Do large projects make FCP run out of memory?

[Mark Maness]

This depends on several things.

How large is your project file? How many hours of footage is logged and captured? Is your media and and other files associated with this project in a central organized location?

Any these can add to this type of issue.

Usually, its best to pair down any unused footage and consolidate as best as possible. You can have many projects to reach final output. This isn’t unusual at all.

_______________________________

Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com
https://blogs.creativecow.net/waynecarey

[Mark Raudonis]

A 50Mb project size is NOT unusually large. We’ve gone up to 250-300 Mb before we start to see issues. 5,000 clips is also not that out of the ordinary.

I’m guessing that you have something corrupt in that project. Can you dig back into the auto save vault and find an earlier project that worked?

Also, the amount of RAM you have will affect the computer’s ability to open and sustain larger projects. We run with 4 gigs of RAM for most of our systems.

Hope that helps.

Mark

[Mark Maness]

Good point! Memory can be your issue.

On a Mac Pro, you need to have memory sizes of 4 gig, 8 gig, or 16 gig. On a Mac Pro Octocore system, I’ve heard that you need it to be 8 gig for a minimum using FCP.

My system is a Mac Pro Quad 3.0 and it went bonkers until I upgraded it to 8 gig. It came configured with 7 gig. I had no RT support in FCP until I went to 8 gig.

_______________________________

Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com
https://blogs.creativecow.net/waynecarey

[David Roth weiss]

What the other fellows didn’t mention was anything about the number of daisy chained firewire drives and/or the available space on those hard drives. Firewire is imperfect at best, and far from perfect when not at at its best. So, if you are using numerous drives and one or more of those is nearly maxed-out, the performance of your entire system will suffer, especially when editing HDV.

Even though HDV is only the file size of DV, its processing demands far exceed those of DV. So, those needs, combined with the drag of bogged-down firewire on the motherboard, combine to make the entire computer slow.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Chris Borjis]

I just ran into some fcp 6 slugishness the other day.

all media was about 6, 40 minute ProRes SD clips
all stored on a 4GB fibre channel array.

There were two timelines, one was 20 minutes, the other
about 24 minutes and a 10 minute timeline.

getting around the 15 minute mark I noticed when I did an insert edit the cursor would advance but the clip would not show until I hit the back arrow or scrubbed. If i let it just sit it would take several second before the inserted clip would appear.

The interface became sluggish as well. Just grabbing a clip from a bin would not work, it would not drag over.

several times I had to close fcp and re-open it again.

I couldn’t believe it was this sluggish for such a small SD project. I wonder if its a prores issue.

[Chris Elley]

We are having the exact same problems on a MacPro 8-core with 8GB of RAM running FCP 6.0.2. SATA storage with plenty of space available. Healthy system drive, etc. Tiger.

We have 100 hours of DVCPRO HD footage in the project and it refuses to show video on playback, even after turning off external video output. The only thing that comes up in the preview window is bright green. “Out of Memory” is one of a handful of error messages that can pop up. We can see all bins and navigate about the project, but none of the video or audio will actually play.

We have trashed preferences and rebuilt the project a few times with the same results. We noticed the phenomenon set in around 70 or 80 hours of DVCPRO HD footage. I’m not sure what the file size was at that time, but with all 100 hours the FCP file is around 135 MB.

The only workaround we have found is to break the large project into several smaller projects. This method has produced absolutely no error messages and beautiful performance, reaffirming the system’s performance. However, not all projects can be conveniently broken up, and this worries us for the future. Has anyone been able to pinpoint the source of these errors?

About Memory: We’ve been told that FCP (and other apps) max out at 4GB of usable memory. 1.5 is for background framework and up to 2.5 is user definable in FCP. Apparently, the only benefit beyond 4GB is the ability for the system to run other applications simultaneously. Does anyone concur?

Thanks,
Chris Elley
Electro-Fish Media LLC
Austin, Texas

[Jaap Verdenius]

Right, that was the point I was wondering about: If the 4 GB memory limit is a problem for FCP, in other words if a project can become too large for it to handle, in particular if the number of (references to) media files gets too large.
It would be good to know because if THAT is the problem it is also clear that splitting the project into subprojects is indeed the way to go.

By the way, I checked most of the points that were made earlier in this thread; but the disks are not daisychained; actually there is only one, it is 60% full and its measured read/write speed averages 60 MB/sec; there are no other peripherals that might drag performance down; and both systems are really fresh and new. In short, there is no simple explanation (except the corrupt file, but how to verify/falsify corruption…?)

Jaap

Jaap

[13]

Also make sure the project file is not on the same drive as the media.

[Chris Elley]

I’m not convinced by the corrupt file theory only because we have started over fresh a few times with the same results. That makes me lean toward a limitation of the application and OS, but it sounds like confirmation from others would help.

Is anyone out there successfully editing very large projects that are comparable to the ones mentioned in this thread?

Thanks,
Chris

[Chris Borjis]

[Chris Elley] “Is anyone out there successfully editing very large projects that are comparable to the ones mentioned in this thread?”

I think whats happening is we are maxing out final cuts capabilities.

People here like Shane Ross are doing long form projects on a regular basis and not having these issues. He advocates breaking these segments down into smaller sections then doing a final nested sequence of all segments for edit to tape. I think he has a training DVD on just how to deal with large projects.

I could be wrong but I think even Avid systems have to do this.

When FCP is updated to perform properly with Leopard, this may no longer be an issue.