He texted me later to say “this computer’s a-blazin’!” Upgrade your GPUĮasily upgrading an internal GPU in recent Macs is unfortunately not possible without significant DIY skills. When he opened up FCP X and scrubbed through some projects (spots for a major toy retailer), he was flabbergasted. With a kit and instructional videos from Other World Computing, I helped him upgrade to a 1TB internal SSD. Just last week, I helped a buddy who thought his 2010 iMac was a goner because of its sluggish performance. To boost FCP X performance add as much memory (RAM) as your Mac can handle (16GB is good, 32GB is great) and swap out your startup drive with an SSD. But your older Mac might just benefit from an upgrade.

PrescriptionĪ shiny new 5K iMac with SSD or a cylindrical Mac Pro will make FCP X sing. So for the most part if you expect a fluid editing experience from a “stock” Mac realized before FCP X (2011) you’re likely to be frustrated. GPU and storage performance has skyrocketed in the last few years and FCP X has leveraged it. When Apple was “aiming where the puck is going to be” with FCP X, hardware was as in the picture. If this ball is your constant companion, it’s a good indication your Mac is ancient. But if I’m expecting it to use a keyer, stabilization, and 5 animated titles without rendering, then I’m delusional. The requirements for Final Cut Pro X are not extreme. In fact, I have a 2007 iMac in my office running FCP X 10.2.3 that edits just fine using proxy over our NFS network. Symptom #1 FCP X is just plain slow, all the time, doing everything.

This article continues the series that began with How to recognize and fix 11 common problems in Final Cut Pro X. If you’ve experienced slowness, or are looking to squeeze more speed from FCP X this article is for you. However, you’ll also hear some reports from folks who have had the opposite experience. Do some googling and you’ll see benchmarks and YouTube videos showing Final Cut Pro X to be not just faster, but many times faster than other NLEs at importing, playback and export.

Stablize shot on final cut pro 10.3.4