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Cant do long form…..spinning beach ball of $%^%$*#@
Im so frustrated….Ive called Huge…Ive posted here to no avail…..I cant get my FCP system to play for any length of time without locking up and giving me the spinning beachball that FCP is so famous for…..I have Huge SCSI array that should be plenty fast enough to play ONE stream of DVCPRO50 footage…it must have something to do with the troughput….it just chokes and locks up…..I have talked ot Huge….I have done tests on the speed of the drives./..they seem fine….IM getting 256 Reaad Write speeds……Im at a complete loss….every driver is the most updated driver…..Im running FCP 5.0.4 OS 10.4.6, I have 4.5 gigs of RAM…..yes Ive thrown away my preferences…no my drives are not full….yes I have reformatted the drives recently….Ive done everything that I or anyone can think of…..sometimes I wonder if its a SCSI thing…at that OSX is just not goode with Atto SCSI cards…..the only thing I can think of is data throughput….it chokes….it cant seem to handle it for any length of time…..any ideas??? My system specs are in my profile….
thks Paul
Paul Harb-Director/Editor
Wrong Beach Multimedia -
9 Replies
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You may have checked this, but do you have the right firmware for your Atto card, and is it in the correct slot?
I’ve heard something about it needing to be in slot 4 of the dual processor G5s, but that was in relation to an Avid Adrenaline, so may not be relevant.
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For what it’s worth, here’s a link at Avid about troubleshooting. There is a pdf link at the bottom of this page which gives some things to try.
https://www.avid.com/onlinesupport/supportcontent.asp?productID=0&contentID=8285&typeID=2
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I’ve written an article on just that topic. Unfortunately, you may not like what I have to say about long form and how to beat the SBBOD, especially at this stage of the project.
https://web.mac.com/sfcutters/iWeb/fcpworld/news/FCDB0CCA-08D8-4562-B59E-67A8A2FFF685.html
Kevin Monahan
Take My FCP Master’s Workshop!
fcpworld.com
Pres. SF Cutters -
I dont get this statement…..I have been doing long form on Avid for years…..it rocks….it is solid and stable….how can you say this? I must respectfully disagree…..if FCP cant handle it that is one thing….but you shouldnt clump all NLE’s together….
Paul
Paul Harb-Director/Editor
Wrong Beach Multimedia -
I’m generalizing and just being cautionary, Paul. And as I say in the article, much of my POV is subjective to what my experience has been in the past. Yes, my article is “my opinion” and nothing more. Take what you want from it, and you are certainly entitled to disagree with me.
I said: “The bottom line? I don’t think that NLE’s are very good at handling long and complex sequences in general, so you are at a disadvantage from the get go. And unless you take some care before a project even begins, you may run into trouble with our friend the SBBOD.”
Sure Avid is BETTER at long form in the world of NLEs, but you cannot say that there are ZERO issues with Avid and long form. You still need to keep a long form project lean and mean regardless of the NLE.
When I worked at Pixar on “Nemo” you shoulda seen how long it took for that project file to load. It was excruciating (however it was a special case as there were thousands of pre-computes in a single sequence).
That being said, I think I’d rather cut a feature length piece on MC over FCP, for sure.
I’m not sure exactly why Avid is a bit more stable for long form, but I tend to think it’s because Avid doesn’t load the entire sequence into RAM as FCP seems to do. I’m fairly certain that Avid only loads the section you are working on into RAM dynamically.
I reserve the right to be wrong though! 😉
Kevin Monahan
Take My FCP Master’s Workshop!
fcpworld.com
Pres. SF Cutters -
Kevin’s article has many useful hints. Also, keep an eye on the size the size of your project file. If it’s above 20 Mb (easily achieved on docs with multiple versions), you should slim things down and adopt a different workflow.
Break the project down first into Media/Edits, then further down into chapters/acts/interviews, whatever seems most logical. Also weed out redundant edits by archiving them, keeping the project with your main edit up to date and as lean as possible.
