Full FCP 7 Assault – Out of Memory, Dropped Frames, Playback Trouble suddenly.

[David Roth weiss]

Marc,

Sorry, but you’re just spinning your wheels. I already gave you the fix, but it appears you’d rather try everything else but the proper fix. When you’re really serious about fixing your FCP issues and getting back to work just let me know and I’ll come out of retirement to help you.

David

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Mark Suszko]

Might be a conflict coming from trying to resolve old and new versions of one of the apps copied-over, or a bug in an update. When you run old FCP7 suite systems, you really need to put the entire machine, OS and apps in the equivalent of a bell jar, if you want them to stay stable. No updates. No changes. Hotel California.

[Marc Israel]

David, thanks for chiming in again. The fix you gave is very welcome as an idea and possible or probable solution, but, because I have never, ever had any issues whatsoever with these sequence settings, including other entirely finished film projects…and because of the dreaded prospect of having to reformat an entire project with thousands of files, about 50 different extended sequences, several micro-projects within the larger project, etc and hope that everything syncs up without creating some other issue(s) in the process…I think it could be understandable that I haven’t been yet ready so far to declare your fix gospel and execute it. Also the advice to run disk utility seemed to led to an entire fix of the project, temporarily, until I recreated the circumstances for the issue again. I am wondering if you can elaborate on why you think the sequence settings is the problem here given the First Aid fix, the issue re-surfacing due to rendering one heavily effect-ed clip, and also given that I have had zero issues with the project for a couple years on/off until now, not to mention other fully completed projects with identical sequence settings for several years now.

There could be a lot of background tech understanding I’m just missing here, because I don’t have a firm grasp of that stuff and how it all relates and interrelates…

Also, if I were to change all the sequence settings, can you give me some idea of what extra muscle I should expect to have flex…like, you mentioned resizing clips – is that something I can do in a batch fashion, maybe using “paste attributes” for example? Should I expect expect to run into any snags or you think it’s a pretty cut and dry procedure? Also, why does FCP create these outdated sequence settings for me automatically when I plop down any of the original HV30 footage into the timeline? Why doesn’t it default to pro-res settings instead, for example?

[Mark Suszko]

I’d put money on David being right. Though I suspect you also have drive issues.

As to why FCP7 picked the codec of the same footage you out into it, that’s a convenient thing most times, but it’s also a default you can set or change. You should have changed it when you started. Much of the drama would have been avoided. I’d tell you to read up on “Easy Setups” but really your ultimate answer is to get with the 21st century and move over to either FCPX or Resolve or (shudders) Premiere. Really, any of the new platforms are great and way more capable for what you want to do. At least half your misery is coming from hanging on to seven. I get nostalgia, truly, I do. Nobody more nostalgic than I am… I also get the “sunken costs fallacy”; you wanna finish this project on the same platform it started on. Jumping away now seems like too much.

I’m picturing you in the scene from the first Pirates of The Caribbean, where Jack Sparrow enters the harbor on a slowly-sinking little boat that’s completely submerged to the mast-top by the time it hits the dock.

That’s you now. The dock’s in sight.

Promise me, if you can’t bear to jump ship yet, that you will, once this last project’s done. Even I’m doing it this year, at least at home. (I keep a bell jar legacy seven setup at work strictly for authoring interactive DVD’s. Which nobody’s asked me for in 5 years. But DVDSP was THE BEST, and the shop can’t afford the new stuff.)

[Marc Israel]

I hope I am not the movie you see in your mind. But perhaps I’m in denial. and that ships already set sail and now sinking in the harbor. In any case I can’t jump ship.
I’m hoping some underwater monster comes up for air and while doing so happens to bring the ship back up on its head just before I drown

It’s not for nostalgia reasons. This is a film project I started nine years ago, a sweeping epic documentary, one which I worked on for two years, then gave it up on, but now am coming back to with fresh vigor and a whole new angle and more footage. And what I have to start again with is practically half the film already made, or at least a very rough draft. Hundreds and hundreds of hours of fine-toothed editing. To start again on another system would essentially be to lose all those hours and need to re-clock just as many before even beginning to tackle the whole revision, which, in itself, will take another several hundreds of hours. So see? I can’t. Just can’t. But I will promise you I’ll jump ship once this project is done. Then, I’ll be ready for the future. For now, I’m married to FCP 7 no matter what grief she gives me.

