Large project, FCP shuts down

[John Magin]

Questions:
What version of FCP?
How large is the project? Generally accepted practice is to keep it under 100 mb. How many timelines do you have in the project? often what happens is one scraggly piece of media can become corupt, be it a still image file, a transposed QT or a render file. This can flag during project opening and cause it to crash. If you are savvy enough, you can go into your Utilities/Console and look at the CrashReporter. Look at the last thread state(it lists the last thread first, but numbers it ascending order) and it may provide a clue to what operation caused the kerfuffle. Also, your project cache file may be corrupt. go to User/library/preferences/Final Cut Pro User Data (FC Studio 1 or higher) and whack the whole folder- you can copy/move custom button bars/layouts if you have them to back that up. Reopen FCP and try to open the project file.

John Magin
Tekserve Pro Video Services
john@tekserve.com

[David Roth weiss]

Thomas,

How much RAM in the machine?

How many timelines are open?

How many stills are in the project?

Do you have Disk Warrior and have you run it?

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[David Bogie]

Define “large” in two terms: How big is the project file in Mb and how long is the project in terms of hours.

bogiesan

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

[Thomas A. johnson]

Okay… I’ll answer several questions at once here:

RAM: 6.5GB
Number of timelines open: I have had is crash with as little as one and as many as 5.
DiskWarrior: No, I don’t have it, but I have seen that mentioned in various threads before.
Project size: (I had not considered looking at this before.) 221.7MB
I notice that several revisions back the project file was considerably smaller.
Duration of project: there are a few timelines within, but the one primarily in question right now is just under 10 minutes
Files referenced: I am referencing quite a bit of footage on a firewire drive (just shy of 30 hours)

Notes: No other software seems affected. I have tried systematically taking our RAM modules to see if this helped (it didn’t). It seems as if it is filling up all available ram and not letting it go for some reason. (No, I haven’t benchmarked this- just a theory.)
the FCP disappearing routine began just after doing a small edit which included cutting out part of the beginning of a soundtrack project file.
I did try deleting the prefs files (but not the whole folder) at one point, which did not help.

-TAJ

[David Roth weiss]

221mb seems awfully large for a 10-min project with just 30-hours of video. Do you have loads and loads of stills and graphics?

And, one more question. What type of media drive(s) and how much space is left?

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[John Magin]

Notes: No other software seems affected. I have tried systematically taking our RAM modules to see if this helped (it didn’t). It seems as if it is filling up all available ram and not letting it go for some reason. (No, I haven’t benchmarked this- just a theory.)
the FCP disappearing routine began just after doing a small edit which included cutting out part of the beginning of a soundtrack project file.
I did try deleting the prefs files (but not the whole folder) at one point, which did not help.

> does FCP give you an “Unexpectedly quit” error or just goes “poof”. I would look into Diskwarrior and other utilities ( Techtool Pro, Drive Genius are good staples) as your directory structure may be borked. If you are running OS 10.4.2 or higher, you can run Drive Verification in Disk Utility- also if you haven’t repaired permissions in a while that’s a good thing to do while in DU.

[Thomas A. johnson]

Okay. I analyzed a couple of older versions of the project, and I came up with the following:

I had a version sitting at 87MB, which had all of my stills in place (appx 500 or so used in a couple of animation sequences).
The next version I had was 160MB- the primary difference that I see on this is that I linked to a soundtrack pro project file (.stap)

Also, if I have had one of these projects open, close the project (without exiting final cut) and try to open another version of the project, FCP will shut down.

thoughts?

-TAJ

[David Roth weiss]

The 500 stills are eating up your RAM big time. Consider turning those into video clips via QT Pro and you may see performance benefits.

The STP thing might meaningful, there really aren’t enough people using it to have a lengthy reporting record to rely on.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Ron James]

Do a search and you might find some of my older posts regarding FCP file management and workflow. You can really strangle yourself if you don’t do things right from the very beginning. The database gets bloated and this is exactly what happens.

I’ve posted at least four or five times on the subject, though, so you should be able to find info on how to fix your situation now and prevent it in the future.

Good luck!

[Thomas A. johnson]

Thanks everyone for the advice.

Just for the sake of leaving my troubleshooting path-
I ran disk warrior, I reinstalled FCP- both with no change.
It seems I saved the most obvious solution until last…

So far, it looks like the ‘bloated database’ is what happened. I never was able to ascertain exactly what caused the issue, but my work-around was to pull my sequences to a new project that did not include my original media bins. It seems to be rendering fine now. However, I don’t know what I did to bloat the database. Any thoughts on this point / things to avoid?

DB structure for reference: I had appx 30 hours of 4:3 NTSC DV25 footage all sub-clipped out with description/detials filled in and divided into various bins. I had a separate bin for audio clips (wav and SoundtrackPro), a separate bin for graphics (.png from AE, livetype,logo graphics), , a separate bin for clips prepped for FX (slow-mo, etc)

-TAJ