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MacPro freezing up completely – especially with After Effects
I edit a daily science news show on a 12-core MacPro with 48gigs of RAM – not exactly a wimpy machine, at least in theory. However lately I’ve been experiencing a spate of frustrating freeze ups that I just can’t find an explanation for. We use After Effects daily to render the host’s chromakey and these freezes often occur mid-render. It usually happens like this – the render stops completely, but the rest of the computer is still functioning. But then slowly all other programs start to freeze until finally the computer is completely unresponsive and my only option is a hard reset. It makes me cringe every time I force the computer to power down.
Now my first thought was to just use a process of elimination – what I have I added/done to the computer lately that might be responsible for this. This, however, is difficult to ascertain since I’ve noticed that the problem seems to have become progressively worse over the past two months. Since then I’ve only installed one new program, the Sony XDCam browser. We recently switched cameras to a tapeless system and this could very well be part of the problem, but I don’t think it is. We work on a 250GB SSD that I’ve had to take home a couple of times to get work done on my own computer. I’ve also upgraded to OSX 10.8.2. I am kind of at a loss here. This is a beefy computer and it shouldn’t be acting like this. I guess what disturbs me is the nature of the freeze ups themselves, starting with After Effects and then freezing the whole machine. Any ideas?
I’ve uploaded a system report just in case.
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4 Replies
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My instinct is that it’s the RAM or a bad sector of the hard drive.
RAM: AE hits the bad Ram location = freeze
HD: AE hits a cache at the bad spot on the HD = freeze.Check the HD. Boot to the recovery partition and run disk utility on the drive.
Pull half the ram tomorrow. See how it works. Then do the other half.Best,
Jeff I. Greenberg
Author/Master Instructor/Speaker/Consulting
My contact info and more -
How about Apple Hardware Test?
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Thanks for the advice – I’ll let you know how it goes. Although I will say that since I’ve been quitting FCP7 before I render anything in AE I haven’t had any crashes.
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I have same issue. My Macbook is a mid 2010 unit. My problem mostly occurs on boot up. So, I would like to suggest you to clean your Mac, there might be lots of unwanted data stored in your Mac. The other option, you can try defragmentation for your Mac.
I have used Stellar Drive ToolBox software for my Mac.
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