I am using final cut pro with a Digidesign MBox2 audio interface.

After a few minutes of using fcp I get a pretty little spinning rainbow wheel that only goes away after restarting the computer.

Any thoughts on how i can stop this happening?

thanks

How do you know it has anything to do with the Mbox?

I've had no issues with FCP machines and the original Mbox's (haven't used the MBox2).

What happens before the "pretty little spinning rainbow"?

I am using final cut pro with a Digidesign MBox2 audio interface.

After a few minutes of using fcp I get a pretty little spinning rainbow wheel that only goes away after restarting the computer.

Any thoughts on how i can stop this happening?

thanks

Have just started using FCP on a Mac G5 n the past week and also had the nifty spinning rainbow thingy.

Turns out that we were fortunate enough to have Guy Cochrane (one of the world's best FCP people) assist us yesterday...and he solved the issue real quick and simple.

The spinning little rainbow thingy was activating every time I left FCP idle for a few minutes. It would go away a few seconds after I touched the mouse scroll wheel (which is not exactly the same as you having to do a restart) but since I am new to both the Mac and FCP, I figured this was "normal" and the computer was just getting back into action.

Guy went into one of the Mac menus and simply told it never to go to sleep again.

In other words, ours was a Mac default setting that you can change (but I'm afraid I can't tell you exactly how to change it - though you might start with Preferences - and I'm not sure that this is exaclty what's causing your issue, but if it seems like a possibility in your case I'd suggest you check the Mac manual or help files.

Michael Knight

PS - we had another major situation in which the rainbow wheel was spinning like crazy, but that was because we had inadvertantly misused or misnamed our ingest Easy Setup file paths (from XDCAM HD via Sony's firewire/software) and overloaded the Mac hard drive.

This really gave FCP a headache because for some reason it couldn't find the files.

Eventually had to do a complete uninstall/reinstall.....wiping out Gigabytes of downloaded material that is fortunately still preserved on the XDCAM's optical discs.

How do you know it has anything to do with the Mbox?

I've had no issues with FCP machines and the original Mbox's (haven't used the MBox2).

What happens before the "pretty little spinning rainbow"?


FCP works fine when the Mbox is not plugged in, and misbehaves when it is. Many Tests, many restarts. I finally resolved the issue by simply plugging the mbox into the usb port furthest from the power input (Macbookpro), i'd previously had it in the one next to power socket.

Obvious, when you know.

I didnt even think there'd be a difference between the two sockets

Everything seems to be working fine now (touch wood). How I miss that spinning wheel...

Thanks Chris and Michael for your input.