Green Flashes and Crashes with XDCAM EX Footage

[Sebastian Howard]

Hello there,

I was wondering if there had been any progress regarding this matter. Has anybody found a solution?

Has anybody tested this with FCP 7 on Snow Leopard, which is what we are about to set-up?

Looking forward to getting some news.

Sebastian

Sebastian W. Howard
Batchfilms
Sculpting Life Into Moving Pictures

[Robert Salsbury]

Hi

No solution to offer, sadly, only a me too.

What I can add is that I’ve noticed that BEFORE you’ll get green frames, FCP dumps a lot of messages like this in the console:

11/18/09 9:37:34 AM [0x0-0x3a03a].com.apple.FinalCutPro[425] Final Cut Pro(425,0xa00ad720) malloc: *** mmap(size=268439552) failed (error code=12)
11/18/09 9:37:34 AM [0x0-0x3a03a].com.apple.FinalCutPro[425] *** error: can’t allocate region
11/18/09 9:37:34 AM [0x0-0x3a03a].com.apple.FinalCutPro[425] *** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug

and by a lot I mean it’s repeated a few thousand times.

If you can an eye on messages in the Console application (“Console Messages” section) you can see when you need to reboot. On some systems with large projects, that may be more often than you like, but I’m managing ok, keeping project file sizes as low as possible.

I also zeroed out my stills cache – set it to ZERO, so that FCP would have as much of the RAM available to it as possible before getting wacky. No real time stills animation, but that’s not a problem for me on this show. And render to ProRes rather than XDCAM for sure.

-Robert

[Duncan Thomsen]

Hi

I’me new in but have been reading on CC for about 5 years now. Thought it was about time as this problem has finally got me.

I use FCP for all forms of programmes and films, I offline, online, grade and colour using it, as well as often prepare fully finished for broadcast. I engineer and have beta tested through london facilities, backed by Apple to roll out kit.

I have had the same prob with XDcam. I broke 3 GDrives in 2 projects and crashed 2 suites with the next. We implemented a Prores transcoding buffer, which allows us to ingest and prepare for edit as well as provide a backup of the material just in case. We also moved to G Raids 4Tbs.

Until the prores route was introduced, any xdcam, timeline scrolling caused crashes, and complicated procedure did. This caused multiple issues with the systems (all best spec).

We have now gone up to FCP7 and snow leopard, this has got worse. So much so that anything with xdcam slows up the system and blam – crashes. As soon as prores was introduced to those suites, no issues apart from the normal crashes one gets and can deal with.

The main prob we have is in the finishing suite. 12gb ram, dual 3ghz xeon, lovely machine, Kona LH output. Edit away in prores, grading, correcting and mixing. then blam – crashes.

I can only assume the HDs aren’t up to it. Or the limited RAM usage is causing it to fall off just when it needs the extra memory. We eSata’d, and found that this was ok, but not as stable as FX800.

Anyone got any ideas? Is it the drives being too slow, the ram not being able to deal with four monitor outputs of HD Prores? (thats 2 computer monitors, a sony grading monitor and and interlaced crt). Would 64bit s/w like SL, cause a 32bit programme to open the RAM too much?

We checked spikes, and electricity sources but no joy. The prores offline works fine, but online? Maybe just too much. And project is kept to about 130mb for efficiency. Got autosave on 10 mins and a nervous twitch in my left hand for saving.

Please help!

Duncan

[Georg Peter müller]

Here is another “Count me in” message… I have done all kinds of experiments to figure it out, including complete system reinstall, replacing the apple.vadriver, swapping cards to different spots.

I just realized yesterday that my system gets stable if I take out the decklink card altogether. I am using a multibridge pro to connect my JVC display. Now the question is: If I sell the decklink and get a mxo, will this thing start crashing again?

Cheers

Georg

If we don’t have it we don’t need it

[Ron Darby]

I been having a similar problem too. I use just about all Xdcam footage shot on an EX3.
On Leopard I would get the occasional crash, but after I up graded to SL I get drop frames every 2 seconds I play video, then it crashes. After rebooting it seems to play OK for about 20 minutes, then the drop frames start. They kinda ramp up, as in , first drop frame, I can hit the “OK” button on the warning window and play video for a while, but soon it’s less and less time between drop frame warnings. Then it gets so bad I can not even play video (in timeline, and viewer) for more than 2 seconds. I have tried new projects with only one clip in it, changing my electrical source, different media drives, turning off the Kona LHe,(AV play back set to none) and no joy. Next Ill try different codecs.

My System:
Mac 2 x 3.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
14 GB 800 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM

Caldigit 3TB

FCP Studio 3

Aloha Ron