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FCP7 crashes trying to ‘log and transfer’ 6 hour take of AVCHD footage
Dear contributors to the forum,
Thanks for your contributions, I’ve found this site super-useful and this is the first time I’ve actually needed to post my own query!
I recently bought a Sony NX5 camera which shoots AVCHD footage. I filmed a concert, shooting non-stop for about 6 hours. When I try to log and transfer this take into FCP7 on my Macbook Pro (2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4Gb RAM) Final Cut crashes about a a quarter of the way through. Also I am finding render times and export times tedious, especially the more work I get.
I’m considering upgrading my RAM to speed things up, and also buying an extra 3Tb external hard drive to store all the HD footage. My question is this: will upgrading the RAM (from 4 to 8Gb) and keeping my laptop’s hard drive with plenty of free space speed things up enough for me to work as I need to?
Thank you!
Peter D. Marsay
UK Cameraman/Editor -
8 Replies
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My math may be off, but six hours of avchd is over 100 gigs, isn’t it? After it’s converted, maybe more?
So the external drive would be necessary I think? -
That sounds about right. Might it simply be overload of my hard drive rather than a need to expand the RAM? I’d also like to know if upgrading the RAM would speed up rendering etc in FCP7 full stop. That would be nice! 🙂
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More RAM is helpful in a lot of situations, but I’m not enough of an Apple systems wonk to know how much is overkill. I seem to recall that not all the RAM you buy can be put to use by FCP7 because it wasn’t built for multi-threaded 64-bit like FCP-x was.
What I CAN say with some confidence is, you NEVER lay video into your main or “C” drive when editing, you reserve that for the OS and NLE to work in, and keep the video and audio in a separate scratch drive, either internal or external, but not just a partition of the same drive the OS and NLE live on. If that’s what you were doing, then yeah, I think we found your problem.
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Whilst more Ram is going to generally help your machine sadly FCP7 cannot utilise any more than 4GB Ram (32bit and all that). So you wont see a gain in FCP7 speed by adding any more.
As Mark says using your internal drive for media is a no no.
You need a minimum of a firewire 800 connection for your external drive 7200RPM drive speed.best wishes
Neil
http://www.patience.tv -
[Peter Marsay] “I filmed a concert, shooting non-stop for about 6 hours.”
That’s not recommendable whatever the format you shot with.
Try to rewrap it with ClipWrap and chop the file for further edit.
rafael -
Thank you all for your responses, saves me buying extra RAM then! I’ll be getting a big firewire hard drive, thanks. How about Compressor, will further RAM help that? Certain settings make it crash sometimes… or perhaps it’s a similar issue and all my footage should on a big firewire hard drive? Thanks again.
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I would get the extra RAM anyway, although FCP can’t use it other Apps running can so it will generally help despite no direct FCP gain.
Any 32 bit App is limited to the amount of RAM it can use, so I would guess that applies to Compressor as well.Always store media, especially HD video media on a fast external drive (or separate internal). Your OS internal one is not quick enough and its running the OS etc at the same time.
best wishes
Neil
http://www.patience.tv -
Thank you. I’ll probably also get the RAM then just in case. Cheers.
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