Mac Pro momory issues – ATTN Walter

[Ernie Santella]

You have too much memory. reduce to 2GB and try it again. I had that problem. I had 5GB and FCP worked fine, but while exporting it would crash. I took out th extra memory and it exported fine. It seems to be a quirk with MacPro right now.

Ernie Santella
Santella Film/Video Productions
http://www.santellaproductions.com

[Zak Mussig]

Ernie,
Thanks for the quick reply. I thought the 2 gig limit had to do with some 3rd party piece of software or hardware. You couldn’t export anything using your Mac Pro until you went down to 2 gigs of RAM? I ask because I’ve been turning out MPEG 2s like crazy until this project. Other sequences from this same project have exported just fine in the past. I was only doing these again because 3 didn’t work the first time.

Thanks for your help, just trying to figure this out.
Zak

[Ernie Santella]

Nope, it’s not a card issue. I pulled my PCI cards still had the same crashing problem. Try it and post your results. It only happened to me on really large/long exports (like 15 minutes). Short exoorts worked fine.

Ernie Santella
Santella Film/Video Productions
http://www.santellaproductions.com

[Gary Adcock]

[santellavision] “You have too much memory. reduce to 2GB and try it again. I had that problem.”

this should not be an issue on a MP machine if the firmware has been updated.

I have done this very thing on my MP with 6 gigs of RAM without issue. ( 10.4.7 and QT 7.1.3)

gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows

[Zak Mussig]

My firmware is up to date, and the same thing happened with 1 gig of RAM installed (didn’t have the RAM to use a valid 2 gig setup), so I’m scratching that possibility, an I’m going to assume I have a bad file, or files, in these timelines. There are Photoshop documents over every clip as an overlay graphic, so I’m going to check into those.
Thanks for all of the help and interest so far. Anyone have any advice for finding corrupted or troublesome media in a timeline? Any other ideas are appreciated as well.

Time to put my RAM back in.
Zak

[Zak Mussig]

Hey all,
Got it sorted… stupid Photoshop issue. Some of the files had a group that wasn’t used for that particular graphic, so it was hidden. These obviously didn’t get caught by a merge visible and save PS action, and seem to be the cause of the problem.

Thanks for the help,
Zak

[Walter Biscardi]

[Zak Mussig] “My question for you Walter is, did your Mac Pro still show an accurate memory count in the system profiler even as your 2nd memory card riser went bad?”

Sorry I’m late to the party, but turns out there was no problem with my RAM riser. Turns out what Apple calls “Install RAM in pairs” was different than my interpretation and AppleCare’s interpretation of how it should be installed.

With the Mac Pro, you must install the RAM in pairs on each board and in succession. So the first two RAM chips go into Riser A, then the next two into Riser B, then the next two again into Riser A and so on.

In my case, I had a single 1GB RAM stick in Riser A and a single 1GB RAM stick in Riser B assuming that was a “matched pair.” That is, the RAM in Riser A matched the RAM in Riser B. The AppleCare tech also thought that was correct.

Daystar Technologies figured out the RAM was in the wrong position and now 2GB of RAM works fine only installed in RAM Riser A. RAM Riser B is empty at the moment until ATTO creates the new drivers to allow 4GB RAM in my machine.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Zak Mussig]

Walter,
I guess that makes 2 of us with machines that aren’t broken. That’s fine by me. Coming from the G5, my first instinct was the same as yours to install RAM. Since I didn’t pay for the thing I took a little more care to read the instruction book than I typically would have before jumping in.

Zak

[Phillip Van west]

Thanks for finally clearing that up, Walter. I would NEVER have interpreted what Apple published about optimal RAM location that way.
The whole notion of never having 1 or 3 DIMMs in a riser just didn’t make sense until you described it the way you did. Thanks again.

pvw

Phil Van West
Terra Nova Productions
Denver, CO
Video Production/Post-Production

G5 DP 2.5GHz / 4.5 GB RAM / OS 10.4.8 / FCP 5.1.2 / QT 7.1.3