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FCPX running rampant
Been using FCPX without much hangup… until tonight. Now I’m very stumped and hoping others here can help troubleshoot this for me and offer some advice.
Quickly, my set up. 3.4Ghz iMac i7 with 16GB ram and a 256 SSD. Editing proxy files off a G-RAID 2TB drive via FW800.
Suddenly, a few days ago, I noticed that FCPX was dropping a crazy amount of frames upon playback. I’ve had sluggish issues in the timeline (editing a 90 minute doc) but NEVER playback issues, so there was cause for alarm.
ALSO noticed that the background renderer would refuse to go – it was stuck at 0%.
Opened up the console and the activity monitor to find that it was flooded with messages like:
“Final Cut Pro : void CGPathAddArc(CGPath*, const CGA… etc etc: invalid value for start or end.”Also, it would eat my system resources up until it ate up all available space on my hard drive as swap memory and force the computer to force quit stuff.
I see a lot of HI_WAT_ALERT messages coming from the kernel.
It eats up all the RAM within 5 minutes of me opening my project.
Any ideas?
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FCP Guru
http://www.fcpguru.com -
16 Replies
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How big is your project file?
I had the same experience with RAM and the swap file. Swap file ate up about 40GB.
Running an older machine than you but with 16GB Ram.The issue was with the project.
Once you have the project open export the XML and have a quick look for anything unusual in a text editor.
Deleting render files and duplicating the project might work. You could try copying the entire timeline and pasting into a new project. This will probably take a while given your issues.
In my case I copied 15 minute sections from the original project into four separate projects.
There was a bit more involved but first have a look at the XML. -
Excellent idea – I’ll try that tonight and see what I come up with.
I’ve already attempted:
– Duplicating the project
– Deleting titles (using a font that I suspected might be it)
– Rendering a ken burns style scene of stills to a quicktime and reimporting it (and then removing the stills from the project)
– Duplicating project AND event to an alternate driveNothing so far has worked.
I’ve also noticed that the clips that play back choppy are duplicating frames when i step through it. Maybe there is corruption in the proxy files FCPX has generated? Going to also try using the online files tonight and seeing if that helps.
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FCP Guru
http://www.fcpguru.com -
Do you still have any large stills in the project (besides the ones you’ve already taken care of)? These can cause major headaches.
Also if you’ve got some complex compound clip action going on that could also be a reason.
Or any one of another hundred reasons, you’re just unlucky 🙁
Hope it works out for you.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
I do have some crazy compound clip action (mostly some multi-cam dance sequences that i’ve Synced and chopped up). I’ll try breaking those apart and simplifying them.
The most worrying thing is the footage that plays back fine in the browser and has played back fine in the timeline, suddenly has duplicate frames when stepping through…
It’s only annoying because I’m still learning how to troubleshoot the software. Tonight, when I’m back I’ll give an update.
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FCP Guru
http://www.fcpguru.com -
Chopping up compounds can cause problems.
Sounds like the project database file has corrupted.
I ran Instruments (comes with Xcode – free download App store) when loading my old project and it returned multiple Core Data Faults:
[NSSQLCore newValuesForObjectWithID:withContext:error:]
[NSPersistentStoreCoordinator(_NSInternalMethods) newValueForRelationship:forObjectWithID:withContext:error:]
Hopefully conforming the project with the original files will fix things.
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I copied and pasted my entire sequence into a brand new project and all seems to be well! Thanks for the tip! Will let you know if any more funky-ness returns, but the render bar seems to be rendering the whole sequence and playback is silky smooth.
After removing Adobe Flash, trashing prefs, and regenerating render files, the whole program seems a bit snappier too.
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FCP Guru
http://www.fcpguru.com -
Scratch that. Turning on FCPX, walked away to make coffee this morning, came back to find my startup disk was out of swap room (the swap was 60GB)
Back to the drawing board…
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FCP Guru
http://www.fcpguru.com -
That’s no good.
Have you had a look at the XML?
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If you can split the project into smaller sections and turn off rendering.
I think the project database can choke having to reference both the clips and the render files, especially with compound clips.
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I tried looking at the XML and found some interesting timecode errors on some stock footage clips I had imported and then slowed down. The frame rate seemed to be 24.003 and there were strange errors in the console like:
11/30/11 11:30:59.066 AM Final Cut Pro: WARN ONCE: timescale of 1000000000 gives non-integer ticks per frame for 23.976024 frames per second. Calculation for fractional part of frame is compromised.
I split up the film into separate projects and am going through each one to see where it starts sucking up crazy amounts of RAM. My first step is re-encoding the stock footage and making sure the timecode is accurate.
I sure miss the ability to reconnect right now :p
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FCP Guru
http://www.fcpguru.com
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