Editing 4K video in Final Cut Pro can use up a lot of memory and CPU, and unless you have the latest mac, it can really slow down your machine. The good news is 4K and HD video can still be edited on older machines. This video takes a look at 5 changes you can make to make your older computed operate most efficiently when editing video in Final Cut Pro.
1. Display Quality
Switching the viewer display quality from Better Quality to Better Performance can significantly boost your computers performance. Choose this option to display video in the viewer at reduced resolution. Decreasing the size of the media maintains playback performance even for very large media files.
2. Optimized Media
Selecting the Optimized Media checkbox when importing your media into Final Cut Pro transcodes your clips to an Apple Pro Res 422 format. This codec provides better performance during editing, faster render times, and better color quality for compositing. If the original camera format can be edited with good performance, this option is dimmed.
3. Proxy Media
An alternative to creating optimized media. This option transcodes your video clips to Apple Pro Res 422 Proxy format. This format creates medium-quality (one-half resolution) proxy versions that increase editing performance and take up considerably less storage space than optimized files.
4. Shorter Connected Clips
When creating connected storylines, breaking up the clips into shorter segments can also boost Final Cut Pro's performance. Any changes made to the clips will only require re-rendering the shorter segment instead of the entire clip, making your workflow much faster.
5. Competing Applications
Closing all the unnecessary apps running in the background will free up your computers RAM and CPU for Final Cut Pro, increasing performance.
These are my top 5 tips and tricks to increase Final Cut Pro performance. Let me know in the comments below what you're doing to edit faster.