FCP quitting unexpectly during rendering

[Mike Parfit]

Hi,

Rendering in smaller chunks usually works. (10 minute clips or less.) This makes it impossible to set up a major render and leave for a while, let’s say to sleep. However, the small ones frequently crash, too.

The idea that 4GB of ram is not enough to run Final Cut properly may be correct, but if it is then Apple is guilty of false advertising, since the system requirements text clearly states this:

2GB of RAM when working with compressed HD and uncompressed SD sources
4GB of RAM when working with uncompressed HD sources.

I am working only with DVCProHD and HDV, both highly compressed, and I have 4GB

There should not be a memory problem, because the program writes the render to disk. You can see it growing. It is clearly related in some way to the complexity of the project file, because if I render a single clip it is much more likely to be successful than if I render a timeline with many clips and several active video and audio tracks.

None of the many solutions I have tried seems to account for the fact that removing the Kona 3 card solves the problem. And there’s one more thing. This is the fourth Kona card I have had in the machine. AJA sent several new ones to see if that’d solve the problem. It didn’t. So it’s not some glitch in the individual card itself.

I believe that the term “memory leak” may indeed be a polite term for what is happening here. Other terms come to mind sometimes.

Cheers,

Mike

[Patrick Troy]

i agree 4gb ram is surely sufficient

we have just had an apple tech here on an unrelated issue
i asked him about this problem
he said that fcp type programs heavy rendering buffer into ram and when there is a code problem they overflow into a swapfile which writes to the drive and then it all falls over

have you got the latest fcp update?
i wonder if that solves it

[Mike Parfit]

Hi,

I have all the latest updates, and they don’t solve the problem. Interesting what the Apple person said. I keep thinking that the Kona card amplifies some problem that mostly lies hidden in Final Cut. If so, Apple and AJA ought to work it out, because they’re working so closely on things like the new IO machine.

Anyway, I’m pretty discouraged about ever getting it working properly. I took the card out again last night for a render, which went flawlessly after the card was gone. But I’m sure I’m going to damage the card soon enough with all this activity.

Take care,

Mike

[Anders Haavie]

Well, I have done some research. It is true that there is a memory leak, and it gets worse the longer the render. The memory is freed up when you quit fcp. My fcp crashes without any aja card inside so I am not sure how the aja card is affecting things. I am using Magic Bullet and other 3d party plugins and I experience alot of crashes. I wonder if this is just bad programming from the pluginmakers, or if fcp crashes with any other rendering as well. When I used 5.1.4 I also had crashed but quite few. Now I get it all the time. Anyone else with the same experience ?

Anders

[Latch Everest]

Are you guys still experiencing these problems? I’ve been editing in SD for over a year with the same system and have had absolutely no problems. Until two weeks ago when I started to piece together a half-hour HD show for broadcast.

And now I’m having to render whole projects 2-5 minutes at a time or FC crashes with no warning.

I’ve tried everything and called every tech support that has anything remotely to do with my system setup (Apple, Ciprico, Kona, etc.). I get the run-around from everyone. Lots of finger pointing, and apparantly I’m the only person on the planet experiencing this.

Anyway, if anyone has experienced any new tricks for solving this problem *please* post them.

[Walter Biscardi]

[Latch Everest] ”
Anyway, if anyone has experienced any new tricks for solving this problem *please* post them.”

What’s your system setup? We edit SD and HD all day everyday with no crashing issues during renders.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

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[Latch Everest]

Hey, thanks so much for the quick reply. Here’s my setup:

Mac Pro 2 3GHz Dual Core Intel Xeon
-1GB (2x512MB)
– 250GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3GB/s
-ATI Radeon x1900 XT 512MB (2xdual link DVI)
2 2GB DDR2 5300 667 mhz FB DIMM (2x1GB)
OSX 10.4.11
FCP 6.0.2
AJA Kona LHe SD/HD – breakout
Ciprico 5TB Dual Ch 4Gb FC 10
ATTO Dual Ch 4-Gigabit PCIe

Let me know if I left anything out, I’m a little brain dead at the moment.

