FCP keeps crashing

[Harry Bromley-Davenport]

I just got used to either rendering small portions or letting it autorender.

At least with the Octo, the rendering is really fast.

It may be the video card (Blackmagic) but at this stage I'm kinda numb and I've got used to it.

You do bring up a good point, though. I should get hold of Blackmagic and ask them some questions.

Harry

[Harry Bromley-Davenport]

PS.

I notice that the original poster, John Godwin, has an Nvidia card. I have a Blackmagic card, so that quite probably rules out the video card as the culprit.

Harry

[Rick L. Allen]

Originally Posted by John Godwin

I tried to have it render the open, which is about a minute or so long, and it it has crashed repeatedly. I know the clips are on the Fusion drive, and the render is going back to the fusion drive. Right now it's finally rendering because I'm selecting one clip at a time and rendering that, and it's working.

John, you should never use your source (media) drive as both the playback and the "render to" drive. Render your output files to another drive. Look at it this way - you are asking your drives to both read and write large files to and from the same drive at the same time. You are stressing your drives and jamming the pipeline with info flowing to and from the drives at the same time. Almost every time I've had a rendering problem it's because I neglected to designate a different drive for the final files.

[Christopher Drews]

Before I read Rick's post I was about to mention the same thing. This error could very well be a render drive problem. As suggested before, always, always, always use an different drive to capture and redered to than your system disk. The best is to have a Fiber Channel or SCSI array in RAID 0 formation. If you can't swing that, get a G-RAID2 from G-Tech. They are all firewire 800 and playback DVCPRO HD and one stream of uncompressed fine.
If you are really stuck, this worked for a feature. BUT, it is dangerous. Use the media tool to consolidate. This will downsize and destroy some of your media (but if it is backed up, this is no problem). When you navigate to your migrated project, new render files will need to be created. Since your original media has been altered (I usually leave handles) it will usually fix render problems associated with problematic media. But I suggest this as a last resort. The media tool is very dangerous and has a high learning curve just to get favorable results.
-C

[John Godwin]

Harry: Sorry to hear you have those problems. Maybe this'll get resolved and help you too.

Rick & Christopher: My liquid system is set up with separate media/render drives, which speeds up the processing, but it works with a single raid when necessary. I went with the single RAID on this FCP system because my systems integrator indicated that would be sufficient and, being almost totally unfamiliar with FCP & Macs, I thought that might be the case.

HOWEVER, what you say makes sense, so I just tried it - changed the render drive to a g-raid. Unfortunately, FCP just crashed again. I had already copied all the material to a FW800 g-raid and it rendered just fine on my macbook pro, from and to the single g-raid drive. When I put the same drive on the big system it started rendering, then crashed FCP. So the problem is obviously with the big system, and it behaves the same way with the Fusion drive alone, with just the g-raid, or with both, the fusion as the media source and the g-raid as the render drive. Is the 8-core so fast it just overwhelms both drives? I don't have the skill to do it but it occurrs to me it would be interesting to *underclock* the processors and see if the crashing stops.

*Edit: And, also, the drive lights on the Fusion hardly indicate it working too hard. When I copied the material over to the g-raid the lights were solid blue for the whole time. When the system is rendering the lights hardly blink at all. On playback they indicate more effort. And, Christopher, it sounds like I'd be better off to avoid the media tool for now. I can get through the immediate issues by rendering small segments, evidently, and that sounds a lot less risky.*

My systems guy (and someone else in this thread) have suggested copying the timeline and bins to a new project and seeing if that fixes things - I guess that's next for the morning. My edit time is being eaten alive by the troubleshooting.

[John Godwin]

Okay. Based on input from my systems guy, I just ditched preferences, using FCP Rescue, emptied the trash, rebooted, and it rendered normally. Finally.

Apparently emptying the trash and rebooting helped. When I deleted preferences before I didn't do that, just restarted FCP. That may be the standard way of doing it but being new to FCP and Macs, my clues are scant. Don't know yet if this is the fix (but I sure hope so, because it's simple and repeatable if necessary) but I'm going to keep trying tests until about noon and then edit regardless. I'll post results later today for the benefit of anyone else this may help.

Edit: So far it's handled everything just fine, rendering to one drive, promptly, not crashing.

