How stable is FC Studio2? Honestly.

[Walter Biscardi]

[Tom Meegan] “The system I worked on the last three weeks had 10+ terabytes of storage daisy chained over seven FW 800 drives.”

I can’t believe that actually worked. That’s, shall we say, less than optimal for a setup.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR
The new Color Training DVD now available from the Creative Cow!

Read my Blog!

[Tom Meegan]

I had my doubts.

We built aliases to all the stuff we knew we would be using and kept those aliases on the same drive (empty and new) as new projects and captures.

Five of the seven drives were variations on the LaCie Raid 5 boxes

[David Bogie]

Possibly welcome to the family.
All systems are unstable, all applications crash, all drives eventualy fail. There is nothing inherently more or less stable or useful about FCP on a Macintosh than any other system or NLE.

All claims of superiority are lies.

You may love working in FCP, you may thoroughly detest it. Try to find out before you invest.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[Jack Kelly]

Thanks loads for all the replies. Getting myself an FCP system is now my #1 spending priority for 2008.

====================
Jack Kelly
London
Dir / Prod / Camera
Jack-Kelly.com – my homepage
====================

[David Mcgiffert]

Bogie,

I see you haven’t lost your sense of reality,
I can remember reading similar postsof yours in the old
Media 100 days in the early 90’s.

Shane’s DVD is a real help if you are the least bit
organizationally challenged (me).
I changed (some of), my ways after looking at his DVD and I
am better for it.

But DO get somewhere where you can play with FCP
and get a feel for it’s set-up. It never pays to jump into
anything on other people’s say-so. Especially with editing…

All the best,
Good thread.

David

[Jack Kelly]

Yes, you’re absolutely right – I fully intend to get some hands-on time with an FCP system before I fully commit to purchasing one. I’ve looked into dry-hiring an FCP system here in London but the prices are too high (

[Mike Parfit]

Hi,

Honestly, I have a different story. Our system crashes frequently, and has done so consistently through updates and upgrades. We have a Mac Pro with 4GB of memory and a Kona 3 card. Most of our crashes occur during renders. We simply cannot complete any lengthy render without a crash. We use DVCProHD and HDV. Our projects are large — one to two-hour timelines. No nested sequences. We do not have a fast RAID array, but did use 3 internal Seagates in a RAID 0 for a while with no improvement.

We can render with Color or with Compressor at length without similar crashes.

We can make two changes that reduce the crashing considerably:

1. Remove 2GB of memory. This causes a lot of Out of Memory messages but reduces the numbers of crashes dramatically.

2. Remove the Kona 3 card. This has the same useful effect but the Out of Memory messages don’t appear.

To get significant amounts of rendering done we routinely take out the Kona 3 card, then put it back in and use it for its many great services. (I don’t think this is directly an AJA problem; I think it’s related to capture cards and FCP in general, somehow connected to memory use. I have seen a description of very similar problems with the other brand as well.)

We know most people do not have these problems. However, this is not simply solved. We have been trying to find the source of this problem with the remarkably helpful AJA tech support people for over a year. Our efforts to fix it have included many complete reformat-reinstall procedures, one entire new system, changes in the configuration of hard drives, etc. Important to note here that these problems predate FCP 6. We had the identical situation with FCP 5.

We have a Mac Book on which we have a second (licenced!) copy of Final Cut Studio 2. We keep it at the same configuration — updates, etc., as the Mac Pro. It simply doesn’t crash, using the same project files. However, it has only 2GB memory.

I suspect we are indeed doing something wrong as we install this thing and as we use it. However, we do nothing unusual, have no additional plugins that predate the problem, and have done multiple installations on fresh hard drives all according to the various instructions (Apple and AJA). On this forum and others we have been told with patience by some folks and scorn from others that we need a professional systems integrator to set up our system. That may be true.

However, as far as I am concerned if that is the case then Apple should not give the impression in its advertising and many other places that FCP is a user-friendly, solid application that is accessible and practical for the home or relatively low-budget user — compared to Avid, at least. (We do this professionally, but we are a small shop in a remote location.)

In fact, if you look at some of the advice given in this very thread and elsewhere, you will find testimony to FCP’s tenderness even from those who have stable systems. Witness Walter’s urging that you should use very fast RAID arrays, even though he mostly uses DVCProHD, which does not by any stretch require that level of throughput. Witness frequent advice to avoid updates until they’ve had time to breathe and possibly choke while they’re being used by us more naive users who take Apple at its word that this will work.

My conclusion here is that FCP Studio’s flagship program, FCP 6, is a terrific application with a great deal of power, clarity and utility that has a soft underbelly, particularly with regard to memory use, which leaves it vulnerable to a few circumstances that are not easily identified and rectified. My specific advice is that it is probably worth making the switch, but do exactly what people have been telling me to do: Get your system put together by someone who does it for a living, has done so for a while, and will stand beside it if you run into a problem like mine.

Good luck,

Mike