FCP 7.0.3 crashing like crazy when editing hi-def on my new 27″ iMac.

[Gary Milligan]

[wayne kurtz] “The apple store suggested loading the media directly on the internal HD (rather than use external FW or thunderbolt). As my internal HD is partioned, I have tried that suggestion. Still crashes with hi-def, but not with sd.”

It’s never a good idea to have your media on your system drive. Use an external with at least a firewire 800 connection.

[wayne kurtz] “The media was shot with sony pmw 350 at 1920×1080 and extracted with sony xd cam software. The compressor of the media is sony xdcam ex 1080i60 (35 mb/s vbr) at 29.97 fps”

I think you should be transcoding to ProRes 422. It’s a much more edit friendly codec (for FCP). What codec does your colleague use?

HTH

Gary

[William Carr]

1) Use external drive for Capture Scratch folder

2) Transcode all media to ProRes for editing

[Wayne Kurtz]

I will try to apple pro res. I know about not putting media on internal HD, but as the drive is portioned they said it is a separate drive and to try that, as going over FW still bot as fast and perhaps that reason for crashing.
Thanks for the tip

[William Carr]

As I understand it, partitioning is not the same as a separately spinning disk that carries your media and another that runs the Mac and apps.

Firewire is plenty fine for editing ProRes 422 HD files, especially if your external drive is a RAID 0 or better. RAID 0 drives are high capacity and cheap these days. I’ve been using FW and RAID 0 drives for years with far less powerful Macs than yours. No inherent reason for crashing at all.

[David Eaks]

[wayne kurtz] “I will try to apple pro res. I know about not putting media on internal HD, but as the drive is portioned they said it is a separate drive and to try that, as going over FW still bot as fast and perhaps that reason for crashing.”

While a partitioned hard drive is recognized and shows up in the OS as two separate drives, it is still physically one hard drive. So, this means that one hard drive has to access it’s “OS Partition” to run your OS and Apps and at the same time access the “Media Partition” for your HD Media while editing. Any firewire 800 7200 rpm drive (or better) used solely for your media will be a better situation than this. They are inexpensive, especially on the internet right now. While you are shopping for your new external drive today, you might as well grab an SDD and a 3.5″ adapter to use as your OS drive. The SSD does not really need to be that big, I’m getting by fine with 128GB SSD’s in both my Macs.

I also suggest you use Prores but even if it alleviates the problem, you’re still in direct violation of the #1 cardinal rule of editing, “keep media on a separate drive than the OS and Apps, and don’t fill the drive over 80% capacity” (or is the #1 rule about backups and redundancy? I forget).

I’m sorry that the “Genius” suggested a partition for your media, that is a terrible suggestion. The Apple Store is great for stuff like setting up a new iPad but not so much for setting up an editing suite.

[Michael Gissing]

The clue for me is the flashing green. I suspect your graphics card may be an issue. Apple recommend ATI.

Also what OS are you running. Snow Leopard is probably the safest for 7.0.3. If you are using Lion or ML it maybe less stable.

[Dave Jenkins]

I’ve edited XDCAM EX hundreds of time. I disagree with compressing to ProRes. It edits fine and it’s much smaller than Prores so it doesn’t chew up hard drive space as fast. I have edited from firewire drives without crashes but it was always attached to a MacPro, most of the time the media is a raid 0 HD that runs at about 200MB’s per second.

Dajen Productions, Santa Barbara, CA
MacPro Two 2.66GHz Quad Core – AJA Kona LHe
FCS 3 OS X 10.7.4
FCP X, Adobe CS6, Logic Pro, Squeeze, Filemaker

[Tom Matthies]

You’re getting transfer speeds of 200MB/sec. through a Firewire connection? How?

E=MC2+/-2db

[Jeff Meyer]

I’d give a +1 for ProRes.

XDCAM is a long GOP codec. I believe XDCAM35 is like XDCAM50 – 15 frames per group of pictures. I had similar issues with XDCAM50, but using ProRes made things pretty stable. You’ll certainly pay for it on disc space, but disc space is cheap compared to half your time being spent restarting Final Cut and getting back to where you were before things crashed.

With current projects kick the sequence compressor over to ProRes, and make sure you’re working in 8 bit, not 10 bit. XDCAM is an 8 bit codec, so there won’t be any appreciable losses to the footage after color work.