Regards my FCP 7, I think it’s bell jarred pretty well, the whole package was just transferred via time machine, no updates.

[Marc Israel]

I just spent awhile taking David’s suggestion making a new sequence to settings of Pro Res 422, square pixels, and copy and paste everything from the current timeline. There’s a couple immediate problems. Firstly, the widescreen clips get this big square black border on top and bottom.
Hopefully you can see a photo of it here:

12965_screenshot20181219at1.37.39am.png.zip

No matter what I choose for pixel aspect ratio, it doesn’t give me a plain widescreen across the whole screen.

[David Roth weiss]

Marc,

If you go back and read my initial message you will see that I prognosticated that you’d have to resize some or all of your clips.

How do you think I knew that Marc? It’s because I’ve helped a few thousand people just like you who don’t begin FCP projects properly and land in editing Hell. The mistakes you make in FCP at the start of a project are cumulative, and they mount as you progress, until FCP chokes. That is where you are now… If you proceed as you were, you will not only struggle with every minute of your editing from this point, but the quality of every frame of your precious video will be, and apparently has been on past projects, inferior to what it could or should be (especially text and graphics).

So, you can learn how to do things right, and learn how to resize and reposition things quickly as you do, or keep going down the same road.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Marc Israel]

I’m well-aware of your initial message, it’s what instructed me (how) to do the experiment last night. I was showing the photo of the canvas to explain the actual snag I hit, and hoping someone like you could explain how to troubleshoot. because I can’t. I appreciate your input, but in my last couple responses to you I’ve been asking about my particular project and how it relates to your diagnosis, which would help me understand and feel more assured that this is, in fact, the only explanation and that you’re considering the minute particulars. I’m glad you helped thousands of people but that doesn’t go as far as hearing a practical response/explanation about the First Aid, the temporary fix, the retraumatization by recreating the rendering scenario, why there’s been virtually ZERO problems until now (and zero problems again when I run First Aid), etc. I can’t just automatically go on blind faith, turn over my powers of reason to someone even if they obviously have lots more experience. But I would love to get your take on what I keep mentioning. Simultaneously, I AM beginning to experiment with changing the settings, in case I take your advice full throttle, and I have already hit a big snag, which I mentioned, and would love to get a practical fix for it, because otherwise I am stuck there too.

[David Roth weiss]

Marc,

I am retired and have far too many fun things to do besides reading overly long posts, and going back and forth between them.

Please, just stick to the here and now, I don’t really care about all your previous attempts to fix stuff, that’s the past, when you were unsure about what to do.

So, now that we have that out of the way, other than probably having to repo and resize a boatload of clips and things, to make them right, what other issues do you have?

FYI, you can just try to fix a few minutes of your timeline, or try editing some new clips on a proper timeline, you’ll find that almost everything will playback in real-time without rendering, becsuse Pro Res is a realtime codec, designed specifically for hi-speed real-time performance.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Marc Israel]

“Please, just stick to the here and now, I don’t really care about all your previous attempts to fix stuff, that’s the past, when you were unsure about what to do.” David, with all due respect, the ”past” you refer to is, in good measure, what has happened the last 3 days since the original thread. That’s not here and now? But I don’t want to quibble, an instead make use of whatever you have to offer and are offering. So, onwards…

As mentioned, I cut and pasted an old sequence into a new sequence with the settings you recommended. The photo I affixed shows the result. It’s basically like a form of letterboxing. It’s a square frame with the widescreen footage set in the center with blackness on the top and bottom to compensate for the different shapes (square vs rectangle). This is the first roadblock I immediately ran into. There’s others, but unless I can straighten this one out, I’m stuck.