FCP X crashes on large jobs

[Nicholas Kleczewski]

He’s talking about Intel’s AVX. I too think there’s something to that. The skimming speed limit mentioned above happened to me on a regular basis on a MacPro which does not have it, and happens to me absolutely never on my MBPr.

Director, Editor, Colorist
http://www.trsociety.com

[Mike Fernanandes]

Keep your media and the event on different drives

I did this fix for my show and it made a world of difference in performance of FCPX. And I don’t think it has ever crashed since.

—

Make a new event on a local hard drive. And in preferences turn off copy files to Final cut Event Folder

Then drag your media from your external or different local drive to the event that is now on your local drive.

By doing so the event will only contain reference files.

Because Events are databases that are constantly saving every time you touch it the drive is trying to write and read media at the same exact time. This causes crazy bottlenecks that are only accented as the project gets larger. By splitting them you are freeing up that bandwidth to playback with out interruptions and to save with out interruptions.

We this is on out xsan and it was a night and day difference but I also still do it even when I’m working on a project at home simply with a external drive being my main storage and the Event database saving on a internal hard disk.

I did a super lame tutorial for my team about it ( https://www.loudyeti.com/archives/416 )

—–

Currently I’m working with 20 hours of footage and it’s playing like a dream, no proxies and high quality playback settings.

loudyeti.com

[Mark Dobson]

Hi Mike,

Could you just clarify how many separate hard drives you are talking about here.

[Mike Fernanandes] “We this is on out xsan and it was a night and day difference but I also still do it even when I’m working on a project at home simply with a external drive being my main storage and the Event database saving on a internal hard disk.”

By default I normally create my events / projects on the same external drive that my core files are stored on. ( I might well reference other files on other drives also)

But what I understand you to be saying is that having the events / project folders on the same drive as your media is what can cause problems?

This is contrary to the way I’ve been working with FCPX.

[Mike Fernanandes]

Sure.

So on my two primary edit rigs I have three hard drives.

(1) Macintosh HD + (2) A Internal Media Drive + (3) External Storage ( 42TB San on Tower, SATA drive on Laptop )

(1) I don’t usually put any events or projects on the drive as I like those to be SSD’s so there isn’t much room but you can.

(2) Has all my events

(3) Has all my media

—-

When we started cutting in X we were adding San locations and just cutting where we stored stuff.

Performance was super slow, It took about 10 minutes for the program to load from that first start up. and then scrubbing and playback was jumpy and this all got worse the more footage we added to the project. On average our show produces about 20-25 hours of footage per episode.

But when I went home and cut on the laptop with the media external from the events ( due to space limitations on a laptop ) the exact same project booted in 8 seconds.

Once we did the same on the SAN we had huge performance boots everything was just snappier projects loaded in a fraction of the time, and it allowed us to share media much easier as with an added San location only one user can be accessing it at any given time.

loudyeti.com

[Jeremy Garchow]

I don’t know if XSan has a similar function, but I know with my SAN, we had to set our block level a little lower (which is a restripe), and then we had to dial down what is called the “Allocation Optimization Size”.

This helps to read/write smaller files which is what is happening with FCP Events/Projects.

Jeremy

[Bret Williams]

Do your Psds have smart vectors? I was using some 4k sized smart vector Psds and when I hit render I could se the free memory go from 10 gigs to 4 Megs almost instantly. The system would stall out and not crash so much as just be completely frozen.

[Mark Dobson]

[Mike Fernanandes] “So on my two primary edit rigs I have three hard drives.

(1) Macintosh HD + (2) A Internal Media Drive + (3) External Storage ( 42TB San on Tower, SATA drive on Laptop )

(1) I don’t usually put any events or projects on the drive as I like those to be SSD’s so there isn’t much room but you can.

(2) Has all my events

(3) Has all my media”

Thanks Mike.

[Michael Hadley]

The Crash Log Analyzer in the Pro Maintenance pack can be helpful in determining what is causing crashes. Also try deleting your event render files and trashing prefs.

Good luck.

[Bill Davis]

Purely observational support, but I have the same experience.

My MacPro has a lot of minor (and some not so minor) issues running FCP-X. And my newer MacBook Pro has almost none.

Meet FCP-X.

It LOVES up to date hardware.
It LOVES lots of RAM.
It LOVES fast storage
It LOVES a knowledgable operator.
and it LOVES those who have the patience to let it do at least a decent amount of it’s under the hood processing, before they start demanding it buckle down and consume huge edits like a beserk raver consumes bottled water.

It will tolerate a good bit of abuse. But not indifference and certainly not anyone who treats it with ignorance or foolishly naive expectations.

; )

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