Strange Response Delay in FCP 7

I'm getting a strange behavior from FCP and I'd like to see if anyone else has seen/heard tell of it.

I'm working in a 720p30 ProRes sequence that contains about 2 hours worth of clips that I'm currently trimming (a basic radio edit from a long recorded source). There are hundreds of cuts, but only 1 stream of video and 2 audio.

Now that I'm about 2/3rds the way through the edit, I've noticed a delay in the response time to keyboard shortcuts. For example, if I hit the up arrow to jump back to the last cut in the sequence, there is a delay before the playhead obeys.

At first I thought it was a RAM issue or else related to the fact that I'm working with my waveforms on, but turning off waveforms has no effect one way or the other, and neither did breaking up the sequence into 2 parts.

So HERE's the weird part: the response time is WORSE the farther zoomed in I am to the sequence. With every level of zoom out, the response delay decreases until it's instantaneous again when the sequence is "fit to window". Also, if I'm zoomed in, but at the BEGINNING of the sequence, the response time is instantaneous. But delay gets worse the further down the sequence I go until I'm basically looking at nearly a 3/4 sec delay from key press to FCP response where I'm currently working.

Any thoughts?

Andy

What format are you editing, what kind of drive are you using for your media, what version of FCP are you on, and what kind of mac are you running?



www.strypesinpost.com

Well, I already mentioned the format: ProRes 720p30, but here's the rest of the info:

Internal Serial ATA drive 7200. 1 TB with 300GB free

FCP 7.0.1

Intel Mac Pro 2.26 Quad-Core
6GB RAM
OSX 10.5.8

Andy

Short of it being an FCP 7 oddity, do you work off the system drive? If you do, you could try working off a fast enough external scratch drive or a separate internal drive.



www.strypesinpost.com

Ha. LOL.

No, I don't edit off my system drive. I've been doing this a long time, and have built and worked on LOTS of FCP systems over the years since v1 of the program. I'm a veteran and not liable to make mistakes like that.

I don't think drive speed is really the issue because of the weird nature of the delay. The fact that it's tied to the level of zoom in the sequence doesn't suggest a read/write access problem since that would likely be an across the board issue.

I'm pretty convinced there's something else involved. I was just wondering if anyone else had seen this issue.

Andy

What happens if you copy the contents of the project into a new project?



www.strypesinpost.com

> if I'm zoomed in, but at the BEGINNING of the sequence, the response time is instantaneous.
> But delay gets worse the further down the sequence I go until I'm basically looking at nearly a
> 3/4 sec delay from key press to FCP response where I'm currently working.

That suggests junk in the project file -- some kind of cache issue, or render files. Have you dumped render files? Have you done any "spring cleaning" on the project file, removed excess sequences and Browser items, etc.? What if you cut and paste just the editing sequence into a blank project file, then closed the old one and tested the playback? What if you migrate the contents of that timeline a bit at a time to a new Sequence?

The fact that response improves relative to your display size and playhead position practically rules out drive issues or any hardware issues.


www.derekmok.com

Thanks for the tips Derek. I was actually getting ready to try the old "copy the sequence into a new project" trick when I saw your comment on it possibly being a cache or render issue. I initially dismissed the idea of it being a render issue since there have been no renders in this project so far. It's basically 30 clips cut into a sequence whole and I've just been trimming things out.

But I decided to check anyway. I opened the render manager, and in one of my old test sequences, there was 56MB of rendered audio from a clip that was 44.1kHz. I deleted it, and viola, response time is up.

I have no idea why rendered audio from an unopened sequence would have such an impact on my current sequence, but that seemed to be the issue. Like you said, junk in the project file.

Thanks for the help.

Andy

That is bizarre. I wouldn't have suspected such a tiny render to have been the issue, either. But there's a certain amount of voodoo involved in what we do!


www.derekmok.com