Da Vinci freezes then crashes

[Joseph Owens]

[David Baudry] “it started to freeze each time i press play”

Normally I associate this behaviour with overloading the call for data from the source drive or exceeding the VRAM associated with the GPU. You appear to be running a single Graphics card, the iMac internal nVidia GT55M. Are you sure this is not the GT755M with 1 GB of VRAM? If so, this card would be seriously under-powered.

You can correlate your system with the DaVinci Resolve on iMac configuration guide. The information mostly relevant to the late 2012 27″ iMac stresses a model with a minimum of 2GB of GPU memory and to make absolutely sure you are running in 64-bit kernel.

If you are using a compressed codec, the CPU can also become seriously overloaded — even Apple ProRes presents a challenge for a single-GPU system, but RED or H264 would likely exceed the capability of an all-in-one computing platform.

As far as the 2012 iMac is concerned, the official position of BMD is (quoting from the 2013 config guide):
“…provides a flexible and simple desktop workhorse for real time previewing, grading and finishing material up to and including HD. It can also provide a good platform to review and grade higher resolution than HD images which you can render at slower than real time in the iMac. Alternatively use it as a grading station, then move the project to a faster hardware platform such as the MacPro for rendering.”

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.