking!

[Mitchell Lewis]

Have you tried setting the items in your RT menu to Dynamic and Unlimited RT? The RT menu is located at the top left corner of your timeline.

[Reed Gidez]

Mitchell

I started with the 'usual suspects' including playing with RT settings, all to no avail. Trashed prefs, safe boot, etc.. Nothing worked. Even reinstalled FCP and the associated files (time consuming). Nothing made a dent.

Things have been rock-solid since this past friday with two multicam shows cut without any issues.

Repairing permissions solved the issues. Life is good again!

[Mitchell Lewis]

Glad to hear you solved it. :)

[David Chapman]

Next time, you can use Disk Utility in your Utilities Folder in Applications without the hassle of using your install disk. Generally, I'll run a permissions repaid after a system update or app updates, especially if an all is acting up. I now do it once a week. Not a items get repaired, but that's ok.

You can also reset your random access memory. Restart, hold down (when you hear the chime) cmd+option+p+r and keep holding. Your computer will restart. Release at the second chime.

These 2 things weekly have kept me running smooth for years. I still do an erase/install every year or so, especially when updating to a new OS.

[Nigel Barker]

Verify & Repair Disk Permissions can be run on the system disk while the system is running as can Verify Disk but to run Repair Disk you need to boot off the install DVD or another system disk

[Ed Roo]

Techtools Pro (MicroMat) and DiskWarrior (Alsoft) should be part of every Mac users toolkit.

Also, SpinRite (Gibson Research) should be used on all your hard disk drives (magnetic).
Run SpinRite on every new drive prior to installation then every three months as maintenance to keep your HDDs in top running order.

[Robert Lane]

While fixing permissions can often clear up minor issues that cause slow-downs, I always - as in "you should do this before anything else" - get a copy of DiskWarrior from Alsoft and fix the directory. Do that *before* attempting to run a permissions fix on a system with deep slowdowns.

The reason for this is because a system that responds very slowly has a highly fragmented and/or unstable directory (think of it as a Mac version of the Windows registry). While a permissions and "repair disk" operations will address only surface issues, DiskWarrior addresses the entire directory and it's resource forks, the utilities in Disk Utility do not.

TechTool Pro does not address deep directory issues, only DiskWarrior is the specialist in this area.

NOTE: "SpinRite" is a Windows-only program and is NOT Mac compatible, nor can you boot to it on any Mac from a CD nor flash-drive.