How To Make FCPX Run Faster!

By default background rendering is switched on when you start FCPX. When the computer is not otherwise engaged it will be trying to render out the effects that you have put on your footage. However this consumes an enormous amount of CPU power and in many cases is simply not necessary.

If you do have a section of your timeline that isn’t playing smoothly and you want to render out, select the clip and press Control + R to render that piece.

Adding something as simple as a title to your footage will significantly increase the CPU load on your Mac. In our tests, doing just this increased the FCPX CPU usage from 25% to 100%. If possible, add your effects at the end of your editing process. If you do want to do it there and then, you can always switch the effects off once you have added them to give you smooth playback on your timeline.

FCPX gives you the option of prioritising better quality or better performance upon playback. Better performance is selecting if you are struggling because the small deterioration in quality does result in smoother playback.

Having idle applications might not consume much CPU power but in our tests you can see that having two pieces of photo editing software open is consuming a huge amount of RAM. Close any software you are not using to save on your Mac’s resources.

We purchased FCPX in 2013 and since then have enjoyed endless upgrades not only in terms of functionality but also performance. One of the more recent upgrades in 2019 included a Metal-based engine for Final Cut Pro X, enabling the software to bypass the CPU and engage the GPU directly for more tasks, thereby improving performance.

We are strong advocates of using the waveform, histogram, RGB parade etc., to ensure accurate colour correction ahead of grading. However, having these scopes open when they are not being used does consume resources so only open them when you need to.

H.265 is fast becoming the industry standard codec thanks to the smaller file sizes HEVC offers however pre-2016 Macs do not have hardware support for H.265 and as such, struggle even to playback H.265 footage, never mind quickly scrub through it and add effects to it. If you fall into this category, make sure your camera is recording in the H.264 codec.

FCPX can create lower resolution files (called proxy media) that it uses to edit in your timeline, thereby speeding up your Mac. Come the time of export, the original high res files are pulled back in and substituted for the proxy media. It can be a little time-consuming and takes up quite a bit of extra hard drive space but using proxy media kept our 2015 MacBook Pros editing 4K multicam a lot longer than they otherwise would have been able to.