There’s no problem for FCP to have multiple projects open simultaneously, you can copy, cut and paste between them.
Also, make sure that you regularly save your projects using the “Save As…” dialogue, forcing the whole file to be re-written from the ground up on a regular basis. Apparently months of saving to the same file is a recipe for corruption, and simply backing up a buggy file is no insurance against losing your work.
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Hey Kevin….I thought the article was interesting and informative….obviously it is geared towards FCP users….which I am one…..I just came off a movie working on Media COmposer of course….and I must say….I hate the interface compared to FCP….but wow….is it stable…..5 systems running off Unity…..rock solid for the most part….very complicated project…..tons of footage…..long tape captures….and no issues that kept us from working…..sure it crashes….but ti crashes and you restart and your working again….with FCP I find myself spending a lot of time trying to find workarounds….because of stability issues…bugs…ect….mainly at this point it seems to be some sort of throughput issue….it just cant deal with playing my timeline without getting the beachball…..Huge is ttrying to figure it out, to no avail….drive tests show that Im getting 250MB plus but it just ends up choking when playing any timeline for too long….differenet projects….Im temped to wipe everything…OS and start form scratch….but I just did that a while back….so im dont know….thks though for your input….
Paul
Paul Harb-Director/Editor
Wrong Beach Multimedia -
Paul,
I don’t doubt that you’re having problems, but I’d like to offer a glimmer of hope.
We use an FCP/X-SAN combination to turn out hundreds of hours of one hour episodic reality TV shows. Our shared storage is approaching 48 terrabytes, and we have multiple editors working on the same episode simultaneously. We couldn’t achieve this level of production if we had the kind of performance you’re experiencing.
As you compare your experience of working on an Avid/Unity vs an FCP system, are you comparing systems with similar resources? In other words, are you spending a similar amount of money on drives for your FCP as for your Avid? How huge is your Huge? Have you maxed out all of the drives? THere’s many things that can affect throughput. Media organization. Project organization. Connectivity. Software version compatability. Hardware drivers. THe list goes on.
My suggestion for you is, find a qualified tech-head that you trust to take a close look at your system/workflow and get it straightened out. You CAN have stability and efficiency with large projects… you’ve just got to be careful about how you work.
Good luck.
Mark
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I adopted FCP quite early on. I bought the first DualG5 (ordered on the day of release) and got, so I believe the one of the first AJA Io’s in the UK. I also bought a HugeDualMax1.2TB a few days before they went to resellers.
So that’s more than a few years ago.The RAID was formatted on the day I got it. It’s never been touched since! Huge are great!
It’s on an ATTO card as you can see in my profile. When I bought the system it was no end of trouble, there weren’t half as many people using a full blown setup. This forum was what kept me sane. I couldn’t get uncompressed running at all until a quicktime update came out.. I think it was 6.5. Then the system ran really well.
However after a few more updates, large projects started to hang with the spinning ball.
In particular a 7 camera, 3.5 hour digibeta concert. The work around was to cut the timeline into separate opjects, which worked OK.I moved the suite around the office a coule of times, and most importantly put the new Tiger OS on a new HD and kept the old one in too. These days there are no problems with the suite. Except occasionally FCP cannot save the project file. It will warn that ‘File cannot be found’ So I force a save onto another drive, quit FCP. Move the forced save back into the proper drive and carry on.
I don’t get any SBBOD anymore, but I can’t advise exactly what is was that fixed it, it was two years ago. I’m pretty sure however that is was a full OS reinstall. My first Tiger install also seemed buggy, after a few days I reinstalled and since then it’s been OK.
The only maintainence I do, is to run cron scripts (Cocktail OSX App) repair permissions, and check to drives using speedtools and disc utility.I often have Livetype, Photoshop, FCP, FTP App and Safari at the same time and the system seems to be fine. Hope you get it sorted.
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