As you all know by now, FCP X 10.4.7 is out. It’s a huge, mostly under the hood update resulting in a big performance boost on Mojave, and an insane performance boost on Catalina. Really great update, you can read all about it in the usual places 😉
I did, however, run into a little issue that I wanted to share. Ya know, in case I’m not the only one… NOTE: this is a Mojave OS issue/conflict with some apps, including FCP 10.4.7 and VLC, Not an FCP X bug!
Anyhoo, if you install 10.4.7, and your OS menus completely freak out system wide when you launch FCP, here’s the fix… (from this VLAN Thread)
Open System Preferences -> Accessibility. Select displays, and make sure “Reduce transparency” is NOT selected. (note that selecting “increase contrast” will also select the transparancy box, so ya can’t have that on either.
I imagine not many people had this selected as I did, but if FCP X freaks out, this is the fix. Enjoy the update, it screams! 🙂
Final Cut Pro X Babbling 
Nice tip, thank you!
So AWESOME! I’ve been searching for a solution for days. However, I had this problem in Catalina but, interestingly, not in Mojave. It’s now fixed in Catalina. Thank you so much!!
Nice article, thank you. I was hopeful I’d see an improvement in performance with my 2013 Mac Pro but nothing noticeable however the bottle neck might be my hard drives…
Saved my bacon. Thank you!!!
This fixed the problem – Thank you!
Thank you very much. Same problem here on Macbook Pro 9,1
Wow.! Really glad you posted that fix. I just spent hours redownloading fcp several times. Nothing seemed to help. I also don’t think I ever played with that setting. Thanks so much. I hope this fix is available elsewhere. I have not seen it myself.
You saved me! Thank you!
what a great fix. It was already difficult to phrase the problem to Google and as you said, not many people have this issue, so there aren’t many threads with the solution. Thanks for this explanation!
thank you!!!! saved my day! How did you find the solution?
I’d like to say I’m really smart, but I just got lucky with google 🙂
Thank you. This fix also worked with catalina + FCPX 10.4.7 (almost perfectly). It fixed all the major menu-flickering and that really made my day. BUT, I still experience flickering with these purple triangular shapes appearing inside the FCP-window while using FCP. For instance when I scroll my video back and forth in the video bar. I rund a MBP retina mid 2012 so catalina is the last OS update for this old mac. I lost a lot of my old programs like office so I had to buy that one again, and the catalina update only warned me of acrobat and office conflicts. Still about 15 otter progs got the “no parking sign” on them after catalina update. I downloaded latest apple video drivers or whatever.
So now I guess I can use FCP X 10.4.7.
But will I have to live with the annoying flicker while editing video?
I´d hate to downgrade to mojave or pervious FCPX version now. I was using FCPX 10.4 (I guess that would equal 10.4.0) and latest Mojave before updating to catalina and FCPX 10.4.7 and things were working with no flickering at all, but I really wanted the new caption/ subtitle features of FCPX 10.4.7.
You wouldn’t happen to know of any other quick fix for the smaller but still annoying FCPX flicker?
Fredrik
Hi, I haven’t seen that other flicker. Just guessing here, but some of the 2012 MBP’s had video card issues. Hopefully that not the problem. If it get’s worse, maybe run the hardware test https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201257 or have it looked at? Sorry I can’t be of more help!
Holy cow, I would never have found this solution. FWIW, it fixes the same problem for iMovie. Thank you!
Holy cow, I would never have found this solution. FWIW, it fixes the same problem for iMovie. Thank you!