FCPX Crashing my entire OS CONSTANTLY

[Ronny Courtens]

When you get complete system freezes there is a big chance that something is wrong with your system, and not necessarily with FCPX. Just a few thoughts:

Check your startup disk first. Do you have enough free space left on the drive? Also run Disk Warrior to check if the drive is still working as it should.

If your startup disk is okay next thing I would check is the drive on which your FCPX Projects and Events are stored. Same procedures: free space and drive check.

If you don’t have any problems with your drives create a new admin. user account on your system. Do not import any of the settings from the old account, just install and use FCP X from the new account. If this works without any further crashes you should do a clean OS re-install.

[James Cude]

Zapping NVRAM/PRAM may also help- https://support.apple.com/kb/ht1379

[T. Payton]

A freeze like that defiantly sounds like a hardware problem. A buddy of mine had that happen with his iMac. Make sure your Time Machine backup is updated and then take it to an Apple Store.

——
T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque

[Doug Metz]

Full system hang / crash could also be due to bad RAM or video card.

In addition to checking and repairing the disks, you should also run the extended hardware test.

Something else that I do once or twice a year is open the machine, thoroughly blow out all of the dust, and re-seat RAM and all the cards. Make sure it’s unplugged, naturally. ;o)

Doug Metz

Anode

[Jeff Kirkland]

It sounds like way more than an FCPX issue. I’d lean towards something hardware related but you never know. A friend recently had mysterious crashes with FCPX that locked up the entire machine and it turned out to be a corrupt font.

Anyway, if reinstalling X didn’t make a difference then it’s probably time to go the whole hog and do a clean install. There are just so many things that could be off kilter OS wise that just nuking the whole thing is usually the fastest option.

If that doesn’t work, then it’s a hardware issue and I’d put money on the GPU although I’ve seen some severe OS lockups when a drive intensive app (that’s definitely FCPX) is accessing a physically failing hard drive.

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[David Powell]

Nope definitely an FCP X issue imo. The same thing happens to me. And it only happens when using X. The whole OS hangs except the mouse movement forcing me to do a hard reset. My imac was recently diagnosed with a clean bill of health from the Apple Store.

[Jeff Kirkland]

I’m not saying that its not FCPX that’s triggering the crash but if X has been completely removed and reinstalled and it still happens then its not internal corruption within FCPX but an interaction between FCPX and something else.

The crash has only recently started happening and FCPX hasn’t changed in months so logically there’s been a change in something external to X that’s causing a crash now.

The trick is to figure out what that something is. There’s 1001 things it could be so unless you’ve got endless hours to kill, my goto plan is always a clean install & keep my fingers crossed it isn’t hardware.

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Aaron Rock]

Thank you all for the feedback,
David, thank you for assuring me that I’m not the only one who’s come across this. Like you said, the issue only seems to happen with FCPX. Unfortunately the crash is so complete that it doesn’t even generate errors on the log in console. Thus I have no direction to go in to fix it.
Like you said Jeff, I could spend weeks tinkering to try and find the root of the problem and not get to the cause.

A few points to make: NVRAM I did reset. Will check to make sure the ram installed is seated properly. Disk utility, disk permissions, all come back okay. I’m not supported for the AHT (a major PIA). So my next hope is apple support. Once I get to the root of this I will be sure to share it here.

Thanks again.
Aaron Rock

[Mark Smith]

I had a similar issue on my Mac mini once which is one of my fcpx machines . I had to sort through the various video codecs installed and eliminate a corrupted codec plugin which solved the problem for me .

[Jaime Prater]

This same exact thing is happening to me. If FCPX is open, eventually the system will freeze/crash. It’s only when FCPX is operating.