FCP “Out of Memory” Error

[Trevor Ward]

Yeah, I get it. But it’s not like a 5000×3500 pixel image is an unreasonable image size. It came from a Canon prosumer camera. It’s not like it’s a 20,000 pixel by 40,000 pixel image.

Actually, perhaps FCPX IS the answer. AE is too slow, waiting for renders. I don’t own Premiere and am not ready to give up on FC. But ARGHHH!

-trevor ward
Red Eye Film Co.
http://www.redeyefilmco.com
orlando, fl

[Jon Chappell]

5k is IMAX resolution. It’s pretty big.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools – Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools – Edit QuickTime chapters and metdata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools…

[Trevor Ward]

But a 18MB picture isn’t abnormal. It’s quite common. I can buy a camera for $200 that takes 15mb pictures that I might want to throw into my production.

You’re missing the point, and so is Apple. I’m not making a 5000×3500 video. AE doesn’t seem to freak out. I hear that AVID works well with pictures. I’m sure Premiere works too.

-trevor ward
Red Eye Film Co.
http://www.redeyefilmco.com
orlando, fl

[Michael Kammes]

I get the impression you’re not gonna be happy with any answer, but I feel compelled to try yet again:

FCP is a video editor. Not a picture editor. Video, in the HD realm, tops out at 1920 x 1080. This is far less than than the 3K or higher you mentioned.

FCP was written at a time when 18MB pictures were NOT the norm. This is now a problem. Which leads to….

Apple DOES get the point. That’s why FCP X exists. FCP X remedies your issue. Technology moves, man. So does your camera, and so must your software.

AE is an EFFECTS editor….NOT a video editor. We do not live in a world where one program does EVERYTHING the best. Thus, we have multiple tools.

Avid, FWIW, can’t handle anything larger than 1920 x 1080. Point to a 5K image? Avid resizes to the size of the project. Hey, at least FCP can handle 2 + 2.5 K.

Premiere? yes, Premiere handles larger images. Not all NLEs are created the same….if they were, what kind of market place would we have?

Hundreds of thousands of people for several years have had to deal with this limitation. So do you. If this is the least of the things I have to worry about during the day with my VIDEO NLE, then I’m thrilled.

~Michael

.: michael kammes mpse
.: senior technology & workflow consultant
.: audio specialist . act fcp . acsr
.: michaelkammes.com
.: twitter: @michaelkammes
.: facebook: /mkammes

Hear me pontificate: Speaking Schedule .

[Terry Simpson]

Excellent advice, all. Thank you so much! Both the reason and a process for troubleshooting. One 18 sec segment was saying it would take 1 hour 43 minutes in Compressor, before it Failed. There was a single 3.5k x 5k px image. I had been using it scaled to only about 11%. After I resized it to 1900×1400, the segment rendered in like 45 seconds. What make it tough was that the section with a single oversize pix was surrounded by 2 segments that used Magic Bullet Denoiser, a very render intensive plugin. So I thought THAT was the culprit.

Anybody want to suggest the fastest workflow for resizing these stills? Right now, I /export/still>png, open it in Photoshop or even Preview and resize it. I have another project to deal with htat has a couple dozen stills that are pretty big.

Thanks again.

Terry

[Jon Chappell]

Automator has a Scale Images task. Photoshop has a batch processing function too but I’ve never used it so I’m not sure if image scaling is included in batch mode.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools – Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools – Edit QuickTime chapters and metdata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools…

[Twojay Dhillon]

I just ran into this problem for the first time. I use FCP only to re-edit my own personal reel and have zero GFX/SFX in my reel, so when I saw the error I freaked out.

I added a 1080p video to the bin and clicked it to play it in the viewer window, however, I got the error message.

Being totally inexperienced, I safeguarded what I had done up to that point and also made a new sequence with the same settings. I dragged the clips onto the timeline and rendered them (yay?!). After render was complete, I simply copied and pasted the clips to their final sequence and no error message came up.

Hope this helps somebody that is also as computer/FCP incompetent as myself!

[Lisa Purisima]

Hey,

Having a jpeg in there can give the same error. Changing your sequence settings to render at 8 bit instead of 10 will solve the problem too.

[Amanda Mascia]

I just wanted to say THANK YOU!
Your insight into changing the image size to lesser than 2000 was spot on! I had a huge project I was working on, that has a million photos, and it was rendering fine in previous versions until just today. I got the dreaded “Error Out of Memory” and wanted to cry. By resizing the photos it now renders NO PROBLEM!
You totally saved me!
🙂

[Albert Morel]

Hello everyone

Great stuff to read on this thread and very helpful. I am also working on a project that mainly contains large still images on FCP7. Way too large I believe. I get the Out of memory problem as well now and I have just realised that all the images I have in my project are about 8085 x 5418 in frame size, which I guess is far too big for fcp right?

My question is what is the easiest way to scale down the image size of all the images and at what size should they be brought down to? Hope someone are able to help me, it would be greatly appreciated.