Let's Discuss Big Sur

[Steve Sherrick]

I have to state that typically, I am usually at least one Mac OS behind the latest and greatest, usually choosing stability over new features. That has worked out well for me. But, there were some improvements in FCPX 10.5 as well as some plugins that required a move either to Catalina or Big Sur. I decided I would just do a clean install and go to Big Sur. This has been a nightmare.

System Specs


RED has acknowledged there does seem to be an issue with RED R3D files when using combo of FCPX 10.5 and Big Sur. Lots of freezes, beachballing, lagging, etc. when you have R3D files in project. I thought perhaps this was limited to slow hard drives, but have since tested on external SSD and seeing problems on my MBP as well. Overall, everything just seems unstable. Thinking about going back to an earlier version unless others have had success with a similar configuration.

As for storage, I run OWC Thunderbay RAID 5, Oyen Digital SSD, etc. Not the fastest storage but has been totally fine with previous versions of FCPX and Mac OS.

I'd appreciate any feedback that might help me put the pause button on going back to Mojave.

Thanks!
Steve

[Brian Timmons]

Hey Steve,

From my own experience these performance issues (freezes, beachballing, lagging, etc.) are not limited to Big Sur and occur on Catalina as well.
The issues started on FCP 10.4.9 and continued with the 10.4.10 and 10.5 updates.

To have a stable FCP X & R3D experience I had to downgrade to FCP 10.4.8. This was what was available before the late August 2020 10.4.9 update and everything with R3Ds just works again.

Don't know what happened under the hood after 10.4.8 but in terms of real world use things went very wrong and has not been fixed.
It's concerning that we still have this issue months later.

Brian Timmons
BRITIM/MEDIA

[Dominik Muench]

I'm on the latest versions with OSX and FCPX and its running very smooth and fast for me, the performance with R3Ds has improved noticeably even on my 3 year old MBP. I tend to edit off external USB3 drives.
however !! my Adobe CC has become extremely slow and unreliable to the extend where I'm ready to say f*ck you to Adobe and Photoshop for good and doing the switch to Affinity finally.
The apps get stuck all the time, beach ball appears and it takes ages to come back. When an Adobe app finally crashes completely I cant simply reopen it but have to restart the entire machine which is extremely annoying.

[Steve Sherrick]

There seems to be a lot of mixed results as I've poured through some forums, including the Apple Developer forums. What concerns me is Apple is moving in many directions at once. We've got the relatively new Mac Pros but also have the M1 chips rolling out. My fear is that the Mac OS and 3rd party software will be struggling to stay aligned with versioning. I've always liked in the past where I could get everything to a stable point using one of the last dot revs of the OS and the most stable versions of software like Avid and FCPX.

Are we starting to see too many moving parts, where stability will come second to new features? I'm also wary about the Mac OS becoming like the iOS where they just about try to trick you to upgrade to the latest and greatest. As of right now, we still have a lot of control over updates. I just hope it stays that way.

I wonder if any of the Apple Developers on Reduser like Jeff Kilgroe know of any gotchas that are preventing R3Ds from gumming up FCPX under cirtain configurations. I mean, it's brutal. I used to have no problem on earlier versions of FCPX bringing in any RED file. Of course playback would depend on the system and hard drives but I'm seeing import times (Leave in Place) of several minutes and then accessing files in the browser causing beachballing. Other files mostly work just fine, so does seem like R3D issue, although maybe I will see it once I get a wider variety of codecs exposed to it.

Any additional thoughts, tips, etc. are appreciated.

Thanks!