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FCP 5 project taking forever to launch
Hello,
I’m working on a documentary with a huge amount of dv media on three different firewire drives, one a 465 Gig, the other two are 232 gigs. I’m near the end of the movie and yesterday while playing the sequence, the video and audio were breaking up, causing the screen to go white momentarily, and I was getting the dropped frames warning constantly. This maybe happened once or twice in the six months of working on this project.
I did some project maintenance – copying bins and old sequences to a new project, and eliminating almost everything except the final sequence. This seemed to be going fine, but towards the end of moving bins, final cut started to move a lot slower. Now, it’s the next day and I’m trying to open the project and it’s taken over an hour and a half to open, with the status bar for reading the project moving up a percentage or two every twenty minutes or so. I restarted, trashed preferences, and repaired disks. Now the project has been stuck on 19% for the last half hour.
The computer is a dual 2.7 GHz Power PC G5, with 2.5 GB DDR SDRAM; Final Cut 5.0.4, Quicktime 7.0.4, and OS 10.4.5.
Any ideas? My producer’s patience with me is fading quickly.
Thank you,
Jake
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15 Replies
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You may have a corrupted project file. Or you may have many, many sequences open. Or you may have edited portions of long sequences into other sequences, multiple times.
Try opening a recent project from the autosave vault. If you have have a lot of sequences open, close the Canvas, before you close the project.
Don’t cut sequences into pieces for use in other sequences.
Leave the project open and don’t shut down the application.
All the best,
Tom
Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 2 Editing Workshop” Class on Demand “Complete Training for FCP5” DVD
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After our project files get around 120 MB+ then it starts to slow WAY down on launch. Do what Tom suggest, and it should clean it up and get things peppy again.
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Get off firewire drives.
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Tom,
I only had the one sequence I was working on open when I shut down yesterday. I tried opening all of the autosaved projects from yesterday, and I got the same result. However, I tried opening the project on another computer that has final cut, and it opened instantly. Does this mean it might be corrupt media?
Thanks for all your help,
Jake
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I apologize if I sound naive, but what do you mean, get off firewire drives?
jake
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Without the media it will obviously launch very quickly. It may be a corrupt media file or a render file, though that usually produces a different symptom. How big is the project file? Is it time to split it into pieces. Large projects with a lot of media need a lot of pre=planning to handle the media efficiently.
All the best,
Tom
Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 2 Editing Workshop” Class on Demand “Complete Training for FCP5” DVD
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Tom,
The project file is 18 MB. The only thing in the project is two copies of the sequence (the sequence being about 90 minutes long) and three other, much smaller sequences.
Jake
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You haven’t marked In and Out points in one long sequence and cut it multiple times into another sequence, have you?
If not, I’d look at a media or a drive issue. Might be time for Disk Warrior.
All the best,
Tom
Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 2 Editing Workshop” Class on Demand “Complete Training for FCP5” DVD
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Tom,
The only adding to the sequence from another was occasionally lassoing/copying/pasting some clips from a smaller sequence into the main one. I never marked in to out and cut one in.
I tried disk warrior on the three drives. Two are fine; the third had errors. When disk warrior tried to fix and replace them, right at the very end, the application quit. I’ve tried three times on this drive, the same thing happens each time.
I tried dragging the problematic drive to the trash. The project now opens quickly, with the media referenced on the missing drive becoming offline, but the sequence plays fine with the media that’s there. Is there a way to isolate what might be corrupt media on the problematic drive?
Sorry for all the questions,
Jake
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[JakeD68] “what do you mean, get off firewire drives?”
What he means is that firewire drives are notoriously unreliable and prone to crash just when you can least afford it… like now when you’re at the end of the project.
Firewire drives are NOT recommended for use with FCP by Apple (even though everyone uses them). Your experience is exactly why Apple says “don’t do it”.
By the way, you do have a back up for your media, right? Every hard drive ever made WILL die… it’s just a question of when. So you’ve got to ask yourself (Just like Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry), “Do you feel lucky today? Do ya?”
Good luck.
Mark
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