• Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

  Final Cut Pro 4 trouble

  Posted by Shiraz Prince on January 17, 2011 at 3:17 pm

  Dear All

  I am old school and still using Final Cut pro 4 (i know… and I will be upgrading my system very soon). My apologies for such a long post but its is complicated and if I don’t list everthing you may not be able to help me.
  My system specs are 2.0 dual core G5, 2.5 Gb RAM. The issue I have at the moment is that I am working on this 6 hours long project on Final Cut pro 4. I worked on similar project last year and it worked fine. but now its giving me lot of troubles. I have done most of normal editing, with not much effects being used. I am now working on hightlights and using quite few effects (like reducing speed of the clips, using silk and fog effect, tints, split screen etc etc) I have listed few issues below for your attention:
  1. If I double click on the effect final cut pro crashes.
  2. When I try to reduce the speed of the clip it give me general error or end of memory error.
  3. When I try to reduce speed on the canvas it will show the what you choose initially but when you play it, it goes back or forward the time. So I will be looking at something totally different to what I cut initially(this is very annyoing one)
  4. If I try to change the color of tint, the colors dock appears with everything black but I can’t change any colors final cut freezes.
  5. I can not change text color any more. Same thing happes color dock will appear all black doesn’t let me change anything and then it freezes.

  I did similar project last year on 512 RAM and it worked fine but now with this project I am having lot of trouble.
  1. I have already put in additionl memomry and now I have 2.5 gb
  2. I have deleted com.apple.finalcutpro file from preference
  3. I have also deleted final cut pro user data folder.

  Next I am looking to do following:
  1. Safe reboot once again (I did it once before putting new RAM in)
  2. Break the project down in to 6 independent projects by copying everything from timeline and pasting it on another timeline and then saving that as separte project… Please let me know if that would help
  3. Will try to reinstall my final cut pro 4. (I will have to buy final cut pro 4 from somewhere) But at the same time I do not want to loose any work I have done so far, while reinstalling. Please advise me the safest option.
  4. Export everything from each sequence from timeline to Quick time and then import that back into another project for rest of the project.. Not sure if that will help but someone advised me.
  5. My drive where OS 10.3 is running from is 160GB and now I have about 52 GB left. The project is saved on another internal hard drive (1 TB) which I recently bought and installed internally. I will try to reduce bit more space on the drive where operating system is installed.

  Please help me if you can.

  Thanks

  Shiraz

  Shiraz Prince replied 15 years, 7 months ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Steve Eisen

  January 17, 2011 at 5:03 pm

  Your software is very old. FCP 4 did not support timelines longer than 4 hours. It might even be 3 hours.

  I would suggest creating shorter sequences.

  You have the bare minimum requirements for working with FCP.

  Never capture to your system drive.

  I hope you are going to be updating your very soon. Current systems and software are much more stable.

  Steve Eisen
  Eisen Video Productions
  Vice President
  Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group
• 

  Michael Sacci

  January 17, 2011 at 6:26 pm

  [Shiraz Prince] “1. Safe reboot once again (I did it once before putting new RAM in)”
  You only rebooted once? But if your reboots is hanging or giving you a kernal panic you may have bad memory sticks.

  I think the first course of action it to
  1) first thing, put all the footage on an ext FW800 drive, these are super cheap these days, do not get a USB Drive, you need a FW800. This needs to be your FCP scratch drive also so your renders go to it.

  2) Make smaller sequences (if you project is really big you may want to do that too. First thing in the finder make a copy of your project file add (PARTS) to the name of the new project file and work with this one.
  Close the Sequence in FCP and then Duplicate it 6 Times. Name the original one with (ORIGINAL) at the end and then the copies, (part 1), (part 2) and so on. Start deleting the footage from each sequence so you have it divided up as you think is best. Make sure you are saving after each step. At the end do a save and then a save as so you have a copy. See it this works. Then if it is still giving you issues you can break each sequence into its own project by doing a save as and then deleting the other sequences.
• 

  Shiraz Prince

  January 17, 2011 at 8:31 pm

  Thanks Guys

  I will give this a go and let you know how I get on.

  Cheers

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