Speed up Final Cut Pro by turning off Fonts?!? Are you nuts Wally? Well, yeah I am a little nutty, but yes, you CAN speed up Final Cut Pro by turning off fonts you’re not using.
If you’re like me, you probably have 1,000 to 2,000 or more fonts on your Mac. I have around 2,600 on most of our machines. Having all of these fonts loaded actually slows down the overall performance of the Mac and definitely slows down FCP when you go to use the Text or Boris 3D tool. Font Book is a great way to manage the fonts to both improve the performance of your Mac AND help you manage your fonts for various projects.
First off, if you’ve never launched Font Book, well what the heck are you waiting for? It’s the easiest way to preview all the fonts you have on your machine. So launch it and you’ll see something like this.
So you notice right away, on the right you can see a preview of the font. Just keep stepping down using the down arrow on your keyboard and you’ll keep seeing your fonts previewed on the right. I use this all the time to preview fonts. Font Book defaults to showing you the full alphabet as the preview, but if you’d like to see a particular sentence or series of Characters, simply go up to Preview > Custom and then you can type whatever you want into the Preview area.
Ok, first off, let’s turn off fonts that we don’t need. Again, turn off any fonts you don’t need and you’ll speed up both your system and Final Cut Pro. Highlight the fonts you don’t need right now. Then click on the font Select / DeSelect button (Yellow Arrow at the bottom).
Now you can see the Fonts are shown as “Off”. I encourage you to turn off as many fonts as possible. Anything you don’t need, just turn them off, they’re hogging system resources. To turn them back on, same deal, select them and click on the Select / DeSelect button.
Ok, now notice how the left column of the Font Book says “Collection.” This is where you can organize fonts so you can keep track of what you use for projects and Select / DeSelect entire sets of fonts in a hurry. First go up to File > New Collection. A new Collection folder appears and you can name it to suit your needs.
Now it’s as easy as go back to “All Fonts” and then drag and drop fonts from your main Font collection to the project collection. Now anytime I work on that project, I can activate the fonts quickly.
In addition to projects, you can use the Collections feature to organize your fonts in all manner of ways from type of font to whatever suits your needs. So there you have it. Font Book. A very simple tool giving you a very simple way to improve the speed of your Mac and Final Cut Pro by cutting down on the number of fonts you keep active. How many do I keep active at any time? Usually 200 or less.