out of memory error

[Mike Parfit]

[Greg Nosaty] ” I can never just set the show to render all my color grading and effects and walk away, I always have to nurse it along. “

Hi, Greg,

It is a relief to see someone else going through the same stuff I’ve been seeing for several years and several versions of Final Cut. Identical experience, except that when I try to do the long render much of the time the program simply crashes without the courtesy of the out of memory message, and then all the rendering is lost. I’ve been told it was a problem with firewire drives, so I got rid of them; no improvement. Tried everything all the posters here have suggested. The only thing that helped for a very short time was a complete reinstallation from the OS up.

The improvements lasted about three days, then we’re back to crashes and out of memory, so that sure seems to indicate there is some kind of corruption building up somewhere, perhaps among the render files. I, too, have relatively long timelines — 40 to 60 minutes.

It seems clear that this is not a universal experience, but it is shared among some of us, so there must be something about our settings or systems that makes it happen. I would be very interested to see if you find something that solves it. I would also be interested to know if people who are not experiencing this are using significantly different workflows for longer pieces, such as nested sequences, etc.

One further puzzle is that we have not had similar problems with our Macbook Pro, using firewire 800 drives and the same project. Granted, we don’t use it as much for editing, but on several occasions I set it to rendering a whole timeline overnight — on a project on which there had been previous renders and problems on the Mac Pro — and came back in the morning to find that it had worked.

Thanks,

Mike

Mac Pro 2.66
4 GB
3-drive internal SATA Raid
Kona 3

[Greg Nosaty]

I also experience FCP crashes when working in high res. My workaround is to restart the computer and software once or twice a day. The best I can figure is that it is some kind of cache problem. If i’m working with thumnail views in my browser and doing alot of test renders it seems as if the cache gets overloaded. Then the system starts to become sluggish and you can almost see the crash coming. Thats when I know its time to save and reboot.

I’ll have to try my MacBook Pros as render stations, thanks for the tip.

BTW- all my drives are eSATA, Sonnet 5 bay mostly and they make a groovy 34mm PCI slot adapter so you can use the raids on your MacBook Pro.

cheers,
greg

[Russell Lasson]

What kind of RAM do you have in your machine?

Your machine seems abnomally unreliable. It quite possiblely be mid grade RAM that’s causing your issues. What brand is it and where did you get it?

-Russ

[Mike Parfit]

[Russell Lasson] “Your machine seems abnomally unreliable. It quite possiblely be mid grade RAM that’s causing your issues. What brand is it and where did you get it?”

Hi, Russell,

I think you’re addressing Greg rather than me, but just to address the memory issue thoroughly, I have all factory memory that came with the machine. The identical problem has happened to me on these successive machines: A dual G4, a Quad G5, and the present Mac Pro intel.That’s why I believe it is something in my configuration or workflow practices, and since other people seem to share this issue, there must be something to be learned here from people who aren’t suffering from it or who have solved it.

Thanks,

Mike

[Greg Nosaty]

[Russell Lasson] “What kind of RAM do you have in your machine?

Your machine seems abnomally unreliable. It quite possiblely be mid grade RAM that’s causing your issues. What brand is it and where did you get it?”

It happens with all the desktop systems I work on, each with different amounts and brands of memory installed by the Apple reseller.

[Pf Bentley]

I’ve been getting the Out of Memory error too on renders using FCP 6 with a MacPro and 4GB of RAM.

However if I Export to QT Conversion without first trying to render the timeline, it works fine as it renders the timeline and makes the movie at one time.

[Pf Bentley]

I take that last comment back – it output the QT movie fine but still needed to render. However the render worked fine after the output. I also made the timeline clips smaller if that had any effect.