7 Tips to Make Final Cut Pro Run Faster!

hello everyone i'm dion from dion video productions in this video i'm going to be showing you how to make final cut pro run faster in seven steps as final cut pro is made by apple and is made to run exclusively on macs it is very optimized and therefore tends to perform very well however if you're editing off an older mac or are using large 4k video files with many elements even final cut can start to slow down this video aims to change that by helping you keep final cut pro running smoothly now one of the ways of speeding up your workflow is to use optimized media or proxy media these are both great functions however require a separate video for me to explain this properly for today i'm going to be showing you seven simple easy ways that only take seconds to implement and will help make final cut pro run faster let's get started alright so the first thing we're going to be looking at is turning on better performance mode as you can see i have final cut open here on my screen and for this we're going to go up into the view menu found in the top right hand corner and then we're going to scroll down under quality we have two options either better quality or better performance now as the names imply better quality will give you slightly better playback quality which will look more true to life however better performance shows you a slightly compressed version of your video making it easier for final cut to run smoothly without dropping frames so for this i highly recommend checking this by simply clicking on it as you can see if we go back into the menu better performance mode is now selected and then of course if ever you want to see a shot in best possible quality you can very easily switch between the two the second tip is to turn off skimming skimming is what allows you to move your cursor freely over the project line and then automatically get a preview of all of the clips and elements in it i find this to be a very useful feature that i particularly like however have noted on some timelines i prefer to turn this off as this will create some lag so to do this we're going to go over here into the sort of mid-right of the screen we have this row of icons and the first one here allows you to turn on and off video or audio skimming so we're going to go ahead and click that to turn off as you can see it's now no longer highlighted and now if we move the mouse in the project line nothing will happen of course we can still preview our clips but this will require us to click and drag the play ahead and either drag it or move it to different areas in the timeline to more quickly toggle between this function you can also press s on the keyboard alright so the third tip i want to be showing you is how to clear render files now of course the more full your hard drive is whether you're editing on your local or external hard drive the slower it will run so it's always good to have some free storage and a great way to clear some storage is by removing those render files now what are render files well render files accumulate any time final cut has to render your project and this will happen anytime you make an amendment to that project so for example here if i go ahead and hide this text here you'll see these dots appear above the timeline indicating that it needs to render if i let final cut render it will now generate more render files and over time this will take up gigabytes if not terabytes of space so i always recommend deleting this especially when you're done editing as these files simply are cache files and therefore are not necessary and will not affect the integrity of your project in any way alright so let's go ahead and show you how to remove these render files now first we're going to open up the browser tab here so by pressing this button here in the top right corner of your screen and from here you'll have a list of libraries as well as events now you want to make sure that your given library is selected the library can be indicated as the icon with these four little squares we'll go ahead and click that to make sure it is selected as highlighted in blue and then we're going to go up into the menu bar and under the files menu we're going to click delete generated library files from here this menu will appear and this will give us the option to delete the render files as well as optimize or proxy media now today we're focusing on render files so be sure to select this and then from here we have two options either to remove only the unused render files or all i suggest selecting the unused files only as this won't require you to re-render your project after doing so as in this case it's going to keep the render files from the latest amendments made to your project however any previous amendments that have not been saved will now be removed from here press ok this shouldn't take very long of course does depend on the size of your library i always like to recommend checking the size of your library before and after doing this just to see how much storage you've saved of course if you still find yourself running out of storage it is also entirely possible to run final cut pro off an external hard drive if you want more information on this i'll have a separate video of mine linked down below now that we know how much storage space these render files can take over time we're going to change a function that will allow final cut to actually generate less of these files and this brings us to the fourth tip which is to turn off auto render now to do this we're going to go up into the menu bar and under the final cut tab we'll click on preferences from here under the playback menu and under rendering final cut as standard will have background render on as you can see as indicated by this tick mark beneath this we have a start time for when it will automatically start rendering now there are some pros and cons to this of course the pros are that your project is always rendered therefore will look at its best while you're editing but the reality is you don't always need to render every single change for example if you're doing a crop if you're adding some text it's completely fine to work with your library unrendered as it will just be a little bit more blurry but at the end of the day of course as soon as you export final cut will automatically render the project and therefore all of the changes you have made will look as good as they should now to turn off background render simply select the icon here and as you can see this is now off and final cut will no longer automatically render so let's go ahead and make a quick amendment here to our project let's say let's say i'm going to go ahead and remove this text element go ahead and delete that as you can see this now needs to render as indicated with the dots up here but if i do nothing you'll see final cut does not render until i manually tell it to do so for which there's an easy keyboard shortcut which is ctrl shift r go ahead and press that and as you can see it has now instantaneously been rendered so once again having more control over when final cut renders will save you many many gigabytes of space as again it will generate far less of these render files that only build up over time tip number five is to close video scopes now video scopes are very useful and can be found here in the view menu as they give you a real-time report of the luma levels or rgb of your footage which will allow you to then grade the exposure as well as the color grade of your film however as you can see as i play this back this graph here is updated live so this will take immense processing power for final cut not only to play back your footage live frame by frame but then also analyze it and show it in this graph so once again this is a very useful feature however by no means does it have to be on at all times and again can save a lot of processing power by simply turning this off going back into the same view menu and clicking on the same scope alternatively you can press command 7 to quickly bring it up and close the scope all right now typically when editing your final cut window may look like this with everything open we have the browser menu on the left the inspector on the right and your effects tab on the bottom right there as well as your timeline and viewer as you can see this is a very crowded window and there's a lot open here at once so the sixth tip is to simply close as many of these windows as possible as many of them including the inspector here are updated live and just includes more information for final cut to bring up and show while you're editing so for processing speed i highly recommend closing as many of these as possible now in the top half of the window these can be controlled by the buttons here press on the top right of the screen we can go ahead and close the the events tab inspector and then on the bottom half here we have this options over here to close the effects tab as well and this brings up only the bare essentials really what you need most which is your timeline and the viewer and then of course you can periodically bring them in whenever you need them but just be sure to close them after as for example also you'll see that the inspector window here it is also updated every time i click a different element in the timeline and this once again will use some processing power one particularly useful keyboard shortcut to remember for this is command 4 as this will allow you to quickly bring up and then also close the inspector window and finally the seventh tip is to simply close as many other applications as you can now there's a very quick way to do this on mac os and that is to press and hold command and then quickly press tab once and this will bring up all your open applications you can then simply close them by pressing q once on your keyboard and you can press tab to cycle through them and close or keep open whichever ones you'd like again the more you have closed the faster final cut will run as the more processing power and ram your mac can dedicate to final cut pro alright so combined implementing all of these seven tips will make a significant difference to helping final cut run at its best thank you very much for watching hope you enjoyed this video if it helped you out be sure to leave a like down below and also comment if you have any questions or feedback for more tutorials like this be sure to check out my full final cut pro playlist thank you for watching

Channel: Dion Schuddeboom

Views: 732

Rating: 4.8644066 out of 5

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Id: BehhyY2Se0I

Length: 8min 54sec (534 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 18 2021