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g4, fcp studio and QT
Hi all,
I’ve had a very frustrating couple of weeks. My Dual 1Gig G4 has been crashing with the black box with gibberish or just freezing. It happens mostly when I’m editing DVCPRO HD footage in FCP Studio or playing a video file in QT. Is it just a conspiracy theory, or is there some truth to the latest FCP and QT not working well with the old G4 hardware? In any case, I’ve looked at the reports and can’t make heads or tails out of it. The consistent phrase that keeps coming up is kernel error… I’ve taken out USB peripherals and even external hard drives, and yet the same problem.
Any suggestions? One that I got from a friend is to go to FCP 5.0.4 for my hardware. Any thoughts on that? Thanks SOOOO much in advance for reading the saga, and for any helpful suggestions!!! -
3 Replies
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Boot from and run the hardware test disk that came with the machine. It may be poorly seated or marginal RAM that only gets used when you are using FCP. If the problem only occurs after a while, then it could be related to the heat inside the computer causing RAM (or logic board) failures. Either way, run the hardware test overnight running looping RAM tests to see if, when booted off the CD/DVD, the machine fails. If it does so, it eliminates the possibility of your software having been corrupted.
If you’ve got a spare hard disk, install a copy of the latest copy of the OS on it, together with the minimal amount of FCP/S to do testing with your material. This should take about an hour or two at most for the install. Run with this minimal software and see if you still have problems. Running the latest version of FCP would be best, since you never know what bugs may have been present and squashed by a later update of software. This way you won’t have to interrupt your existing setup. I’ve done this on one of my iMacs since I was getting kernel panics and poor performance (it gets used as a TV set with an EyeTV tuner attached) – and now I’ve narrowed the problems down to the software on the iMac since everything has been fine running the temporary software off an external FireWire drive for the last three months.
Bill Lee
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You have a Kernel Panic. Usually it is caused by some bad hard ware. I would sign up for an appointment at the genius bar at your local apple store and see if they can make any sense of the panic log. You can also try what the last person suggested and install a copy of the OS on an external drive and see if the issue persists. If it douse then it is definitely caused by some bad hardware.
One more thing because of the age of your computer if it is a hardware problem it is probably not worth repairing. And since you said that you are working with DVCPRO HD footage you may want to conceder getting a much faster new computer anyway.
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Thanks for the suggestions. This is why creative cow rocks!
I’m going to try the hardware test first and proceed from there. I’ll post results for future interest with similar problems.
Thanks again!!!
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