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Final Cut Pro unusable for big projects?
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Two simple questions:
How will faster storage fix a problem of crashing while rendering? No journaling. No sleep, ever. No attached firewire drives. Lots of room on the SATA drives. Memory swapped and moved and checked and resettled. OEM memory, proper configuration.
How do you explain that the crashes only seem to occur when the real memory use in the Activity Monitor builds up over time during a render to a point beyond 2GB? Is that somehow related to storage? It seems counterintuitive to me to blame this on storage, but I have certainly been around computers long enough to understand that counterintuitive is sometimes right.
Thank you,
Mike
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I am going to ask a dumb question. Did you start the project at the same version of Final Cut? Upgrading anything of that size, even a dot upgrade can wreak havoc and sink ships off the coast of small countries I have been told. Nasa images of the day are photoshopped right?
I understand the risk to dig deep into gear at what could be a long drawn out indy situation. I currently have a wonderfully stable SD system. I have been waiting for “HD” to figure itself out. Blue-ray being the final piece that still sucks. I do not have clients that need it and therefor I am holding out on Encore/Fastmac internal drive/Toast. I can wait while others cannot bless them.
On the other hand, at lease you have a new system. I have nightmares about working on a project captured on firewire with second system sound that started on an ibook and is now doing a film out. Forget Jaws, or Saw Part 14 “Home Despot”, Final Cut lets you mess up and it has come to bite me more then once. It sounds like you were able to put together a decent edit suite and can finish this puppy to much applause and knowledge gained. There is too much to know about HD, post, and the future. I am finding out that patience and planing are more fundamental to money and time. This is where the Cow (Thank your creator), friends, and people who have done it before come in handy.
There was another post recently that reminded me that we are in this for the artistic creation end of things and not so much the tools. Dropped frames with producers in the room still blows.
Good luck and get that puppy out the door to be downloaded and crunched to all hell when it hits cable and ipods everywhere!
James
P.S. I am in TV please do not take any offense if in fact you are creating art. The real cost of reality television is the depletion of one’s soul one piece at a time.
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[Mike Parfit] “How will faster storage fix a problem of crashing while rendering? No journaling. No sleep, ever. No attached firewire drives. Lots of room on the SATA drives. Memory swapped and moved and checked and resettled. OEM memory, proper configuration.”
If you have media on multiple drives, the risk of corruption is greater. Hit one corrupted piece of media and crash.
If you have media on multiple drives there can be momentary lags when FCP switches from drive to drive to access a file. Can cause a crash.
There are a myriad of issues that can occur when you have media spread out across multiple drives.
There can be a myriad of issues if you update FCP during a project.
There can be a myriad of issues if you update Quicktime during a project.
[Mike Parfit] “How do you explain that the crashes only seem to occur when the real memory use in the Activity Monitor builds up over time during a render to a point beyond 2GB? I”
The only render issues I’ve seen are if you have exactly 2GB RAM in a machine and do a long series of renders, like a 20 – 30 minute section of timeline at once. I documented this in my blog about 2 or 3 months ago. This occurred on both our G5 Quad and Mac Pro Quad.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
Read my Blog!
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Jounaling helps the system to keep track of the files in the HDs, but also can slow down the process.
In Hds with many (many) files is convenient to have the Jounaling ON. HDs used for media storing, where you can have few hundreds or few thousand of files, do not really needs Journaling.
I have jounaled the System HDs (that is a must) and an external USB HD where I save docs, pictures, music etc. The media HDs, all Un-journaled.
Cheers,
rafael -
[walter biscardi] “f you have media on multiple drives there can be momentary lags when FCP switches from drive to drive to access a file. Can cause a crash.”
if true, a sad illustration of the fallibility of technology ie when computers just crash for no damn good reason
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so what about if the media is lots of image sequences. If I have thousands and thousands of exr image sequences, am I better off with journaled then?
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[Jayson Rahmlow] “why not use journaling?”
Journaling severely slows down your drives. Journaling should only be used with your System Drives or your Time Machine Backup drives.
For Media Drives, Journaling should always be turned OFF. If it’s on, you run the risk of constant dropped frames and other potential editing issues.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
Read my Blog!
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[walter biscardi] “4GB of RAM is a major problem as I have noted in my blog and in other posts here on the Cow. Our Mac Pro Quad had all sorts of issues with 4GB RAM that went away when we dropped down to 2GB. Now it’s running 8GB RAM with zero issues. The new Octo Core is running 10GB with no issues. “
I’m glad Walter addressed this. 8Gb should be the minimum.
FWIW, our new 8-core crashed regularly with 10GB (two fours, two ones) of ram. At 8GB (two fours) it doesn’t crash at all. If you read Apple’s tech note, they pretty much tell you that with FCP you need even matching modules on both risers, which means from 8GB you will probably want to go to 16GB next.
Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.
mitch@insightproductions.com -
[Mitch Ives] “I’m glad Walter addressed this. 8Gb should be the minimum.”
actually Gary Adcock addressed this at some point recently noting that your minimum RAM should be 1GB per Core.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
Read my Blog!
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