Everytime I render a file, FCP will crash. The progress bar will show, and stay at 0%, then get hung and go kaput.

At first, the problem started with the progress window popping up for a split second and dissapearing leaving the clips unrendered, but not every time a render is being executed, FCP will close on itself.

Can someone please help me with this? I've read around a lot about this issue, but have no solid solutions to figuring out the problem in order to get FCP to run smoothly.

Thanks!

Okay, I've looked into this issue some more, doing a few more tests. I discovered that the problem is caused primarily when it comes to rendering transitions. I was able to render things like stills, or short clips in the timeline. But it always will crash when doing the transitions. The only transitions I've done are simple cross disolves.

Sometimes, the render will only go to about 40-50% now, and then crash.

What's up with this?! Pretty weak, seems like such a simple bug to fix.

Kevin,

Based on the majority of your posted questions I'd strongly suggest that you either:

A. Start reading up on the supplied manuals with Final Cut Studio and start learning how FCP actually works and how *you* interface with it (goto the "Help" menu to find them)

B. Get some online-training or guided training books on FCP or;

C. Hire a consultant to work with you one-on-one to get you trained and up to speed quickly.

While we all stumble with things we either don't understand or can't figure out however, this forum doesn't exist to "train" you on every aspect of the application you don't know or understand. It's here primarily to: Ask questions that have no obvious or easy answers (and the almost all your questions are easily answered if you start using the resources right in front of you); help others with those problems or; share new or troubleshooting information that you've found helpful.

As you're finding out, video editing is a very technically intense operation and there are dozens of aspects of the editing environment that you need to know and understand so you can get past these small and easy issues you're having.

Thanks Robert... totally understood.

That's how I usually work, I've edited on Avid for a good while now. So now I hopped onto the FCP boat because of requirements for a project.

I've read through much of the manual, forums, many FCP sites, other editors, which are all helpful, but didn't get me the quick fix I need yet.

I'll be sure to look into the other resources more thoroughly when time allows. Ive just been trying to emulate all the things that I would do on my next job and figure it out to accomodate the urgency of this new project.

I've had problems with the system crashing while rendering and I trouble shot it down to being a lack of storage space. Here was my logic (and I was correct!).

HD editing can create some really big files. In my case every shot was a green screen keyed shot which meant that FCP would create long/large render files. Even though my RAID showed that it had 125GB of available space (out of the 2000GB capacity), which should have been PLENTY to handle the render files, it still wasn't enough. What happens is that you don't have enough "contiguous" space. In other words, the drive has lots of little empty spots that all add up to 125GB of blank space, but each of the individual empty spaces may be very small (something like 50-100mb or so), so FCP can't create the big 1.5+GB files needed to complete the render.

Anyway, I archived off a bunch of old footage and freed up 1000GB, then I rendered again and all was well. The system acted much snappier as well. Another option would have been to defragment the hard drive, but that can take a LONG time, and one of the RAID manufactures said they didn't recommend it.

Moral of the story is that you shouldn't edit from a drive that has less than 10% of it's capacity available.

If that didn't work, I would also try throwing away your FCP Preference files. Here's how to do it: Final Cut Pro: Troubleshooting Basics (http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1846)

A Couple of other things to check:

- CPU and Ram usage during rendering
- Available space
- Are you able to render in FCP (apple + r or opt + r)
- Trashing FCP Prefs

Also as Robert said have a look through the manual, and remember Google is your friend. If you have a problem, its likely someone else has as well... are you rendering in FCP or compressor. Wha ever it is, try the other. Change some of the settings, and if your not already try only rendering certain parts to cut down trouble shooting - there's nothing more annoying that getting to 90% and it dies...

Thanks fellas. I'm getting a hang on it. HD space is definitley not an issue. I have stacks of externals, and never work on it when it's about to pass 80% capacity.

I think my previous issues had more to do with codecs, because it was specifically occuring with a type of clip. But so far so smooth.

Kevin,

This is an old problem with FCP. Crashing during large renders is something that happens to me all the time. It may be that, because I am editing long form and my timelines are long, that this happens to me more than usual. I've just learned to render in smaller pieces and then save and render again and again etc.

I have found - I believe like you - that if I render under 50% of the material (specifically in a long timeline of, say 90 minutes) that I can escape crashes.

So my advice is to render in smaller chunks and save very very often.

I don't believe that this has anything to do with disk space or fragmentation either.

It's just life.

I don't notice it any more. It's become second nature - like using a manual transmission - to render in smaller chunks.

Also, when I've got through a tricky piece requiring multiple renders of FX etc, I export that section to QT and then reimport that QT file and lay it over the top of the existing material in the timeline. I then disable the playback of the underlying source material. I forget the keyboard shortcut - maybe it's highlight the shots to be disabled and then hit ctrl B. ?? I do it by feel, so I can't really remember. But it's a useful shortcut. Look it up.

Sorry to be vague about the latter.

Best

Harry.