FCP 7 strange playback issue gets worse over time

[Oliver Timm]

10.6 and 10.7 I am having ‘this’ issue. Overall degrading performance until FCP7 is unusable and nothing apart from restarting the mac pro resolves it. At which point it scrubs and plays back to 2 external monitors …. and the cycle continues until performance is awful and I restart again. These are 422 and 422 HQ 1080 sequences matched to the source footage which is the same.

On a mac pro we have a SAS attached storage and have tried 2x Kona Lhe and Lhi.

On a new iMac (2012) with Thunderbolt storage and an AJA IO XT thunderbolt box.

Over time something gets worse and a restart fixes it. Seems to be the common denominator in this thread and as far as I can tell no one has gotten to the bottom of it??

Anyone? Bueller?

[Joseph Hung]

Could be drive health or RAM health. Usually I find that when weird problems like this arise, and everything says it’s fine, it’s something to do with a drive or memory stick, etc. Run some testing software to determine if a drive or stick is dying.
It shouldn’t be your cabling, but I would just double check your cables to rule out that problem, as cables do go bad from time to time.

work.tulpapictures.com
Twitter/Vimeo/Facebook: @TulpaPictures

Mac Pro 3.0 GHz 8-Core Intel Xeon (2,1) 16GB RAM
Macbook Pro 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7 (8,2) 4 GB RAM
OSX 10.6.8
FCS3
CS5.5
Blackmagic Intensity Pro
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 1GB VRAM
RocketRAID 4322 via dual MiniSAS
ProAvio 8TB RAID 5 Dual Mini-SAS
Panasonic Lumix GH2 (hacked) & GH3, Canon 5DMKII & III, 7D, Panasonic HVX200A, Panasonic DVX100A

[David Roth weiss]

The symptoms you describe sound as though you may have either updated the FCP software or the OS over the top of a prior version. Is that the case?

David Roth Weiss
ProMax Systems
Burbank
DRW@ProMax.com

Sales | Integration | Support

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Oliver Timm]

The mac pro – was on 10.6 and I did upgrade it to 10.7, though the symptoms were present before the upgrade. I will un-install fcp7 and do a re-install.

The iMac was new, clean install of 10.8.4 on which I installed fcp7. It seems funny that across both machines it is a persistent set of symptoms. On this iMac I did update 10.8.4. –> to 10.8.5 while FCP7 was installed.

When you mention updating or upgrading do you mean point increments e.g 10.8.4 to 10.8.5 ?
Or the major updates of OS 10.6 to 10.7 or 10.8 ?

I will do a memory test today on the mac pro, I have done numerous drive tests. The only common thing across the 2 machines is a incremental point upgrade.

Let you know how we travel, thanks for your input!