Final Cut Pro's Adjustment Clips causes the app to freeze

Luis, as you observed, this is not the fault of the FCP built-in adjustment clip -- the same behavior happens if you use any of the third-party adjustment layers. For the OP, the simple workaround is to not overlap adjustment clips. Another possible workaround is combining the two adjustment layers into a compound clip before trimming the underlying media. If changes to the effects are needed, open the CC and adjust the effects, then close it. The underlying issue is not a bug per se, but involves the intrinsic FCP code and object design.

In this design, there can be many hierarchical "observer" entities that get triggered in some cases. There is an internal notification system that sends messages to these observers. In some scenarios, it causes a "combinatorial explosion" of notifications, which appear as deeply recursive call stacks in the main FCP thread. See the attached Instruments trace from when I reproduced the overlapped adjustment clips.

This is just a preliminary assessment. I'll examine this more if I have time.

[Edited by Moderator]

Well I did the test. I added adjustment layer titles matching the position and duration of the Adjustment Clips (AC); select each AC; Copy; Select the corresponding title; Paste Attributes. After the titles had the exact some attributes as the original AC, I deleted the AC, so technically the timeline should work exactly the same as before.

I only tested briefly, but I could no longer cause the beachball to appear.

This suggests that it may be indeed an issue with Adjustment Clips.

If using adjustment layers works, it at least provides a workaround.

Let us know. If you confirm this, then it is worth reporting the issue using feedback:

Final Cut Pro->Provide Final Cut Pro Feedback...

Here is a thought: to ascertain whether this is quite specific to the new Adjustment Clips,

you could create a duplicate of the project, and make it identical to the original, except, instead of using Adjustment Clips, use traditional adjustment layers (as you probably know, these were basically just empty titles; you can create your own in Motion or download free ones from a number of places).

I will try this myself as well, and will report back.

I have to correct my previous post.

I just tried a small edit to version of your timeline in which I had replaced the new adjustment clips with more traditional adjustment layer titles - result: a looong beachball.

So long in fact that I was almost ready to have to force quit FCP (in the end, it stopped, and I could regain control of FCP).

So now I am thinking that it is not because of Adjustment Clips per se, but some combination of all those color effects.

jaqbovsky wrote:

I could, just have no idea where do I get this xml from? I have only *.fcpevent files for each project in the library...

With your project open in the timeline, do File->Export XML...

Then you may post the file somewhere like icloud, dropbox, onedrive, etc and share the link here. (The link may be deleted, but we still get it in the mail notification)

Thank you. I imported the xml and opened it. Obviously, the media was missing but soon after most adjustments produced the beach ball for a few seconds each.

I can't test much right now, but apparently your combination of adjustment clips with many color correction effects on each causes FCP to beachball...

Could you post the xml from a minimal example that illustrates the problem?

What effects are you applying to these adjustment clips?

FWIW, I tried to reproduce this by overlapping three different adjustment clips with different color, scaling and rotation applied, and it seems to work just fine.

My brief testing used a pretty short timeline, so maybe a longer more complex timeline may also cause it to occur in my mac. I cannot test until at least later today.

You could try rendering the timeline to see if it alleviates the problem.