Do you have 4GB RAM? Are you crashing?

[Jeremy Garchow]

I’ve had a couple of G5s and now a MacPro. g5s have had Kona 2s and 3Xs. The MacPro has a Kona 3. G5s 4GBs of RAM, MAcPro has 16GB. No constant crashes related to the Kona.

Are you sure there’s nothing else on your system that you aren’t telling us about?

Something little that might not be video related? WoW? Napster? Qt 7.2?

[Michael Alberts]

I had a considerable amount of issues when rendering a ProRes 422 SD show. Little did I know that using ProRes would require me to render the entire show in order to output to tape. Every shot in the show had the 3 Way color corrector applied. That’s the last time I’ll ever work in ProRes. I can complete a show faster when it’s in DVCProHD.
Back to the render problem. We found that we had to render in smaller 3 minute chunks from the timeline in order to prevent crashing. If we tried to render a 4 or 5 minute chunk FCP 6 would just crash. We’re working on a MacPro quad 3Ghz machine w/8GB or RAM. We also were having playback issues when tyring to playback ProRes422HQ HD material. We were getting dropped frames. If we scaled the computer back to 2GB of RAM playback was fine.

Most of our problems seem to be related to working in any form of ProRes. We rarely get crashing when working in any other SD or HD format. But RAM is somehow connected to the crashing and playback problem. All RAM tests ok.

Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.

[Mike Parfit]

Hi, Jerry,

Logic board does come to mind, and unfortunately we have to deliver our 2-hour show in 2 weeks so it is impossible to lose the use of the machine, crippled as things are, for the time it would take to have it diagnosed. However, the consistency of the problem between the two different machines, plus the fact that it works OK at 2 GB, plus the fact that Compressor runs flawlessly for many many hours at a time using the machine’s full bandwith as shown in the activity monitor, would seem to indicate to me that a logic board problem is only a remote possibility. But clearly when the work’s done we’ll have it checked out.

And we have removed and reinstalled the various iterations of the Kona 3 drivers many, many times over the 16 months that this problem has existed.

Let me ask you one other thing — do you do a lot of HDV with those many machines you’re using? I am using HDV very heavily, and I’ve wondered if that could be a contributing factor.

Thanks,

Mike

[Jeremy Garchow]

What kind of drive system do you have?

[Mike Parfit]

QT 7.2?

I don’t have anything other than FC Studio on this machine. Same with our G5.

I have a Mac Book Pro that has a few mainstream things on it like Microsoft Office, but the Mac Book Pro runs Final Cut 6 flawlessly and never crashes, so I use it to do some of my renders.

But what’s this about QT 7.2? I had seen a couple of references to people having some problems, but not lots. Also, this problem has been going on for 16 months in exactly the same form and frequency on two machines, so it’s hard to imagine that QT 7.2 is related to it. Also, we have QT 7.2 on the Mac Book Pro, and, again, no crashes. 2 GB memory in that machine.

Please note Michael Alberts’s post. This is exactly it. We can render short clips forever. This is fine for some things. It’s not even doable for others. And we also have crashes sometimes when I scroll the play head across an unrendered clip. Boom, it’s gone.

Please note that for him, too, going to 2 GB RAM helps.

Something is going on here.

Thanks,

Mike

[Mike Parfit]

For drives we have a 500 GB Seagate System drive and 3 internal Seagate 750s in raid 0.

However, the same exact problem occurred on our G5 with 2 500s in raid 0 and various external firewires.

Thanks,

Mike

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Mike Parfit] “Something is going on here.”

What drive system do you have?

[Jeremy Garchow]

Cool, because for a while there was a 2GB RAM limit on ATTO cards. Just making sure it wasn’t that.

Jeremy

[Jerry Hofmann]

A lot of HDV passes thru those machines. FCP 6 and pro res has helped with speed, but they’ve been stable all along…

I’ve been editing some HDV footage a lot this summer, and my machine’s been stable… has 8 gigs of RAM.

Jerry

Apple Certified Trainer

Author: “Jerry Hofmann on Final Cut Pro 4” Click here

Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D

[Jason Porthouse]

[Mike Parfit] “For drives we have a 500 GB Seagate System drive and 3 internal Seagate 750s in raid 0”

Long shot, but didn’t barefeats encounter problems with earlier seagate drives in a 3-way stripe? I seem to remember that one somewhere…

I understand the newer drives don’t have this problem (at least I hope so ’cause that’s what I’ve got!)

Jason

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Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*