FCP crashing my iMac all the time!!!

[Todd Gillespie]

Hi Adam,

I think you know why you’re computer is crashing… you are WAY underpowered for what you’re trying to do. 20 video tracks? Even the best Firewire drives would only support between 8-10 tracks at once. (having OPTIMAL performance) Which you didn’t mention you were using, so I’m thinking you’re probably editing using the internal drives? If so, you’re creating a lot of problems and you can’t get the performance for a 20 track sequence. You’d need a MacPro and faster drives.

You’ll do better to render down some of your tracks. Export out ALL the video track you have ‘locked down’ and that should help. You can try nesting some parts of your sequence into another sequence, then render-you might get it to NOT crash, but I wouldn’t guarantee.

Good Luck,

Todd at UCSB
Television Production

[Adam Keyes]

Thanks for the reply…a few responses to yours:

Yes, using a LaCie FW800 external HD, that should be fine.
My 20 tracks that I mentioned…let me clarify: 20 total, maybe 10-12 are being used at one time, but 75% of those are things like a small logo in the bottom corner of the screen, or a website address in other corner, etc, no movement on them or anything, they just come in and out….so those shouldn’t take up to much processing right?

I group block of graphics w/ lots of movement on them to save space on my timeline, but I always assume that doesn’t really help in terms of rendering or keeping my processes more simple.

Never tried nesting, and I can’t really export anything and bring it back in, as I’m editing 30 second car commercials that are ALWAYS requiring changes from the client up till the last second… 🙂

It’s an SD timeline too, w/ usually NO Motion, but lots of graphics moving around via FCP’s motion adjusting…so I just figured that my maxed out iMac would be able to handle it.

Maybe it’s just time for a $3000 upgrade. sigh….

[Todd Gillespie]

Hi Adam,

Sorry, you’re setup isn’t fast enough to run and the speed it would need for 10-12 tracks-not the iMac or the drives.
Even if a lot of those tracks are graphics, FCP needs a certain amount of bandwidth for each track, which you don’t have.

10-12 tracks for a car commercial? Seems a little heavy? Usually you are only using 2 tracks for moving video and 4-6 for graphics? 8 tracks tops. You have a lot of moving graphics? Usually, a car commercial will have the graphics ‘fly’ in then settle and not move. In the past I’ve broken up the same graphic into two pieces the ‘fly’ and the static-this way FCP won’t spend as much time processing the ‘non-flying’ part of your graphics. You’ll need make sure the graphics line up, but it can be a time saver.

You probably need to try to consolidate your tracks, if you can get it around 6-8, you probably will be OK.

Boris Grafitti and Red could help a lot because they only use one track, but within the program you can have unlimited amount of individual titles. This way you can have 2-4 tracks tops and still keep all of your title separate. Plus it’s a MUCH better titler.

Good Luck,

Todd at UCSB
Television Production

[Adam Keyes]

Thanks for the reply Todd,

I have used most of the “tricks” you mentioned…but I still have loooots of tracks. I did this mostly for myself, but you can see all my tracks here if you care…this isn’t even all that many for most of the spots i’m doing….oh, most of my graphics have a duplicate of itself w/ a few different properties so that it can “ghost” away or whatever…so that doubles my count for all graphics….

I know you probably don’t care. I just wanted to count. 🙂

[Todd Gillespie]

Hi Adam,

The video looks good and clean.
Are you keying in realtime? Or is that video merged? If you’re keying realtime, that’s definitely going to require a lot of horsepower.

As for the rest, I can see why you have that many layers, I’m not a big fan of FCP titling, so I forget what a pain it can be.

Again, I’m not trying to sell you something, but if your work is doing a lot of graphics you should look into Boris. They probably have a free trail? You could collapse 6 graphics tracks into 1.

You ‘could’ do the same thing with Motion (but I bet it really bogs down your system) and create one project file that contained all of your graphic elements. Then it would just be one render for all the titling.

Until you can buy a faster system, you’ll continue to need to find way to be more efficient with your tracks.

FWIW

Todd at UCSB
Television Production

[Adam Keyes]

Again, thanks….

yes, keying in real time. the thing is, I will pump out up to 8 different spots (all similar to the screen shot i showed you) in about 2 days. so even though i know that there are DEFINITELY better ways of doing it, my time constraint leads me to try and FLY thru everything to get it done. it’s lame, i know, but gotta do what i gotta do.

even bringing in a 3 second Motion project or a LiveType or whatever, the extra 30 seconds it takes to open the program and bring in the project file is too much time for me!!!

I’m sure I could learn Boris and get familiar w/ a few good effects/titles and it may save me time in the end, AND probably look better…someday someday….sigh. 🙂

Thanks again!

Adam