FCP 7 XDCAM EX woes…still…

[Steve Connor]

Have you tried turning off thumbnails in the timeline, this stopped the crashes for me.

Steve Connor
Adrenalin Television

Have you tried “Search Posts”? Enlightenment may be there.

[Rafael Amador]

Hi Jim,
I would start by making a bit of system cleaning: Permisions, rebuilding directories, etc.
rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Jim Blokland]

Hi guys:

Thanks for your responses so far. I have tried turning off thumbnails, doesn’t seem to make a big difference. I have also repaired permissions, no difference. Is there software for rebuilding directories you can point me to?

Last night I did a clean install of Snow Leopard and FCP and the Matrox 2.0 driver on a bare drive. Worked okay at first, but then it began to crash too. 4 times within a half-hour. The sequences are only 20 minutes long maximum, and the project files are only about 30 MB, so that shouldn’t be the issue.

I’m going to try splitting up the media onto two drives next, see what happens. I’ll post back then.

Any other advice most welcome.

Best, JIM.

Snow Leopard 10.6.4
Mac Pro Octo Westmere
14 GB RAM
ATI Radeon 5870
Matrox MX02 Mini
Seritek 4 TB RAID
AVID MEDIA COMPOSER 5 // FCS3

[Andrew Gurney]

I’m currently working on a 7 camera series with XDCAM EX footage. We had significant problems with System Crashes on all 4 of our systems using FCP 7.

Our solution was to create offline versions of all of our footage using the Apple ProRes 422 Proxy codec.

If you can afford the hard drive space I would recommend doing that. It’s a fairly straight forward process of simply media managing the Source Folder and recompressing with the new codec. Then you just reconnect your source folder to the new files. Even our multi-clips were updated correctly, it was almost too easy. I haven’t had a system crash since we did this 3 weeks ago.

Took a full day to do 1 TB of footage and it required another TB of hard drive space for the proxies, so we usually do an Episode over the weekend.

[Jim Blokland]

Hi Andrew:

Thanks so much for this info. Finally, something that makes sense to me. I’m working on a doc feature, with 80+ hours of material — but it will be worth it to not have to deal with the incessant crashes.

I’ll post back when I have (hopefully good) news.

PS: Are you pretty happy with the look of the proxy ProRes? Good enough for screenings on decent-sized screens?

Best, JIM.

Snow Leopard 10.6.4
Mac Pro Octo Westmere
14 GB RAM
ATI Radeon 5870
Matrox MX02 Mini
Seritek 4 TB RAID
AVID MEDIA COMPOSER 5 // FCS3

[Sam Cole]

When I reported similar issues on this forum I was told by the ‘Apple Cult’ that it was my system and should get a ‘proper’ system integrator as “no one else reports these problems”.
Then they told me it was “because I was ‘down under’ and everything worked in reverse”. Are you in Aussieland? Are you using the same ‘system integrator’ as I am?
Well after it was all looked at by numerous engineers it was determined that it is a FCP 7/snow leopard bug with memory management and codec.

I would love to stand behind one of these ‘Apple Cult Members’ when their system crashes to see what they say then. Most of their pictures are at the top of this forum.

My boss warned me about them and I didn’t listen.

Sam Cole
On line Mastering Facility
FCP, Avid, Adobe
Sydney, Australia

[Steve Connor]

Not sure that rant is particularly helpful to the OP.

Steve Connor
Adrenalin Television

Have you tried “Search Posts”? Enlightenment may be there.

[Jim Blokland]

Hey Sam:

Thanks for your note. I understand the frustration. Especially when it seems like you’re the only one having the issue. I hope Apple fixes this in a future software iteration. I’m not a huge fan of XDCAM to begin with, but I’m sure I’ll be seeing more footage shot with that codec in future — and I’d like to know that my brand-spanking new Octo can deal with it without having to transcode to ProRes every time.

Best, JIM.

Snow Leopard 10.6.4
Mac Pro Octo Westmere
14 GB RAM
ATI Radeon 5870
Matrox MX02 Mini
Seritek 4 TB RAID
AVID MEDIA COMPOSER 5 // FCS3

[Sam Cole]

[Steve Connor] “Not sure that rant is particularly helpful to the OP.”

It wasn’t a rant but FACT.

And if you read it correctly you will see it WAS a help as the OP no longer has to keep stripping his system down to fix his problem; he just has to wait for a fix which from what I understand won’t be until the next version of FCP which is a major rewrite (another way of saying ‘awesome’).

Sam Cole
On line Mastering Facility
FCP, Avid, Adobe
Sydney, Australia

[Sam Cole]

[Jim Blokland] “I understand the frustration”

Hey Jim – the frustration comes from a. Apple not fessin’ up regarding the issue and b. the ‘apple clan’ always leaping to their defence to gain brownie points from an organisation that doesn’t keep score.

Even more frustrating is when Sony bring out a native method of dealing with XDCAM (cinemon) and while you can bring the MP4 files directly into the timeline, applying filters (eg. green screen) is almost unworkable because the controls are so sluggish!

FCP 8, 8 x 8 = 64, now that is a good number and all our problems will be solved (for a little while).

Sam Cole
On line Mastering Facility
FCP, Avid, Adobe
Sydney, Australia