Overall working performance of fcpx - your experiences?

Question

I work for a small production company on an instructional DVD project. I use FCPX 10.0.4 and with so many users around the globe I wonder if I am the only one having performance probems that really make my job hard to do.
I don't have the latest iMac at my disposal, but it is still a most decent end-of-2010 i7 QuadCore, 2.8 Ghz, with 8  Gb RAM and an ATI Radeon HD 4850. My project is on an external USB3 disk. My current project consists of 1920 x 1080p tracks,most single, some double (split screen), with separate audio track and some text blocks here and there. Nothing extraordinary.
Although I do get my job done, and I like the way FCPX works, I am extremely frustrated by the sloppy performance. In particular:
- The spinning beach ball that appears at least twice a minute after simple tasks such as moving a clip holder
- Clip holders that freeze half way if you reposition them
- The long time it takes (up to a minute) to fill up the place holders with wave graphics, every time you zoom in or out
- Sloppy playback, single video tracks just make it (most of the time), double tracks never do and skip more frames than are displayed
- The fact that it often takes5 - 10 seconds before the clips starts after you press the space bar
- Etc. etc.
The performance is also very irregular. Sometimes it works OK for a minute, then all of a sudden it starts to get sloppy again. or for some reasons it starts to load all my other projects even though I did not ask for it and basically stalls my entire Mac. All in all, there are so many waits all the time that I really have a hard time concentrating on my job. I tried to use proxy files, which is only a marginal improvement, whereas it takes ages to convert my clips to proxy clips so overall there is no time gain.
I cannot imagine that all of you guys are happily watching spinning beach balls all the time, so either 1. I am extremely demanding, 2. I need to buy a 100 Ghz PowerMac with 2Tb solid state disk or 3. something else is wrong.
All in all, the current performance of FCPX makes it unworkable, but since it is all they give me, I have no choice.
What are your experiences?

Answer 1

I like the idea of a 100GHz PowerMac. I wonder if it would be hyperthreaded?
It sounds like the issue you are having might be due to your USB drive. For starters, USB3 isn't yet supported and isn't on your iMac. So, you should probably spring for an FW800 drive at the bare minimum, preferably something that's RAIDed.
I have a Mac Pro 3,1 8 core with 16GB RAM and a Radeon 5870 card. My experience in editing is fairly decent once I upgraded the graphics card. Not a lot of hiccups on playback. However, when I play out my Kona 3, I get lots of playback issues. I find that I need to be in Better Performance mode to get somewhat solid full FPS playback, which isn't always an issue for me.
So my workaround for that issue for now is to export the file and play it back out of FCP7 or Avid. Yep, you heard me.
The big performance issue I hit is that FCPX takes a very long time to render a timeline. I have had conversations with others about this and the general consensus is that X doesn't really want you to render everything out. But sometimes you just need to for solid playback and quicker export.
Other slowdowns for me are lots of niggling bugs and glitches in FCPX which slow down my workflow. Top of the list for me right now is an issue with using two monitors. If I do a matchback from the timeline, I don't get proper playback. I have to toggle between CMD-1 and CMD-2 to get it to work.
I get slow access to media when I'm importing footage and transcoding, but I don't find that too surprising. If I can spare the time, I just let FCPX do it's thing. Or I try to time it out so that it transcodes overnight.
Hope that helps.