Fcpx running slow, delays

Hello everyone,
Have been busy of late editing a few sports events, one thing that I have noticed is FCPX.0.8 is incredibly slow, and at times I get the 'spinning beach ball' for minutes after performing an edit. On more than one occasion I have had to either crash the app or the computer.
Just wondering if this is due to having a slow HD,would installing an SSD help?
I am running this on a laptop so maybe change to a desktop tower might be an improvement.....

17" MacBook Pro intel i5.
750gb 5400 internal
8 gigs RAM.
FXP 10.0.8

On one instance i could not do a thing with respect to adding effects to clips. I could drag them to the clips, but no response!

Thanks for any help!

BTW: I had a go at using motion, in particular using templates and adjusting to my use. I had to give up in the end. Cannot get my head around the ratio of what I need to accomplish and what I need to do to get that done. With liverype we have I clip representing a graphic on screen. With motion it seems a jumbled mess!
I suppose it is a learning thing, but no time.to learn! (Usual story).

With that said does anybody know of templates up for sale for both FCPX and Livetype? I know of Livetype central but wherever I click I get dead links. I know they released a series of HD templates a while back.

Many thanks for advice and help.

Pete.

Hi Pete,

Sorry to say this, but your system setup and your workflow are hardly qualified for running FCP X, or any modern 64-bit NLE for that matter.

- You are editing from your boot drive, which is already a big NO because this heavily affects editing performance. And your boot drive only runs at 5,400 rpm, which makes it even worse to be used as a media drive. An SSD will only improve things if at the same time you add a fast external drive (absolutely NO USB2) to store your FCP X projects and media.

- The old mobile GT 330M GPU inside this MBP is the bare minimum for working with FCP X. Do make sure you have "Automatic graphics switching" turned ON in System Preferences > Energy Saver.

So yes, IMO you would be much better off with a newer iMac or MBP. We used 2012 Thunderbolt MBPs and iMacs with external Promise Thunderbolt RAIDs for editing daily reports with FCP X at the 2012 Olympic Games and I must say FCP X performed wonderfully even under very stressing conditions. If you do chose to update your workflow and system you might as well update FCP X to the latest version as well. Things have changed considerably since 10.1.

As to Motion: this is a very deep application so, unfortunately, if you have no time to learn it you might as well not use it.

Best wishes,

Ronny

Thanks Ronny, again for the in-depth helpful reply.
Yes, I certainly thought I would be pushing things with what I got, but did not realize it would be to this extent!.

Actually I do have an external Firewire drive I am using for other things, so could prepare that for use with FCP? The next question would be what to move and where is it hiding? Certainly I could follow my nose, but bound to miss something. I believe FCP puts data / slave files in weird and not so obvious places :). I have about 6 projects lurking somewhere...

With regards to Motion, taking into account the complexity of the program, I found a template thatI liked and was pertinent to the sports theme I am working on. But I could not work out how to add graphics to the drop zones!. I tried everything, adding to the list of drop zones in the media area, tried adding them live on the screen but all that did was just add the graphic as a new one on top of everything else. Still would like to experiment with Motion, very impressive.

Cheers Ronny,

Pete