Beachballing

[Dylan Reeve]

[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.”

So I did this when I was trying to save in Color (where it ‘beachballs’ for about 30-60 seconds every time) – it showed no huge processor usage, but it did show Color as ‘not responding’ which went away after the beachball stopped and the Color save progress bar came up.

I have experienced similar on another Mac Pro, also with FCP. It’s most frustrating when it happens when trying to do something seemingly so simple, like moving down the timeline, or clicking on a dropdown option in a dialogue box or something.

I’ll look into DiskWarrior or the other application that was suggested, and will upgrade to Leopard when Avid supports it.

[Kevin Monahan]

Dylan,
Put yourself on a weekly maintenance program. Run Disk Utility (while booting from the disk) and Disk Warrior as part of that process. Delete any files you will not be using. Easily done when sipping your morning coffee and it’s good for your piece of mind.

Kevin Monahan
http://www.fcpworld.com
Author – Motion Graphics and Effects in Final Cut Pro

[Mitch Ives]

Is this a new 2008 8-core or the 2007 model?

If it’s a 2008, they don’t seem to like odd ram config’s. Pull out the 1GB and drop down to 4GB (I assume it’s a pair of 2GB modules). Our 2008 was killing us when we had 10GB of ram. Removing the original ram and dropping back to a pair of matched 4GB modules stopped a lot of the crashing and beach balls. Not all of it is gone, especially on long renders, but it’s at least usable now.

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.
mitch@insightproductions.com