desperate: FCPX hangs on boot up

[Bill Davis]

[Jack Niedenthal] “Hi Bill,
So what should I do? Open the event, let the beach ball spin as it tries to sort itself out, then come back (many?) hours later to see if it is there spinning? How much time should I give it?”

Well, what does the Render Manager say is happening behind the scenes?

(Clicking on the dashboard circular countdown timer)

That will typically show you what’s happening in the background.

Give that some significant time. If it’s incremented at all – say from zero to 1 percent over an hour – then at least you know that background processing is what’s killing you.

Maybe with all that massive amount of footage, it would be smarter to break it up into smaller chunks and both import and process those so you can get to work – and then process similar smaller batches of stuff in chunks over days – rather than trying to suck in EVERYTHING and creating a transcoding queue that might take dozens or even hundreds of hours for the program to fully process?

The X process of reading content in and letting you work with rapid Proxies is a wonderful design – to a point. If you have a normal length program, it’s going to make your productivity soar.

But I wouldn’t mistake it on a HUGE project for “hey, all all my stuff’s here so it must be ready to go!” because it’s often not. At least until it gets all the transcoding done you functionally told it to do when you linked it to some MASSIVE pot of content.

Let us know how things proceed.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Jack Niedenthal]

the meter is at 100%, it appears nothing is going on in the background. I just have a little window at the top that says “loading MyFilm” event.

I am going to go to work today and just leave it like that. Last night I let it go for about 4 hours, but it never got loaded.

I have 6 other very small events that open fine, FCPX opens fine, I only get the issues when I go to load the “big” 700+GB event.

Jack Niedenthal
Microwave Films of the Marshall Islands
http://www.microwavefilms.org
iMac i7 using Lion 10.7.x, HPX 170 using only one 64GB card
I live on an island in the middle of the Pacific, YOU are my only resource.

[Marcus Samuel-gaskin]

Could be a long shot, but there can be issues with customised keyboard layouts. Try this

https://fcpx.tv/bugs.html

and this

https://fcpx.tv/troubleshooting.html

[Jack Niedenthal]

I just had a marvelous experience. Out of the blue I get an email from “Noah from Apple” asking if he might help resolve my issues. I almost peed myself. I have been working with Apple computers since 1984, have had participated in many Apple discussion forums over the years, but no one from Apple ever contacted me out of the blue–on a forum that is not even Apple sponsored– and asked if he could “help.” Man.

Anyway, it turns out that he believed the issue was with the events folder getting too bloated as I was working on 75 scenes for a full length feature and had them all as compound clips. I was starting to consolidate by combining a series of clips, for example, combining the compound clip for scenes 1-8 with scenes 9-14 so I could watch them play through. At any rate, this got way to bloated for FCPX to deal with.

First, Noah had me send them the Activity Monitor files for FCPX to see why it hangs when the program opens. Then I sent them the system profile from my computer and a snapshot of some of the FCPX files from my hard drive. Then I had to upload the currentversion.fcpevent file. They are still working on that and will let me know if it can be fixed.

Next, he had me take out the corrupted/bloated currentversion.fcpevent file, gave it a new name and had me put it outside the event folder as “original_currentversion,fcpevent”, then we put in a one week old version, renaming it currentversion.fcpevent. It opened! I am back from the ledge of a tall building! My wife is no longer afraid to leave the knives around!

And… I am buying my firstborn male child a plane ticket so he can go live with Noah, as promised.

And thank you, thank you, thank you CREATIVE COW and the fine people on this website!!!!!!!!!

Jack Niedenthal
Microwave Films of the Marshall Islands
http://www.microwavefilms.org
iMac i7 using Lion 10.7.x, HPX 170 using only one 64GB card
I live on an island in the middle of the Pacific, YOU are my only resource.

[Steve Connor]

Jack, glad you solved it and you also had a good experience with Apple as well. I’d just like to point out however that someone had already suggested swapping out the project file in a previous response on here!

Steve Connor
“The ripple command is just a workaround for not having a magnetic timelinel”
Adrenalin Television

[Jack Niedenthal]

Steve, yes this has been a huge relief. I should add that I followed that suggestion above and I couldn’t get it to work (not sure why)… Noah went through it step by step via Skype, even though it was well past his work hours on a Friday, as I live in Micronesia and am in a really crazy time zone.

Well, I have to go burn some incense in Noah’s honor now. What a day!

Jack Niedenthal
Microwave Films of the Marshall Islands
http://www.microwavefilms.org
iMac i7 using Lion 10.7.x, HPX 170 using only one 64GB card
I live on an island in the middle of the Pacific, YOU are my only resource.

[Craig Seeman]

[Jack Niedenthal] “I just had a marvelous experience. Out of the blue I get an email from “Noah from Apple” asking if he might help resolve my issues.”

OT But . . . Out of the blue . . . does this mean Noah from Apple is monitoring the forum here . . . or some other mode of communication occurred such as a support request? Sorry for being off topic but I this is interesting to me.

[Craig Seeman]

I wonder if this was a case of individual Event bloat.
Would the lesson learned be to work across multiple Events?

The old FCP think was putting everything into one project. That too could result in project bloat. People would then break it up into multiple smaller projects. The problem was such projects were independent for the most part.

In new FCPX think may be that, since any number of Events can tie to a Project and any number of Projects can tie to an Event (it’s that relational database thing) that it should be very easy to work across multiple smaller Events. In other words, in a multi scene movie or documentary, one might want to make each Scene into an Event. It’s easy enough to create new Events and move things around, much more so than in FCP7. It should be easy enough to break Events up as one progresses through, as needed.

All this cries for a more sophisticated Event manager though (even more than the one by Intelligent Assistance). I can’t help but think this is on the FCPX OSXSAN roadmap.

[Steve Connor]

[Craig Seeman] “OT But . . . Out of the blue . . . does this mean Noah from Apple is monitoring the forum here . . . or some other mode of communication occurred such as a support request? Sorry for being off topic but I this is interesting to me.
“

It’s been reported before that Apple have responded to problems aired on forums, I’ve had experience of this as well. They might not be as obviously active as Adobe on here, but they are around and in my experience with them, they clearly care about the performance of the product

Steve Connor
“The ripple command is just a workaround for not having a magnetic timelinel”
Adrenalin Television

[Craig Seeman]

[Steve Connor] “hey are around and in my experience with them, they clearly care about the performance of the product”

I don’t doubt that at all. I think it’s important to point that out with so many people saying “Apple doesn’t listen.” It is clear their ears are to this forum. It’s good when forum participants note that Apple is communicating privately to forum issues posts.