Beach Ball within a minute of opening FCPX

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patrickfifth Author

Level 1

16 points

Beach Ball within a minute of opening FCPX

A week old Apple M2 Max:

Model Identifier: Mac14,5

Model Number: Z17H001QLLL/A

Chip: Apple M2 Max

Total Number of Cores: 12 (8 performance and 4 efficiency)

Memory: 64 GB

System Firmware Version: 8419.80.7

OS Loader Version: 8419.80.7

Spinning beach ball after a minute or so of working in FCPX. Was able to work a good portion of today with no issues then bang, beach ball, force quit, delete prefs, delete render files, open library and project make one or two changes in the project and spinning beach ball. It happened with several hard drives attached so I ejected all external hard drives, went through the above steps again and beach ball returns within a minute of using FCPX. It's completely unusable and of course I'm about an hour from being finished with this video job.

Any clues would be appreciated.

MacBook Pro (M2 Max, 2023)

Posted on Mar 13, 2023 09:35 PM

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Answer 1

patrickfifth Author

Level 1

16 points

Mar 14, 2023 07:40 AM in response to Luis Sequeira1

No migration, I've been burned on that in the past so I don't migrate. The only thing is to sign in to my iCloud account and let those things come in. FCPX was installed fresh. The libraries are the same though. Any plugins are added after.

On running Etrecheck it first said I was running a beta version of Mac OS, I don't believe that is correct. I'm on OS Ventura 13.2.1.

Etrecheck report

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Answer 2

patrickfifth Author

Level 1

16 points

Mar 15, 2023 08:05 AM in response to Luis Sequeira1

(Oops, thought I posted this yesterday.) 100% is external media. Had about 25 events, just consolidated them down to 16. Fairly sizeable I suppose, 391GB. All media and the library are stored on my internal SSD, 4TB and it's about 50% full.

UPDATE: I created a new library, copied the projects over to it. Then copied all the Multicam clips over and most of the regular clips, opened the project and finished it with no substantial beach balls. It seems to have been something corrupt in the library. All media is still external. Thanks for your tips!!!

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Answer 3

patrickfifth Author

Level 1

16 points

Mar 13, 2023 10:27 PM in response to patrickfifth

Seems I just have to ask the question and then the answer hits me. So I deleted prefs, then opened the library I've been working in, then delete all render files, then switched to proxy mode (had to build proxy of a few files) and now it seems to be working fine. Edited for 20 min or so, no beach ball.

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Answer 4

Mar 14, 2023 12:19 AM in response to patrickfifth

We need more information to pinpoint the cause of the problem.

I guess that you migrated everything from a previous mac, right?

Problems like this on a new nearly always come down to stuff that was migrated.

It is even more so if the system you migrated from was upgraded in place year over year, so you bring to your new mac stuff that was installed in, say, El Capitan, or even (yes, we've seen that) Snow Leopard.

In order for us to know more: Please run Etrecheck and post its full report here. Use the "additional text" button and paste the report into the text box.

By looking at the report we will know about kernel extensions, launch daemons, etc, which could be bad or simply old.

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Answer 5

Mar 14, 2023 07:44 AM in response to patrickfifth

Is your media on the Drobo?

I am thinking that it could be the weak link.

I never cared much for it, and the drivers appear to be old (not sure if there are updated drivers).

If you test without the Drobo, do you see beach balls?

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Answer 6

patrickfifth Author

Level 1

16 points

Mar 14, 2023 07:52 AM in response to Luis Sequeira1

No media (in use) on the Drobo, only backups. Last night I did try to run FCPX with nothing attached and went through the process of deleting prefs, deleting render files and got the same beach ball. I'll disconnect Drobo and run through the process again.

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Answer 7

patrickfifth Author

Level 1

16 points

Mar 14, 2023 08:40 AM in response to patrickfifth

Plot thickens. I just opened several other libraries and did NOT get the spinning beach ball. I created a new project, dropped in several clips, added transitions and generally did editing. No beach ball. So, it points to a specific library issue?

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Answer 8

patrickfifth Author

Level 1

16 points

Mar 14, 2023 09:31 AM in response to patrickfifth

Latest: re opened the problem library and project, copied contents, created new project and pasted. Worked for about 5 minutes of editing before beach ball. If it is important the beach ball spins, then stutters then just stops. Meaning the beach ball is there but frozen. Later it might start spinning again.

I'm about to go through the process of fixing a corrupt library as explained here: https://chicvoyageproductions.com/how-to-repair-your-final-cut-pro-x-library/

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Answer 9

Mar 14, 2023 12:37 PM in response to patrickfifth

Good job troubleshooting this so far.

It does seem like there is some problem with this specific library.

How big is it? Is the media inside the library or outside? Are there many events?

You may try recreating this in a new library and see if that helps; or if the library is too big, and have many unrelated events, maybe make more than one library.

In order to do this properly, we need to ascertain if the media is or not inside the library.

FWIW, even on small libraries, I always prefer to keep the media external.

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Answer 10

terryb

Level 4

3,112 points

Mar 15, 2023 10:16 AM in response to patrickfifth

I'm glad that Luis (one the FCP Whisperers here) was able to help you get it working again. I notice that your cache is quite large and you said you deleted it in your first post. Do you have background rendering enabled in FCP prefs? That is usually unnecessary. If you do run into areas that won't playback in real-time you can alway manually render the section.

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Answer 11

patrickfifth Author

Level 1

16 points

Mar 13, 2023 10:37 PM in response to patrickfifth

Never mind. A minute after posting all is well the beach ball returned non stop. Square one.

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Answer 12

patrickfifth Author

Level 1

16 points

Mar 14, 2023 08:09 AM in response to patrickfifth

Just deleted FCPX and re installed it, disconnected Drobo. Opened library and made it about 10 seconds before clicking on a clip to re transcode to proxy and beach ball.

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Beach Ball within a minute of opening FCPX

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