7 Ways to Speed Up Final Cut Pro X

hey guys this is Caleb with DSLR video shooter and today I want to show you a bunch of ways you can speed up your computer and Final Cut Pro 10 now with all these 4k cameras coming out and all these 4k cameras getting cheaper a lot of us are seeing 4k the problem is that we're still working on older computers at least some people like me so I love to upgrade to new iMac with 5k and all that good stuff but I just can't afford it right now so I'm trying to make Final Cut Pro 10 work even though I'm still using 4k cameras so there's a bunch of different ways you can drastically improve Final Cut ten's performance I'm going to go through a bunch of them first there's a little setting that can help speed things up and if we look at our viewer here up here there's this little view drop-down if we go from under quality from better quality to better performance that might be just enough of an edge for you guys to speed up your machine and it might have to display the image as nicely but it's going to boost performance the next way you can speed up Final Cut and your editing is to use optimized media so if I pull up my media import window you'll notice over here under transcoding if I select a clip I can check two options here first is create optimized media for those of us with other machines we should take these compressed camera files and optimize them so this is going to create pro res files or whatever files you choose and your computer should be able to edit these a lot more smoothly the next way to speed up editing is to create proxy media so sometimes I create both but no matter what when I import 4k footage I always at least create proxy media proxy media is similar to optimized media in that it will transcode your footage but it will create a really low res version and that's what's going to be your proxy media so if you go ahead and select this and you import a clip once your clip is in your timeline you can go up to that same little view drop-down and switch under media from optimize original to proxy and that will let you easily and smoothly at your project and you can always switch back to optimize original so this is really huge proxy is one of the best ways to speed a final cut and keep your computer running smoothly the next way to speed a final cut 10 is to change how you look at your footage in the browser so over here we're looking at all of our Clips here and if I scroll down really quickly see how it's having to render all these different clips so what I recommend is go underneath all of your libraries and there's these two tabs here we're going to switch it to list and I just prefer this just in general for organization it's a lot easier to see all the clip names as well as our other information here and this is going to really really speed up final cut the only thing that's having a render is the little film strip at the top another method for speeding up Final Cut is going to be changing the clip appearance so let me bring up a larger view of our timeline here so you can see here in our timeline we have all our clips and right now we can see the waveform and we can see the actual image you can change that all the way down in the lower right of the entire screen so you click on this little film strip icon we have a bunch of options here this one all the way to the right is going to give you the fastest final cut experience go ahead and experiment with this and see what works well for you and again the 1 all the way to the right where it's just blank this is going to be the fastest editing experience another way to speed up Final Cut Pro 10 is to close the effects browser and the inspector so over here on the right we have our X inspector up here and then our effects browser down below command 4 will hide your inspector command 5 will close your effects browser both of these panels when open are going to take some CPU away from everything else because every time you change a clip it's having to read what's in that clip what filters are on there what are all the settings how's the audio it's going to have to constantly be switching as you move throughout your project so if you're just doing basic editing or if you're starting a project and just assembling the project go ahead and close all that stuff and finally if you want to speed up Final Cut try to keep your video scopes and your angles closed so obviously if you're doing multicam editing you're going to need to have your angles open here but as soon as you can try to close those that's going to drastically improve the speed of your machine and final cut so those are the seven ways you can speed up final cut there's a bunch of other little things that make a big difference as well so I'm going to go through those now the first is to make sure you close all other applications this also is true for all this crap up here the way you can check all this is to open up Activity Monitor and from here you can see what's eating up your CPU and you can see maybe there's some things in the background that you can close another huge thing that will help Final Cut speed up is your Drive speed in a perfect world we'd be working with 7200 rpm drives or higher and we'd have thunderbolt four-hour drive connection I understand that this stuff is very expensive so a lot of the drives I use are actually USB 3 that is a great compromise still way faster than USB 2 or firewire 800 another tip is try to use a single hard drive per project so you can have multiple projects on one drive but the idea is you don't want all these assets and video clips and files spread across you know two or three or more drives another tip is to make sure you have extra hard drive space when it comes to the hard drive that you're using try to have at least 100 extra gigabytes on the drive because the more space you have available on that drive the faster it's going to be and then finally a very obvious one check to see how much RAM is on your computer and if you can upgrade your RAM go ahead and see what you're at on your computer right now and see what you max out at and then there's ton of websites out there you can buy ram from like crucial o WC they have lots of different kits you can buy and easily upgrade your RAM so there you have it that is my list of tips and tricks to speed up Final Cut Pro 10 this is great if you have a slower machine and you're working with 4k and even more intense machines if you want to just you know get things moving a little faster and smoother those are the tips I recommend so thank you for watching as all as you can check out more reviews and tutorials at DSLR video shooter com

Channel: DSLR Video Shooter

Views: 184,989

Rating: 4.9180632 out of 5

Keywords: DSLR, Gear, Podcast, FCPX, Computer, Speed, Editing, Post Production

Id: H3W5LuvYN4Y

Length: 6min 47sec (407 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 20 2015