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Beachballing
There’s something a little curious and almost certainly a bit wrong with our Mac Pro 8-core 3GHz.
While doing fairly normal things the cursor will suddenly ‘beachball’ for upwards of 30 seconds before responding to whatever it was I was trying to do.
Some examples of when this happens quite often…
– Selecting items in Sequence and choosing to Nest them.
– Saving a project in Color, beachballs for 30-seconds or so before Color save progress bar even comes up.
– Moving to another location in the timeline (sometimes).It’s not just FCP and Color (although that’s where I notice it most). While playing out a sequence for client viewing in Avid earlier in the week the system would beachball for a minute or so every 10-15 minutes – completely stopping playback.
The system isn’t locking up entirely, just one application (the entire time I’ve been writing this post FCP has been displaying stalled trying to nest three clips).
What’s going on?
I don’t really know enough about Macs to know where to look.
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13 Replies
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After waiting more than 10 minutes it was pretty evident that FCP had completely hung. I decided to force-quit.
This is pretty frustrating. Unfortunately I’m really up against heavy deadline pressure at the moment, and don’t have a lot of time to research the issue, so any pointers would be hugely advantageous.
Mac OS X 10.4.11
FCP 6.0.2
Quicktime 7.3.1Eight Core 3GHz Powermac
5GB RAM -
Open the activity monitor in the utilities folder. Sort by processing power and see if some other application or task is eating up your processors. I’ve seen it where a dashboard widget was using an insane about of processing power. Then you can force quit that item.
Did that help?
-Russ
Russell Lasson
Kaleidoscope Pictures
Provo, UT -
One other thing…
Did you upgrade this computer to Leopard or was it purchased new with Leopard on it?
What is version of Leopard and the software installed?
How much memory do you have and how is it installed?
_______________________________
Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com
https://blogs.creativecow.net/waynecarey -
[Russell Lasson] “Open the activity monitor in the utilities folder. Sort by processing power and see if some other application or task is eating up your processors.”
I don’t think it’s that, because the system is still responsive and other applications run just fine, it’s only the current app (typically FCP or Color) that is hanging.
I will pop open the activity monitor next time though and see what the processor ulitisation is like.
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No Leopard at all (it shipped with 10.4.10, including upgrade disc for Leopard).
We’re restricted to 10.4.11 for Avid support.
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I have a similar thing happen when a external harddrive is spinning up, the hard drive contains no media or render files, yet when it spins up it stalls FCP for a few seconds. This may be completely unrelated, but I thought it might provide a little insight
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Hi Dylan,
Do you use DiskWarrior or TechTools?Mac OX 10.5.2-FC 6.02-QT 7.4.1
G5 2x2Gh 4GbRAM-BlackMagic Extreme
PMBP 17″Core2Duo 4GbRAM-AJA ioHD
JVC DTV-17″
SONY EX-1 . SONY PD170
..and always a big mess on top of the table. -
Negative on both counts.
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So Dylan,
My best advice: Get your self one of those applications.
No way the applications run well if your System is not optimized.
You dedicate 20 minutes every two weeks to clean your System directories and no “beachballing”, no crashes, no need to trash any preference.
Really, i don’t know how is possible to work with MacOX without any of those utilities.Mac OX 10.5.2-FC 6.02-QT 7.4.1
G5 2x2Gh 4GbRAM-BlackMagic Extreme
PMBP 17″Core2Duo 4GbRAM-AJA ioHD
JVC DTV-17″
SONY EX-1 . SONY PD170
..and always a big mess on top of the table. -
I did look at DiskWarrior recently, but as someone who’s not that familiar with OS X it’s really hard to actually figure out what it is for and how necessary it is – ‘rebuilding directories’ means nothing useful to me really, doesn’t make a lot of sense in any context I have about what a directory is.
In a month or so (hopefully) when Avid Media Composer 3 ships, we’ll be rebuilding the system with Leopard also.
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