Edit: Spoke too soon. It worked well for a while then crashed once while waiting for a bin to open and display the picons, then again after I did another sequence with cc and MB filters. I need to go ahead and edit and just render short segments, which does work. I think my systems guy will get here tomorrow morning and hopefully sort this out.

John
Atlanta
"Montage" is French for "3 day shoot"

[John Godwin]

I hate to leave a thread hanging ... my systems guy came over Tuesday, saw what the system was doing, it did the same for him (including after he switched out all the memory), and left with the computer and left me with a loaner. The last I heard he had it working correctly again, rendering the questionable project correctly 3 times in a row, using my original footage, and was going to put the original memory back in and test that. He said he had to do a complete reinstall of FCP, and I think copied the material to a new project/timeline - all the things suggested in this thread. I think the only thing I hadn't done was the reinstall, but he had even tried that here before taking the computer.

So the best guess currently is some form of FCP or project corruption or some combination. The exact same project has worked correctly on the loaner machine. The only other possible difference is my machine is OS X 10.5.4 and the loaner is 10.5.3. But the macbook pro with the same project is also 10.5.4.

Gremlins.

Thanks to everyone who jumped in. If the computer comes back and everything is good I'll add that on, too.

Best,
John

[John Godwin]

Updating:

My systems integrator has done a great job of trying to trouble shoot this, and I think has covered everything suggested in this thread and more, but I resumed work on the project in question today and it's still crashing.

I actually haven't been doing any rendering to speak of, as I intend to do the filters and such as the last step, this time. But the killer now (and it has been doing this, too, all along) is that about every 3rd time I open a bin the clip picons start to load and then FCP freezes, gives me the twirly for a few seconds, then crashes. This is using both large picons and medium picons. It's been suggested that I use list mode but then I can see the images, and since the shots aren't cataloged I need to see them to pick them (this is pretty much all b-roll, the soundbites are laid on the timeline already).

So it takes a bit over 30 seconds to restart FCP and that's the fastest way to continue that I can see.

This is the largest xdcam project I have on the system. I have some others, but they (so far) don't seem to show the same behavior. And we have tried copying everything over to a brand new project. The only thing I can think of that we haven't tried is starting over from scratch, and that would cost way to much in time to do.

Does anyone else have any remotely similar problems using xdcam ex?

Thanks,
John

[Craig Seeman]

Could it be the project is simply too large? Try splitting it in some reasonable fashion. FCP uses up more RAM (and other resources) on large projects so try breaking into 2 or more projects.

[John Godwin]

Thanks for the reply. I don't know, I've wondered the same thing, but how large it too large? My experience is using Liquid, and it handles much larger projects than this. And the systems integrator didn't say anything about it being too large.

There are 15 bins. Most have 50-60- maybe 70 clips in them. A few have a few more, and 2 or three of them have only a handful of clips. There are 8 or 9 customized effects in the main bin, 3 sequences (none especially complex, and it was crashing with only 1 sequence originally) and two bins of music. Those are set as lists and no crashing seems to come from them. Does that sound especially large for FCP?

Since I'm drawing on all of the material it would be fairly impractical to split it up.

I am going to try turning the picons off entirely once I finish a rough catalog of what's in each bin, and see if that makes a difference. Once I see what that does I'm going to try and pull all the material I think I need from each bin while it's open and place it on the timeline, to minimize crashes when bins open. But somehow I don't think things are supposed to work this way.

[Shaun Roemich]

Originally Posted by John Godwin

There are 15 bins. Most have 50-60- maybe 70 clips in them. A few have a few more, and 2 or three of them have only a handful of clips. There are 8 or 9 customized effects in the main bin, 3 sequences (none especially complex, and it was crashing with only 1 sequence originally) and two bins of music. Those are set as lists and no crashing seems to come from them. Does that sound especially large for FCP?

The project I'm working on right now (FCP 6.0.3 under OS10.4.11 on a white iMac with 2GB RAM) is about that size and (knock on wood), I'm still stable. I probably have more bins than that actually. All my media is on an external FW drive, if that makes a difference.

[John Godwin]

Thanks, Shaun...

This is on pretty tricked-out Mac Pro and an 8-drive SATA raid, which you'd think would handle it. I was seriously asking the question, as I have no real idea of how big a project would have to be to make FCP bog down.

[Craig Seeman]

What is the size in MB of the Project File itself?

[John Godwin]

20.2 MB, evidently.

[Craig Seeman]

That shouldn't be too bad. Hmm.