FCS 2 Crash on Render

[Harry Bromley-davenport]

Mr D’Eath,

I am a fellow sufferer from FCP crashes while rendering.

I’ve done everything. EVERYTHING … You name it. Including erasing all drives and reinstalling System and FCS from scratch — and I’m not mentioning Disk Warrior, trashing prefs and all that stuff.

Anything more complicated than a 3 minute render of a simple effect causes a crash, so I have learned – over the past two years, that I must baby sit my renders and do them in tiny portions while intermittently saving.

I’m on a Mac Octo with all the latest FCS software and a well maintained system, by the way.

The ONLY way I have found to render any lengthy section, or an entire timeline, without crashing, I have found is to set the “autorender” to (say) “after 10 mins of inactivity” in Prefs and then to go away and PRAY.

For reasons that I cannot understand, the autorender generally does not crash the machine. But if I initiate a render without interrupting and saving all the time, I get a crash.

If you have ANY IDEAS AT ALL, HOWEVER IDIOTIC which might assist me in curing this disgusting situation, please contact me.

From a fellow sufferer.

Harry

[Alex D’eath]

Hard Luck Harry,

Have you tried eliminating your media files. I have heard that having a single corrupt file can wreak havoc on your system. I am restoring my system back to when it was operating properly. If I still have problems after that I will begin removing media from my most recent project and reimporting until the problem repeats and fix that media.

Alex D’Eath
alex@spacecityfilms.com
Operations Manager
Space City Films, Inc
Above & Beyond…..

[Harry Bromley-davenport]

Hey, thanks for the reply, Alex.

Maybe it is indeed some errant media file causing my problems, but I have had the same crashing problem now for 2 years while cutting 3 feature length projects.

In any case, tomorrow I will do some experiments with taking say, a 10 minute segment of unrendered material and, piece by piece, removing and then reinserting shots.

The problem is that, when I get to the end of this ghastly experiment and find that I am still crashing, how do I know that it was not MORE THAN ONE shot which is causing it?

Thanks for the suggestion. Any further ideas accepted.

I long to be able to set FCP to render, go out and take my dogs for a walk for half and hour and feel confident that, when I return, I will not be faced with “FCP has quit unexpectedly”

All the best with your own problem and thank you for the input.

Harry

[C david Miller]

Alex,
Try turning off your ethernet or wireless connection in the Network Preferences and see if it still crashes

C. David Miller

CN8/Comcast Network Television

Central Pennsylvania Region

1050 East King Street

York, PA 17403

717-771-2623

[Harry Bromley-davenport]

Mr Miller,

Is this suggestion you kindly make based on a cure that you yourself experienced? If not, may I ask what the theory behind the suggestion is?

With thanks for the reply to the thread.

Harry.

[C david Miller]

Harry,
If you’d like to drop me your email address, I will pass on the reasoning behind my madness. I can send screenshots over the forum. My email address is David_Miller9@cable.comcast.com

Dave

C. David Miller

CN8/Comcast Network Television

Central Pennsylvania Region

1050 East King Street

York, PA 17403

717-771-2623

[Mike Halper]

For the past 1.5 years or so I’ve had a similar problem. I cut a feature on FCP 5.1.4 (or whatever the laast FCP5 version was) and everything with rendering worked great. I even color corrected in FCP using Magic Bullet Look Suite and never had any problems with rendering taking over 24 hours. FCP6 came out and we eventually decided to go back to the feature to make some changes and were never able to render more than 5-10 minutes of footage or more than an hour of rendering time. This same issue occurred with several smaller projects afterwards, even with reinstalling the OS and all software from scratch, running the system lean with no other software, and on 3 different systems. I even went as far as removing all filters from the project and not using any third party plugins with no luck.

The only way I’ve been able to render is by actually doing an Export / Quicktime movie.

I’ve read here and on other forums of many people also having this issue. Now I have sent a bug report to Apple about this a few times, and even wrote email a few months back to Steve Jobs about how infuriated I was that they weren’t fixing this problem. I even provided links to forum threads as evidence of the issue.

So a few weeks ago 6.0.5 comes out. As usual I hoped that Apple finally fixed this problem (I’m convinced it’s a bug like the Quicktime gamma issue), but wasn’t about to waste time trying until I heard from others. Around the same time I needed to reinstall the OS and set the system up fresh again. I started work on a project and forgot to turn off the auto-render feature (the auto-render always crashed for me) and left the room for a few hours. I came back and discovered that it had started rendering and… was actually still rendering! In over a year I’ve never been able to render that much at one time. I cancelled the render because I didn’t need to render yet, and haven’t bothered to trying rendering again.

Has anyone else had successes with rendering in 6.0.5? Has Apple finally fixed the problem?

_______________________________________________
Mike