-
Final Cut stability advice
I’ve used Final Cut since version 1, so I know about its general instability, but lately it seems to be crashing more frequently than I am used to. I am working on a TV show with 7 – 22 minute episodes. No sequence is over 25 minutes, there are a few graphics with alphas, nothing that is layer intensive, a few people’s faces blurred and most clips have at least one color correction filter on them. Overall, nothing too complicated of a sequence. The project size was getting large (close to 300MB) since I had several versions of each sequence. I made an overflow project to put extraneous stuff into and got the main project size down to 150MB. I’ve done all the usual troubleshooting tactics – repairing permissions, trashing prefs, but still crashing and other general inconsistencies (more than usual). Sometimes it crashes when I am just scrubbing through a sequence (not always in the same place though).
Wondering if anyone has any ideas on what might be the cause. It is starting to seriously hinder my productivity. I’ve easily lost over an hour today with the restarts and work lost. I wanted to try creating a new project and copying my bins to it, but Final Cut just pinwheels if I try to copy anything more than one or two files at a time from one project to another.
I’m running FCP 6.0.5, OSX 10.5.7, MacPro octo 3GHZ, 6G RAM – same set-up I used last season for the online without many problems (and that was 8 episodes).
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Keith -
8 Replies
-
Why are the projects so large? I work on 30 min (22:34) too, and our projects do not go over 40MB. Lots of text and duplicated sequences too.
I haven’t had general stability issues. I can trace all of them to known issues, like projects over 100MB in size.
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
I do have a lot of footage for this series, so the footage bins contain lots of bins and clips. I also have a lot of music in the project, but again, sequences are fairly simple. I’ve definitely had longer, more layered sequences in the past (so I’m assuming just as large of project sizes). I did last season’s online with a project that was over 100MB without quite as many problems, so I’m not sure what’s causing the problems currently.
Does Final Cut have known issues with projects over 100MB? I guess I could try deleting the music library out of this project, and maybe some of the raw footage bins. It’s a bit of an inconvenience to not have all that stuff readily available, but I’ll take for the added stability.
By general instability, I mean not just crashing, but the other quirks Final Cut has had since version 1 that make it a little unreliable at times.
Thanks for the help,
Keith -
[keith roberts] “Does Final Cut have known issues with projects over 100MB? “
I don’t think there is anything official out there, but I have noticed it.
I break up my projects into several. I might keep the main footage and sequences together, but Music/sfx I keep in a separate project. That lessens it a lot.
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
I had a lot of stability problems when I had large project size >250Mb.
This was made up of several multicam (x9) rushes edited into long sequences,plus edit backup copies of each ) which were then edited into another sequence for an overall highlights show.
One thing I found when slimming the projects down was that doing a “save as” then deleting bins, sequences etc does not reduce the project size much. ( undo buffers?)
I found that it was best to start a new empty project and just copy across the sequences, bins that you need.
Good Luck Steve
-
Thanks for the responses, guys. So Shane, your project files don’t go over 40MB because you break them up into several projects? That makes sense. I’m just tired of trying to find work-arounds when using Final Cut.
Steve, I had been working on the same project for months so I thought some buffers or something might be building up and a fresh project would be the way to go. But when I tried copying a bin full of sequences from one project to a new project, Final Cut just hung up. It worked if I copied one sequence at a time, but even then it seemed to take a long time. I’ve noticed Final Cut has always been a bit sluggish when copying from one project to another. It might be worth taking the time to do that though to save time in the long run.
Thanks again,
Keith -
How did you copy?
I think I remember having problems when I drag and dropped between projects.
Cut and paste seemed to work better if I remember correctly.
Steve
-
Yeah, dragging and dropping seems to always freak it out. But even with copy and paste sometimes it would get hung up.
However, yesterday I copy and pasted just the essential bins to a new projects and everything copied pretty quickly and without crashing. I still have to open the old project sometimes to access some of the raw footage and music, which is a bit of an inconvenience, but I can live with it for the added stability of this new project. And even my exports of the sequences are taking less than half the time. Seems odd, but I’ll take it.
Thanks, Steve.
Keith -
Try upgrading FCP to 6.0.6. That was supposed to really help issues with the Nehalems.
Jim Wiseman
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up