Improve Final Cut Pro performance on Mac Studio

If you're not needing 4K for pan and zoom effects, make your originals 2K, stick with 2K through the whole process, it'll be easier.

What are you exporting your image sequences as? ProRes 422 is plenty, but H.264 is good, also. Depends on what your final viewing experience will be. Theater? TV broadcast? Web video?

Be sure you have plenty of free space on your system drive. 15% of total capacity is bare minimum, so you want more than that.

Turn off Background Rendering, delete all render files regularly.

A Mac Studio M1 should handle even ProRes 422 just fine, no need for proxies on that machine.

How long is your Project timeline? Eventually, if a Library/Project gets really large, you'll hit a performance limit, and there's not much to do after that.

Lastly, put your Library and everything on a very fast external drive. I use an 8-bay RAID with great performance. But I also do lots and lots of projects and need the storage. A single, very large SSD drive with fast throughput would be enough for most work.

System and Library hygiene are vital to performance...

I do a lot of stop motion stuff, but what I usually do is take the image dump from the camera and assemble them in After Effects, exporting a ProRes movie for Final Cut. I would suggest even trying to assemble them in Quicktime, but I don't think Quicktime is advanced enough to preserve transparency or even let you choose a frame rate. Anyway this method is extremely fast. My images are usually around 6K in horizontal size. I can output a ProRes file of the same resolution and scale it around in FCP no problem... it loves it!

Alain, you are apparently editing a unique item, a stop-motion film. Does your timeline mainly consist of high-resolution IMG images? That seems similar to time-lapse. Are those IMG files RAW stills, PNG, JPG or what? What is the resolution?

In general, editing a 10 to 12-minute time-lapse made from high-res stills can be performance-intensive. MacBreak Studio did a tutorial showing one method of handling this. In YouTube search on "MBS: Shooting & Editing Timelapse".

If the subject matter is closeups of puppets 2K will be more than enough . . . I suspect even 720p would look as good in the finished product.

Ben: Excellent point! There was an older time-lapse workflow involving Compressor, as seen in the Ripple Training video titled "4K Timelapse Workflow in Compressor" Alain, you can query Youtube for that tutorial. Is the procedure shown in that tutorial basically what you did?

Alain, to make clear, even though your stop-action video *began* with stills, you said it was transcoded to a ProRes 422 HQ timeline. The general procedure shown by the above Compressor method and the previously-mentioned procedure titled "MBS: Shooting & Editing Timelapse" began with stills, but the timeline consisted *only* of video.

Is your final timeline video only, or does it contain high-resolution stills? Please clarify.

This is a crucial point, because FCP almost never has performance issues on a ProRes timeline, even if the resolution is 8k or higher. But if there are lots of intermixed high-res stills as typically seen in time-lapse or stop-motion, that is a different case. We need clarification on whether the timeline is video-only or includes many high-res stills.

If a section of your timeline is more computationally intensive, try selecting that area and manually rendering it (Modify->Render Selection, or press Control-R)

Thanks for the additional details. Are you using the built-in FCP keyer or a third-party plugin such as Hawaiki Keyer? The Hawaiki product is probably the best one, but it can impact performance.

Are you using any kind of video noise reduction? That is often required for best chroma keying results. However if applied in the timeline or if using the integrated Hawaiki Keyer noise reduction, that entails additional performance cost.

Is your timeline running at a fixed frame rate? Or are you retiming the video? Retiming or rate conforming between a clip frame rate and a timeline frame rate can have additional performance cost, especially if using Optical Flow or Machine Learning.

As Luis said, manually rendering portions of the timeline to cache via CTRL+R can help.

Your original post mentioned processing through Compressor, so I figured you're converting image sequences to video files, before going to FCP. So FCP is not using any still images. Is that not correct?

ProRes 422 is one coded. ProRes 4444 is a different codec. Just FYI.

Having done stop-motion and lots of heavy compositing work, I'd say if alpha channels need ProRes 4444. Everything else will work with ProRes 422 (not HQ), even with compositing.

I’m puzzled by a few things, related to transparency.

Both png and tiff support transparency, so why are you saying “some are tiff depending on whether I need transparency “?

And, also: if you need to preserve transparency you should not use ProRes 422 but 4444.