Final Cut 4.5 HD Sluggish when moving clips in timeline
 

Hi All,
Just wondered if anyone else has experienced sluggish performance when moving clips witthin the timeline? I noticed the sluggishness first when I opened a 4.1.x project in 4.5 - and it was really bad. Now all my projects are created in 4.5 and I still notice the problem within the timeline.

You would click on a clip want to drag it 2 sec to the right of left and you would get the colorful death wheel of time passing, then the clip would stutter & move and sorta land where ever then I would have to nudge and fiddle until the clip was finally in the right place. (I have been moving with greater success by simply keying in the amount of frames/seconds).

Anyone?

-Its not my CPU Dual 2GHz G5
-Its not my hard drives - Tekserve firewires (yes they are spun up when this occurs)

thanks
j

Have you deleted FCP preferences and repaired permissions yet?

No - its a fresh install
j

What if you cut and paste instead?

An install usually does not erase preference files.

Yes, I'm having the same problem. I started working for a new company yesterday and they have me working on a dual 2 gHz G5 with 2 gigs of ram so the machine is capable but my G3 iBook with FCX works faster!

I found a post on the Apple support forums that gives instructions for uninstalling FCP and reistalling to solve the problems. It also suggests doing an archive and install of Panther before reinstalling FCP.

Well...the deleting preferences didn't work, repairing permissions didn't work, So its off to reinstall land. ARGH!

Can anyone out there verify that they are running a Dual 2GHz G5 & FCP 4.5 successfully with NO PAUSES WHILE DRAGGING CLIPS IN THE TIMELINE? I dont want to go through all of this only to find I need to go back to 4.1.1.

thanks
jason

I'm considering FCP HD on a dual gig G5. You're having problems, huh? do yo think it's becasue it's new software so it has bugs?

The dual G5 I use at one of the schools I teach at works fine with FCP HD. Have you looked at Apple's FCP support forums? How much ram do you have, how full are your drive(s)? Is FCP in the Applications folder? Are you widows (slug etc.) overlapping or sized to big?

Just to balance out my posting...The G5 Rocks with FCP 4.5 HD!!
My Dual 2GHz G5 has 1.5 GB RAM Plenty of space on the boot drive & reliable media drives. However, upon upgrading to 4.5 HD I have noticed several editors/systems experiencing a significant delay in timeline editing functions - an apparent software conflict. The problem might be noticed more in projects created in 4.1.1 or previous versions that are opened in 4.5. Sometimes it seems that new projects created in 4.5 are often fine and do not experience the timeline sluggishness. I have had some luck with some systems by simply deleting FCP's preferences. Others, like my main system, the only fix that would work was to reinstall the OS & FCP.

Jason, how many video tracks and edits does your project have? I've found that complex projects tend to slow down FCP, especially ones that have several layers of video, hundreds of edits and lots of filters on clips.

I posted to this forum on the same subject a while back. I think this link may take you there:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/search.php?s=&action=showresults&searchid=328114&sortby=lastpost&sortorder=descending

Rob

Thanks for the heads up Rob, but I am certain this is a FCP 4.5 HD problem when upgrading 4.1.1. To answer your question the sequences in question on several machines recently upgraded to 4.5 HD were all about 2 min in duration and had 2 video tracks & 4 audio tracks maximum.

Once again, the only remidies I have found to the sluggishness (moving clips & you get the beachball of death for no less than 10 seconds) found in the timeline after upgrading to FCP 4.5 HD are as follows:
1) Sometimes deleting FCP preferences works
2) Reinstalling OS 10.3.4 & FCP 4.5 always works.

(A hint: Go out and buy a new SATA internal drive, initialize and do a clean install of everything - its the fastest when in a time crunch and you dont have time to play the reinstall game on an existing drive)

later
jason