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Mac Shuts Down During Rendering
My Mac is either rebooting or shutting down when I try and render my project. I rendered a MP4 with H.264 Fast mode and I get a file that is fine. There are a few playback issues, stutters etc. that are not in the timeline. So I’m trying to render as H.264 High Quality. Last night I stated the process and when I came back the Mac had rebooted. Started the process again, same thing. Started it again, went to bed and this morning it had rebooted. Again I started the process but this time when I came back in the Mac had shut down completely.
Is there some issue with rendering at H.246 Higher Quality? That’s the only thing I changed. It seems to render OK in H.264 Fast but I think I’m not getting a really clean file.
????
Ken Bennett
Video Adventures
Capturing Your Life’s Adventures! -
5 Replies
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It appears running FCPX’s Share as H.264 Better Quality, for rendering an MP4 file, will cause my iMac to crash and reboot. I’ve done it 6 times in the past 12 hours. If I set it to H.264 Faster Render it works fine.
Since this is my master file I will be delivering I want the best quality possible, so I wanted to Share as H.264 Better Quality. But FCPX can produce a file at H.264 Better Quality.
Is this a known bug?
How do you get the BEST MP4 quality out of FCPX?
THX
Ken Bennett
Video Adventures
Capturing Your Life’s Adventures! -
What are your hardware specs? It sounds like the GPU is overheating or already damaged. Try exporting a ProRes master file and then using a different app to create the MP4 from the ProRes. Compressor, Adobe Media Encoder, Squeeze, Episode, etc.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Specs: iMac 27 late 2013, 3.5GHz Intel Core i7, 32GB 1600MHz DDR3 ram, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4096MB.
I will try the ProRes and take to Compressor.
THX
Ken Bennett
Video Adventures
Capturing Your Life’s Adventures! -
[Ken Bennett] “running FCPX’s Share as H.264 Better Quality, for rendering an MP4 file, will cause my iMac to crash and reboot. I’ve done it 6 times in the past 12 hours. If I set it to H.264 Faster Render it works fine.”
What Oliver said is a good guess. When you render in H.264 Better Quality, I don’t think that uses Quick Sync. Without that the CPU is under more stress which generates more heat. The GPU must also be used to render any GPU-implemented effects before encoding. You are rendering and encoding a long timeline. A heat-related intermittent component or circuit board problem would be consistent with these symptoms.
As already mentioned your best near term workaround might be exporting to ProRes and if that works transcoding it externally to H264. However that also might cause the OS crash, and if so you could transcode it on another machine.
Another possibility is you’re running out of disk space and during the render & export, it is destabilizing the operating system. The OS should handle that gracefully but no OS is perfect, not even macOS. It wouldn’t hurt to verify you have plenty of disk space on all volumes and maybe run Disk Utility First Aid on all volumes.
This very unlikely a bug in FCPX (or any other app) as each process exists in a separate address space and normally cannot crash each other or the OS.
You can run Apple Diagnostics, but if it’s an intermittent problem that only happens after prolonged stress, it won’t find it. The Genius Bar can run overnight bench diagnostics which stress the machine a lot more and can find intermittent problems.
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If it’s heat-related there are free apps to take manual control of the mac’s cooling.
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