-
Full FCP 7 Assault – Out of Memory, Dropped Frames, Playback Trouble suddenly.
-
Probably a dumb question, but, did you run the disk utility on the hard disk and checked for any hardware issues?
-
Mark, apparently not a dumb question at all. I just ran Disk Utility/First Aid from startup. Went pretty fast, got checkmark of approval, but I think I did notice it was clearly something up? Restarted. Opened up Peru project from last week’s drive. No issues with dropped frames! No sluggish playback! Same thing with Road project. This made me happy. Then I plugged in newer drive, opened Peru. No dropped frames or slow playback! Sweet! Then I decided to play that one aforementioned clip laden with visual affects. Like before, it was filled with random blotches and colored blocks. Okay, I thought, this is probably residual from the bad render when…I was having these issues which are now cleared up. So I reconnected the media from that clip, and then re-rendered that clip, and kablamo!, “out of memory”. THEN I decided to just play any other sequence and, kablamo, dropped frames again. Back to square one. But with more intel.
To summarize:
Running First Aid seemed to clear something up completely. Trying to render a certain clip filled with effects created the problem (just like it did the first time).
The plot thickens. I/we are hopefully zeroing in on the problem. But I’m at a loss for how to proceed. -
If it were me, my next step would be to run disk repair again, then immediately lay-off as much of this material to some other storage medium, muy pronto. I can’t help but think you have an imminent system drive failure in the offing. Get your most irreplaceable stuff archived off ASAP. Then look for things on the drive that you could trash. Trash those, run disk repair again. I’m thinking you may have bad sectors and not enough room for the swap files.
-
This is actually a new-to-me used Macbook Pro bought two months ago and Time-Machined to being back what was on my older MBP. So that, along with the fact that the whole film is essentially backed up on 2 different extrenal drives. means there’s not much to backup. But as for throwing stuff overboard to maybe save this sinking ship, what shall I throw away? I just ran DU again like you said. I don’t know what “bad sectors and not enough room for the swap files” means, but am all ears
-
When you click “get info” on the main hard drive, the system drive, what’s the ratio of total drive space to available space, and what specific trouble messages did disk repair give you?
-
Got 138 GB left on a 500 GB. Sadly, neither time did I notice what message DU gave. It didn’t stop, just mentioned repairing or fixing something I believe, than onwards to fix.
-
Next time you’re going to run it, try initiating a screen recording with Quicktime player first. or shoot the screen with your phone to capture what’s happening.
-
I’m wondering if I should (re)create the problem first (by trying to render that one clip)…so that when I run DU it will have something to fix otherwise already fixed? I’m a little nervous now to do anything that might upset further the Mac’s nervous system…Did the info I gave about HD space help shed any light any in terms of diagnosing imminent system drive failure, bad sectors, no room for swap files?
-
I’m not an expert. I do know that the way you’ve set yourself up, the codec choices and whatnot, it’s a more processor-intensive and RAM-intensive process than necessary, handling the format conversions and rendering. I think step one has to be, protect the assets, assuming you have no other back-ups. Get that stuff laid off to another drive, or whatever. Then get under the hood and start yanking on things. When your system has insufficient RAM for a task, it borrows space on the hard drive to act as virtual RAM. If the disk has too much stuff on it, or if some sectors of the disk are faulty and unavailable to the system, you could maybe run out of space. This used to be a common problem back in the day, but since you’re running obsolete apps and formats, maybe it’s not far off.
That fact that running disk repair clears it up, at least temporarily, suggests to me it’s a mechanical problem and not software. But again, I’m no expert. Except in very rare cases, I’ve never known a sick drive to get better again, only worse.
Hey, have you changed or done anything with any of the cables lately? Has *anything* happened in or around this system between when you were running okay and when it started going bad? Power surge or brown-out, accidental re-start, new hardware added, old hardware moved or removed, no matter how insignificant it seems? Any software updates done manually or automatically in the background? Did you say all this stuff was in Time Machine and “grafted” into a new (er) macbook? Have you sprinkled the blood of a chicken over the drive enclosure? Anything?
-
Mark, again, I really appreciate your input, as am otherwise seemingly alone in sorting this. So thanks for your time and energy. I hear you and others that codec choice and whatnot are not optimal, but again, no trouble at all until this week, and seems all somehow centered around that one render clip that clearly triggers and traumatizes the Mac or FCP brain. But perhaps something to deeply consider switching up regardless of it’s the culprit before I get even much further into the belly of the beast of this project projected to take another 8 months of daily work before complete. Assets protected, check. I’d still like to hear what should yank from under the hood? Songs, films, applications? I just ran AVG cleaner…
“Has *anything* happened in or around this system between when you were running okay and when it started going bad? “
A new MBPro as of two months ago, and yes used a time machine backup from old MBP so that all apps were on new one. All scratch and other FCP files were stored externally. There was something I noticed initially when using FCP at some point, trying to do a particular edit, whereby I think it mentioned the graphics card?…some dialog box never got with the old Mac. One week ago started using brand new Lacie Rugged Road drive with Thunderbolt (first time ever) instead of usual USB. No power surges. A few days ago downloaded Get Bacupk 2RE + MacUpdate desktop and used them to update backups from one drive to another. Absolutely no sprinkled chicken blood, haha, have been without since local sorcery store ran dry…
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up