Do you have 4GB RAM? Are you crashing?

[Steven Sanders]

I sure will,

Tomorrow or the day after I will replace the Blackmagic with a Kona 3. If I still have the same problem, then I guess we’re just gonna have to wait until the solution comes in the form of a new OS (soon to be released) or less evasive: FCP 6.0.2., also on the way.
I’ll keep you all posted.

StvN

[Walter Biscardi]

[Mike Parfit] “But only, of course, with the Kona card in the machine. It has become routine for me to remove the card when I have to do a long render. I can’t imagine that the contacts on the card can survive a lot of removing and replacing.”

That is not good at all for the card. We have Konas in all of our systems with very few crashes as noted in my first post, but we only run external RAIDS on all our systems.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.

All Things Apple Podcast! https://cowcast.creativecow.net/all_things_apple/index.html

Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi

[Francois Stark]

After reading through this thread there seems to be a few common elements:

* FCP with a capture card – AJA or BM
* Lots of RAM
* Internal drive arrays
* Mac Pro and to a lesser extent G5’s
* Long renders

Add all this together an what do you get?

HEAT!
The Capture card gives off heat, Lots of RAM as well, Drive arrays, and the CPU’s a lot more heat when rendering.

What is the result of this heat?

* The capture cards could be running a lot hotter than they were designed for
* The PSU has to supply power to generate all this heat – it could also not be up to supplying all this power continously when rendering

I have many G5’s running FCP, and two G5’s running Pro Tools. They are all quite stable – average about one-three crashes per month. Not too bad. None of them have internal drive arrays. Most have two internal drives – one boot and one general data and backup drive. Most have 2.5 to 3.5 GB RAM. All have LSi fibre channel cards for our SAN.

I have only one Mac Pro. It has had a AJA Kona LHe and LSe card, 3 GB RAM and has always had an internal 3 drive 1.5TB array. It used to freeze up at random times. It has had two motherboard replacements, one CPU and one CPU heatsink replaced. It seems the problems have at last been solved since it’s been running fine without a fibre channel card, with a Kona LSe card for the past two weeks. Next step is to get it back onto our SAN. But if it gets unstable again, I’m going yo take out the three drive internal array and see if it improves the situation.

Maybe it’s the heat or the PSU!

Regards
Francois

[Walter Biscardi]

[Francois Stark] “* The capture cards could be running a lot hotter than they were designed for”

I would find this the most doubtful. We have three AJA Kona systems and I’ve regularly done 48 hour renders on at least two of them when I do animations.

Our G5 Quad tops out around 109 degrees while the Mac Pro only runs at 81 degrees, both running the Kona 3. Both are running upgraded graphics boards which put out the most heat of anything in the machines. Both are fully populated with PCI-X boards.

Not sure what the temps are on the G5 Dual 2 with the Kona 2 as we don’t have the temperature software in there.

I would strongly suspect internal RAID’s as a major culprit of heat or instability, which is why I never run them.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.

All Things Apple Podcast! https://cowcast.creativecow.net/all_things_apple/index.html

Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi

[Steven Sanders]

Hi Guys, Im back with the results of our test.

The first thing we did was remove the Blackmagic codecs / software from the machine, but leave the card in the slot. We repeated the rendering tests and no matter how much we tried, we could not force FCP to crash while it was rendering. Installing the codecs back, and the problem came back. Well, well, well…
Installing the Kona codecs and the cards resulted in a stable system.

We directed the problem towards the people from Blackmagic and their answer was that it was Apple’s fault. Not very constructive. So we decided to swith to AJA. It seems to work in my system and that’s the most importing thing for me, as I have to meet deadlines almost every day.

Greetz

StvN

[Stephen Hopes]

Hi Walter,
It’s so gratifying to read these posts…My life has been a nightmare for months, pretty much since upgrading our two edit suites to FCS 2 and 3Ghz Intel Mac Pros.. We use ATTO with Huge Systems and Blackmagic HD Extreme all with the latest drivers.

We make long form documentaries 90 minutes average and rendering is exactly the same as everyone is describing.. I’ve taken out all 3rd party plugins tried several reinstalls of everything and nothing is working, my partner and I have to sit through these hellish renders (2 or 3 minutes at a time) overnight usually, sometimes to find that the render files have all disappeared the following morning.

I can’t export a sequence with Compressor, I have to export a reference movie and put that to work in Compressor…And nothing from Apple on this…

I got so fed up recently that I bought a G5 2.5Ghz quad on ebay and went back to an old FCP5.1 project file of our current project to see if it would work ok…and voila not even a hint of instability, overnight renders perfectly and then working for days with no crashes at all none….So we have a brand new Mac Pro sitting in the corner doing nothing, with 4Gb’s of ram I might add, and we’ve had to redo all the editing of the project twice because the 6.01 project file isn’t backwards compaptible…
If you have any sway at all with the powers that be at Apple can you try to get some movement on this…
We’re seriously considering moving to the other side….AVID…aarrrrrgh!!!

Steve Hopes
Sydney, Australia

[Erik Mickelson]

Has anyone come up with a solution?
I am having the same issues. My FCP project is only 3.5 minutes long. I have to render it out in 3 parts. Not good.

Dual Core 2 Duo 3.0Ghz, 6GB ram, 2x500GB Raid, Tiger 10.4.11, FCP 5.1.4