FCP X - Can reduced HD speed cause errors?

[slughead]

So I was tooling around with FCP X for the first time yesterday, and in the midst of doing that I told iTunes to perform a massive HD-intensive task, and oh by the way, Time Machine decided to jump in and ruin my day even more.

FCP slowed to a crawl and little yellow triangle icons with exclamation marks started appearing over my events (I could not find a way to get it to give me a specific error).

I was doing some speeding up and slowing down of video and lo and behold I think I have some dropped frames in the finished product. Not a big deal, I was making a stupid youtube video that nobody (including myself) will watch.

I'm going to try and fix it today, but just in general: Obviously FCP X will slow down in the event of low HD throughput, but will it actually screw up?

 

[pertusis1]

I'm going to chime in and not answer your question.

I found that FCP X became somewhat unreliable (had a tendency to crash) when it had maxed out processors and other programs were running. It just never seemed to play well with other programs. Granted, that was on a maxed out mac mini with everything being run off of the same HD, and I have not had the same problem on my oMP, where I use a separate scratch disk.

I'm not sophisticated enough to really notice if I had dropped frames.

 

[Fishrrman]

[[ So I was tooling around with FCP X for the first time yesterday, and in the midst of doing that I told iTunes to perform a massive HD-intensive task, and oh by the way, Time Machine decided to jump in and ruin my day even more. ]]

If you're going to be using "high intensity drive use" apps like FCP, my advice is to do this before you begin:

1. TURN OFF Time Machine. Completely. Turn it right off.

2. DISABLE Spotlight indexing. Turn it, too, right off.

Both of these try to muck with disk in/out behind your back, and they may very well interfere with FCP's attempts to write large quantities of data to your drive(s).

You can turn off TM in the System Preferences pane.

To disable Spotlight, you're going to need something like TInkerTool or "Deeper".

I've never used either Spotlight or Time Machine.
I don't want ANY app messing with my disks behind my back!

My opinion only, and I realize others' will be different.

 

[slughead]

Thanks you both for the advice. Next time I will fight back against my ADHD and not risk it!