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Is FCP ever going to sort out the “large project file” crash problem?
Hey Guys,
I’ve been working on a feature film for about 5 months cutting on FCP 6.01. In general the program has worked great. About 2 months ago however, FCP began to crash alot. Sometimes when I was rendering, sometimes just out of the blue. I tried all the standard stuff like trashing the preferences, repairing the permissions, throwing out my render files etc… Nothing seemed to help. I had to conclude that despite the fact that I have a very fast quad 2 gigahertz Mac Pro with 4 gigs of RAM that FCP was having that old “too big project file problem”. I have encountered it before on earlier version of the software on other projects. I think I have read around on these forums that some people suggest that you shouldn’t have a project file bigger than 150 megs. If you are interested in having more than one sequence of a 90 minute feature and have over 30 hours of footage and alot of imported sound FX, keeping a project file this small is very hard and incovenient. I decided to move over the bare minimum of material into a clean new project. However, this proved to be difficult. I couldn’t even copy over any material without FCP crashing. Or if I didnt’ crash, it would not succeed in copying any sequence over. Eventually I had to copy and paste the sequence in 5 minute chunks, to get it over into a new project. After spending several hours getting a new project file up and running, I was back in business, but unable to go back to previous cuts. Fast forward 6 weeks or so, my new project is now over 350 megs again and FCP is again crashing constantly. Is this problem ever going to get fixed? Or is it just considered that FCP is not designed for dealing with so much material? Anyone have any solutions? Or is also frustrated by this?
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15 Replies
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Solution…MULTIPLE PROJECT FILES for your single project. The Power of FCP is this ability to have several projects open at the same time. SO you can have one project for all the footage, then another for all the audio, and another for the cuts only. And instead of duplicating the cut when you go to make changes, duplicate the cuts project, change the date, and use the new one. You can revisit old cuts by opening the old projects.
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Interesting idea! So FCP will work better with several smaller project files open, rather than one big one?
Its a little late for me to try it out now, since I FCP won’t cooperate with copying stuff out of the project file. But I’ll give it a go when I start my next one.
Thanks!
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I’ll second this one….
I went thru this same issue last year with our first feature film. When it got down to the audio pass, FCP started crashing (128 meg project file). After looking here on the COW and listening to Shane… I cut my project down into smaller chunks and WOW what a difference it made.
[Julian Clarke] “Its a little late for me to try it out now, since I FCP won’t cooperate with copying stuff out of the project file. But I’ll give it a go when I start my next one.
“Its never too late. If you have to, take the media offline (disconnect your media drives) and load the project. Then… all you have to do is copy and paste. Trust me…. its never too late to save yourself headaches.
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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com
https://blogs.creativecow.net/waynecarey -
Oh….. by the way…..
Shane Ross has a tutorial DVD on just this subject. Its a very well worth investment.
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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com
https://blogs.creativecow.net/waynecarey -
[Julian Clarke] “So FCP will work better with several smaller project files open, rather than one big one?
“Yes, absolutely.
This is a much overlooked feature of FCP. Many former Avid editors don’t realize that for FCP, the “project” is just not that important. We regularly operate with many projects open simultaneously: different episodes, a special “B-Roll” project, various sequences etc. There’s no reason to try to “hold” all this information in one project. At the very least, you should have a project that is “sequences” only. When it starts getting unwieldly, commit it to archive and don’t open it.
Shane did a whole DVD about organizing projects. Check it out. It’s worth it.
Mark
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Good advice guys… Thanks!
I’ll think about picking up that DVD too!
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Some additional thing to try are adding more RAM. Bump it up to 6 or 8GB and put all your old edits into a separate project and keep that project closed. For example, if you have an assembly of all your reels into a 90 minute sequence that will eat up RAM when you launch FCP. Take all the old versions of the reels and assembly’s and move them to a new project and delete them from your main edit project file.
Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.
http://www.ambidextrous.net -
Another cause that increases project file size up disproportionately is nesting.
We found that a project file size can jump from 12 MB to 150 MB within two 5 minute autobackups once we started nesting…
So maybe you have some nests you can collapse or get rid of – see if that brings the project size down.
Regards
Francois -
To Michael Alberts:
Not sure bumping RAM will help because FCP cannot use more than 4 GB of it. It may help in separate cases when you have other RAM-hungry applications open though.
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[George Bazhenov] ”
Not sure bumping RAM will help because FCP cannot use more than 4 GB of it. It may help in separate cases when you have other RAM-hungry applications open though. “Who doesn’t work with multiple apps at the same time? If FCP is allocated 4GB that leaves enough RAM for programs such as Motion, After Effects, Soundtrack, Color, Compressor, Transmit, Episode etc which we routinely have running all at the same time. Not to mention your web browser and email.
We also routinely have multiple HD projects open at the same time. This eats up RAM like crazy. Without a minimum of 4 just for FCP we routinely get crashes.
Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.
http://www.ambidextrous.net
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