[Latch Everest]

I should also point out that this only happens when rendering. It never happens during capture or playback, unless it’s playing over an unrendered clip (which is rare). Only other thing I can think of at the moment is I have my scratch disk set to my ext raid drive which holds all the media. All files (audio, motion, HD video, and graphics) all reside under one umbrella folder on that drive.

The only thing I can think of I haven’t tried is the above description of the capture card removal, but frankly that makes me a little a nervous to do on a constant basis.

Thanks in advance to anyone with any additional incite.

[Latch Everest]

Anyone….anyone? If this problem is totally foreign to members here, does anyone have a suggestion where the answer could be found?

[Mike Parfit]

Hi, Latch,

This problem you are experiencing is not unique. People will tell you that it is, and that you are obviously doing something wrong, but you are not doing something wrong and the problem is real. It just somehow seems hard for people who are not having it to accept that it exists outside of a simple human error. Hell, I haven’t accepted that, and keep looking for that error. But I’ve done a lot of stuff to try to find it, and haven’t yet. And to me a respectable program should catch such errors and inform the user about them instead of just crashing.

I am working with DVCproHD and HDV on a Mac Pro with 4GB memory and a Kona3. I have been reporting this problem myself and some others have been having it in one form or another. For me it has occurred consistently for almost two years, through two computers, and many, many iterations of Final Cut Pro and OS10. I have tried everything suggested in this forum, including having virtually everything in the computer replaced, including the logic board, and replacing the original G5 with a Mac Pro. Nothing has helped.

I have had the most assistance from AJA, which has been very attentive but has not solved the problem. An Apple tech I met at a film festival promised to help but never answered repeated e-mail requests. AJA and I are still working on it.

For me the most useful solution is to have a machine without a Kona 3 in it to do my long rendering work. That results in one crash every few weeks. With the Kona 3 in the situation is much like what you describe. The other solutions have been:

1. Remove 2 GB of my 4 GB of memory. This results in a lot of Out of Memory messages, but they seem to replace the crashes, which is good.

2. Remove the Kona 3 card temporarily. This is such a substantial improvement that I routinely do that now every time I have to do a lot of rendering that I can’t easily do on the other machine — essentially anything more than a minute or two of timeline. I do not have to uninstall the software.

3. Use much smaller FCP project files. We are making a documentary with 300 hours of footage and a very busy timeline — routinely 26 or more audio tracks and 7 to 10 video tracks. (Not many effects, though) I also often duplicate my master sequence — 1.5 hours runtime — in order to make major changes reversible. Each sequence uses a lot of space, so I quickly get a FCP project file of about 100 MB in size. When that loads it occupies over 1GB of memory.

However, saving the file with a new name and deleting the extra sequences reduces the file size and I find that the smaller the initial project file is and the less memory it initially occupies, the longer the program will render before crashing. So that helps.

It is memory use that seems to lead to these crashes. I have even set up a camera and filmed the Activity Monitor while the program was rendering to see at which point it crashes. As the render occurs the memory use slowly builds up. As far as I can tell it seems to crash when the real memory use gets over 2GB (this with 4GB in the machine). It looks like a memory leak to me but I am not enough of a geek — in a positive sense — to run that down.

I have been saving the reports that FCP sometimes makes after a crash and have been sending them to AJA. So far, although the crashes almost always seem to occur during the operation of something called the AppleVAdriver, AJA has not some up with a specific reason for them.

I am sorry not to be of more help. This is a discouraging problem. Crashes are so disconcerting even when everything is saved, and they always take a significant amount of time to recover from, so I completely understand and share your frustration. Please keep after the people and companies you have been keeping after. This problem is real. It should not happen with a respectable program, and it needs to be fixed. I feel like a shrink: This is not your fault. You can do things to reduce it, but it is a problem built in to Final Cut. It apparently only pops up in relatively rare situations, but it needs to be fixed by the good but inaccessible people who brought you this fine program.

Good luck,

Mike