Green Flashes and Crashes with XDCAM EX Footage

[Alex Elkins]

Hi Andrews,

It seems like everyone using XDCAM EX material faces this problem, myself included.

The standard answers are:
– Turn off clip thumbnails (both in timeline and browser)
– Turn off audio waveform
– Keep projects under around 100mb. If the project is over that sort of size, it can be split by cut/pasting certain clips or sequences into new projects.

Transcoding to ProRes would probably solve the problem, but I’d guess it’d take much longer to do that than to just carry on editing and deal with it crashing quite often. Just keep saving!

All the best,
Alex Elkins

[Mark Raudonis]

Andrew,

I can confirm the “green flash” preceding crash behavior.

We use lots and lots of XDCAM material on many different systems, and
we have observed that issue.

Some things that help: No thumbnails in the timeline. Restarting of the system at convenient intervals (like lunch), seems to ‘refresh” the memory and extend your “MTBC: Mean time between crashes”.

We work in native XDCAM timelines, but render to prores…

Mark

[Andrew Brose]

Thanks guys,

We’ve been very diligent at keeping thumbnails and waveforms turned off, being quite aware of the lag it cause with the system. Our project is about 200MB big which we could try to make smaller, but with the nature of the crash my gut just doesn’t seem to point to that as the problem. I could be wrong though.

What I don’t understand is why I’ve never run into this problem on my personal edit suite? Or why the other editors I’ve talked to who are also doing large XDCAM EX projects on machines with almost the same specs as ours aren’t having this problem? Is it one of those situations/formats where sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t and nobody really knows why?

Cheers,

Andrew

[Rafael Amador]

[Alex Elkins] “It seems like everyone using XDCAM EX material faces this problem myself included. “
I think that most of the people working with XDCAM have no problem at all, like my self.
Rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Dan Monro]

Hey Andrew,

We’ve been trouble shooting the same problem with RS422HQ media; there are some issues with our X-San bandwidth, and perhaps 10 bit isn’t necessary, but for a practical solution, it boils down to this (and I’d love to get some Cow feedback on this…) FCP uses about 3 gigs of real memory – that’s it. Once you get up to about 1.6 (gigs of real memory being used) you start to see the crashes (preceeded by green flashes in the canvas). I have eliminated a lot of bin information (from a 4 month movie launch project) especially unused sequences, superceded graphics, used slates, old version of the movie, etc. etc. Got my project down to a size that only takes 1.3 gigs or so to open. Its not the size of your project that is the problem, its how much Ram you ask it to use while you’re working – hence the waveforms, thumbnails, etc. I’ve found that closing all but the sequence you’re working on, and any unneeded bins really helps. I’ve had to dramatically alter my workflow (I save EVERYTHING) but its better than crashing every time I try to make an edit.

I hear that Shane has recommended running at 75-80% on your cache settings in System settings (Shane, my friend forwarded me a post by you). I’m still getting the crashes, but at a reduced level. And following the Activity monitor may seem silly, but its kept me up and running. And remember in Avid when you saved every 3rd keystroke because you knew it was going to crash – get back in that habit. Again, better than crashing.

I was going to post a general question about this, but this’ll do: Anybody else have any suggestions or experience with FCP’s RAM limitations? Can I force it to use more of my 16 gigs? Big projects are a fact of life, but if they don’t work, they don’t. I can change…I know I can…

D

Dan Monro
FCP, Avid, AfterFX, Atlanta
MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 2 GB ram
Mac OS X 10.5.7
GeForce 8600M GT Final Cut Pro 6.0.5 Quicktime 7.6

[Andrew Brose]

Hi Dan,

I’m very inclined to agree with you’re saying and have often wondered from the beginning if this has been a RAM issue. Hopefully when I finish my hardware test I can confirm or deny that, but regardless it seems like the problem has to do with the RAM being pushed to it’s capacity.

In fact on a handful of occasions I was stress testing the suite trying to recreate the circumstances of a crash, but instead I wound up getting the green flashes in my canvas and timeline without FCP actually crashing. As long as I stayed in FCP the frequency and the length of the flashes would increase, but if I momentarily switched applications (i.e. browsing Safari for troubleshooting tips) the green flashes in FCP would disappear. Ultimately FCP would crash but it was like the temporary switch in the applications gave the memory a chance to refresh itself. I don’t know if that’s right but it seems like it could be a logical conclusion to me.

If this problem is RAM related and it’s a question of FCP not being able to properly harness the system’s resources then I think we’ll be making some changes to our workflow (i.e. stripping down the size of our project file and performing lots of Command + S).

Anyone else have any thoughts or suggestions? Are we looking at a major RAM issue?

Cheers,

Andrew

[Alex Elkins]

[Rafael Amador] “I think that most of the people working with XDCAM have no problem at all, like my self.”

Hi Rafael,

I’m sure you’re right, not all people have the problem. We just hear about the people who do, but it does seem that A LOT of people have this exact problem though. The question crops up every week, and there still isn’t a solid reason or, more importantly, a solution for it other than work-arounds.

All the best,
Alex Elkins

[Rafael Amador]

You are right Alex, and IMHO there is a kind of hardware/system related issue.
It seems that the more CPUs and RAM the more problems may arise.
Projects that works flawlessly in a MBP makes the octocores crashing.
I wish I’d had a clue.
Rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Atticus Culver-rease]

Are you usually able to run 200MB project files without running into regular crashes? I’ve had stability problems with large projects in various codecs, including XDCAM EX and ProRes. My experience has been that having a project file over 100MB is asking for trouble, but I’d be curious to hear if other people have been able to do it without issues. If you’ve got old versions of sequences and other things that you probably don’t need but don’t want to delete, just create a copy of your project file and leave them in there for safe keeping, but delete them from the project file you’re actually working in. It sounds like you probably have some other issues as well, but it might be worth a try.

[Dan Monro]

The project its crashing in is 123mb. I have paired that down and restarted, but as I got up towards 100mb again, it started flaking out again. So I’m pairing down again. We’re actually trying to pin it on a corrupt sequence.

On the other note; 10 bit media. We reverted our Kona firmware to 32 bit, down from 64 bit. That helped, but not much. But now, I switch my playback mode to 8 bit and it plays back fine, with the exception of dropping frames on output. But at least its not crashing. We could Not change to 8 bit playback when the Kona firmware was at 64bit. Food for thought.

I’ll update any more interesting findings.
D

Dan Monro
FCP, Avid, AfterFX, Atlanta
MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 2 GB ram
Mac OS X 10.5.7
GeForce 8600M GT Final Cut Pro 6.0.5 Quicktime 7.6