fcp7+stills ="error out of memory"- on i7 imac/12gb/w/1024mb graphics card? - no way!

i am working on an 27" i7 imac/2.93 w/12gb ram/1024mb ATI Radeon HD 5750 graphics card

i'm using fcp7

in fcp, under system setting, memory/cache-my still cache is set to 100%

i'm cutting an opening.

i have 150 still images.

some the client provided.

some i shot.

some of the images are large-5mb

i opened a pro res lt 1920x1080/24p timeline.

i dropped all the images onto the time line.

each still image dropped in at 10sec.

i then changed all the images to 12fps.

i rendered and all went well.

i went to order the images.

i rendered and i suddenly got an "error: out of memory"!

how is that possible?

if the stills are too large, how small do i need to go?

and this opening will be projected on a 40' screen at a hotel in may.

i made a very similar opening on last years project that had 180+ images and cut on a 2010 17" mbp and never had an issue.

very frustrating.

what am i not doing right?

any and all thoughts appreciated.

be well.

rob
smalltalk productions/nyc

You probably have a too large still although a corrupted JPEG can cause problems. Remember that you are finishing at HD resolution so extremely large stills are useless unless you are zooming in for details. Unfortunately I don't remember the pixel size limit and FCP7 doesn't pre screen stills to reject too large ones. In the past I only had this problem with large print graphics, never with 5Mb photos so it's possible you have a corrupted JPEG.

You can use Photoshop to batch reduce the stills to something manageable like twice the size of HD or create an Automator script to use Preview's photo editing engine to do the same. A corrupted JPEG will often open in Preview or Photoshop and you can alter it slightly, crop it a little for example, and then save it. This usually rewrites the JPEG and removes the corruption.

To pinpoint which still is causing the problem you can drop them on a timeline and render each one individually. The bad one will cause the memory error and you can work from there to find a solution.

Stills must be under 4000px, RGB not CMYK and personally, I found png's work better when you have many still images.

FCP is a 32bit program so can't address more than 3gb of memory at a time, so that's part of the problem. Once you stack very high resolution images on a timeline this quickly becomes a problem. I tended to ensure that I never worked with images more than 50% larger than my sequence settings (giving enough room for most resizes) to avoid having too many problems. Also some effects/pligins can cause crashes/memory leaks when used on very high resolution stills, so avoid this as well.

You should convert all images to RGB PNG for a better editing experience in FCP7. I would also resize for the project unless you need to pan and scan.