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FCP – green flashes, crashes and hardly any work done.
I am currently working on a documentary shot on RED. Some files are long/large, more than 30 minutes. We have two different languages spoken in the film so all dialogue is subtitled. Subtitles are made in FCPs own titling tool.
Since we started in September, we have had numerous crashes and endless hours of relinking material, as well as problems viewing the cut without the picture stopping and/or the program quitting on us. Also the machine has been very slow. When we still had the Blackmagic connected, we had green and white flashes more often than not.Mostly I try not to get too engaged in the technical side of it all and try to use my energy on problems in the film we are editing, rather than problems with the machine. Naturally the director finds it even more frustrating than me, and after having spent 3 hours trying to view a 60 minute cut because FCP kept crashing, we closed everything down.
Now we have upgraded the software, bought more RAM, a new graphics card and disconnected Blackmagic.
Two days ago the producer (small production company with editing equipment in the basement) asked me to come in and do some tests. The program quit a few times -which I could live with- but the picture seemed to have a strobe effect and we still couldn’t see more than a few minutes at a time without the machine stopping with warning of “out of memory, turn off unlimited RT” etc. etc. Also it would crash in trim mode and when enlarging the canvas to see if we had the strobe effect there as well. But the machine was much faster and easier to work with.
Since we have tried so many different approaches to make this work, I would really appreciate it if someone could take a look at the specifications below. Is there something we are missing? Do we need to transcode the RED files again? At this point we are discussing to move the project to a proper editing suite, but I thought I should run this by you experts out there first!
Modellnavn: Mac Pro
Modellidentifikator: MacPro3,1
Prosessornavn: Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Prosessorhastighet: 2.8 GHz
Antall prosessorer: 2
Antall kjerner totalt: 8
Nivå 2-buffer (per prosessor): 12 MB
Hukommelse: 16 GB
Busshastighet: 1.6 GHz
Start-ROM-versjon: MP31.006C.B05
SMC-versjon (system): 1.25f4ATI Radeon 5770 graphic m/1gb memory
Additional cards:
Sonnett Tempo 4p eSata
BlackMagic Multibridge Pro (disconnected)OS 10.6.4 med Final Cut Studio 3 (FCP 7.0.3)
Today we are using a signal to three screens, two for the desktop and one converted to HDMI and sent to theTV. FCP is sending preview in native 1080p to TV.
We have about 70 hurs of material on 7 harddrives, 3 of them are internal Baracuda XT drives, and 4 are external ((2 g-drives, 1 lacie bigdisk og 1 seagate black armor, they are all connected through eSata).
Renderfiles are to a separate disc Baracuda XT, and the operative system also has a partition of the render-drive.
Project, graphics, music etc. are stored on the internal drive together with parts of the material. All discs have a minimum of 15-20% buffer capacity.
The raw material is RED ProRes 422 2k (2048×1152) basically coded with RedCine-X, og secondarily with Red’s own transcoding program and in prores 422 (HQ) and some not in HQ. Audio/video settings are 248×1152 prores 422, 25pfs, field dominance: none, rendering to YUV 10bit.
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2 Replies
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First thing i’m thinking off:
Do you have the latest BlackMagic Design driver/firmware?
Have you done basic troubleshooting?
Thrashing FCP cache/prefs
Booting with Shift + restart.
Booting with Command/Alt PRAlso you should do some testing without any external drives connected.
To know for sure if the problem is caused from inside or outside the system. -
We experienced similar problems working with ProRes 422 HQ material, 23.98. Even small timelines crashed. Just clicking on a spot in the clip could crash it. We updated our Kona drivers, tried all of the troubleshooting techniques alread mentioned. Lucky for us we have an engineering staff and good tech support.
We eventually got through the project by keeping our projects as small as possible. We treated FCP projects like AVID bins – one for the cut, one for graphics, one for music, etc. (since you can have multiple projects open at once). Keep only one timeline at a time open, render everything and save constantly. Watch for those green flashes; FCP is about to crash. We found that Pro Res HQ is overkill, unless you’ve got graphics that demand it. We converted a lot of our footage from HQ to pro res 422 using compressor and re-cutting it. You can force FCP to re-link to the new files. Try to keep as much material in your sequence format as possible.
Sorry, that’s kind of all over the place. Just some ideas.
Good luck,
DDan Monro
FCP, Avid, AfterFX, Atlanta
MacBook Pro 2.53 GHz Intel Core i5 4 GB ram
Mac OS X 10.6.4
NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M
Final Cut Pro 7 Quicktime 7.6.6
– OR –
2 x 3.2 Quad Xeon; 16 GB ram
Mac OS X 10.6.4
NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 Final Cut Pro 7.0.2 Quicktime 7.6.6
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