Out of Memory error about to make me go postal!

[David Roth weiss]

Its pretty tough to provide any “useful” help without any information on your hardware and software. Better provide some details… RAM? FCP version? Etc, etc, etc…

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.

[Tom Von doom]

Model Name: Mac Pro
Model Identifier: MacPro1,1
Processor Name: Dual-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed: 3 GHz
Number Of Processors: 2
Total Number Of Cores: 4
L2 Cache (per processor): 4 MB
Memory: 12 GB
Bus Speed: 1.33 GHz
Boot ROM Version: MP11.005C.B08
SMC Version: 1.7f10

FCP 6.02, Kona 3

[Bill Dewald]

I’ve had the same problem, with the 16 TB memory glitch reported in Activity Monitor..

I believe the project that I was working from had started to become corrupt. I copied my current sequence into a fresh project, and things went a bit smoother.

Is your entire film in one sequence? Or is it broken into chunks?

16 TB of RAM… we’ll get there someday…

(btw, the system was a dual-core xeon running FCP 5.1.4/ OSX10.4.10)

[Tom Von doom]

The program is in one sequence. I would be happy to break it down to segments. In fact, that’s what I’ve been trying, but it crashes any time I make a change. Or try to save. The show did play out before, but not anymore. What’s the deal with the memory registering off the scale? It seems like a FCP bug or something. I can see why it thinks it’s out of memory if it’s looking for TBs of it. I’ve tried trashing prefs, zapping pram, deleting renders. Not sure what else to try…

[Bill Dewald]

yuk – two ideas –

can you take your media drives offline and try to open the project?

do you have a autosave or backup that you can go to?

I’ve found that projects tend to bloat when they go bad – mine went from 315 MB down to around 200 MB when I pasted into a new project.

[Tom Von doom]

I did go back to an autosaved sequence. I suppose if I took the media offline, I might be able to make shorter sequences and relink later. I’m going to try and xml the sequence and open it in a new project. With the media offline, I mean. it wouldn’t do it with it online. With all the people having these problems on here I can’t believe that there’s no fix for this. It could be me and my system, but I think it’s something to do with Apple. This is my first major project in HD using FCP. Give me back my Avid!

[Dan Riley]

Here’s something to try:
Open the project.
Copy the entire sequence you need..
(drag the mouse over the entire sequence and do apple-c and
hold them down for a few seconds because it’s a large sequence probably)
create a new project.
paste your old sequence into the new blank sequence in your new project.
save your new project and name it.
close your old project without saving cause you say you can’t anyway.
Quit FCP.
Open FCP from your new project (double click on the project file)

Are you now able to work with the sequence?

The reason for doing all this is most likely your project is too large.
That’s when memory issues start to creep up.

Dan

[Jim Carswell]

Just out of curiosity what is your hard drive set up? Please say you are not using the same drives as your operating system!!! Also, are you working with SATA or fw400 or 800?
Jim

Jim Carswell
Spyhop Productions, Inc.
Savannah, GA
http://www.spyhopproductions.com

[Richard Sanchez]

I just finished an HD television program, and since we were a documentary program using footage supplied by consumers at certain points, I found that mpeg video clips, dv video clips, and large still photos were typically the most suspect pieces. If you have a gigantic still, try to shrink the photo to the minimum size neccessary to fill the frame. If you have an mpeg or dv footage mixed in there, I would take it into it’s own project, and export it out to an I frame format. In my case, since we were mastering at 720, and upconverting to 1080, I would render those pieces out to and 1280×720 pro res movie, and that seemed to take care of those issues. Hope that helps.

Richard Sanchez
North Hollywood, CA

“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks

[Tom Von doom]

I appreciate your comments, guys. No, I’m not saving to my boot drive. I have a fibreshare setup with plenty of space. I tried Dan’s suggestion, and so far, so good. I have my sequence in a new project, and I’m re-rendering it all minty-fresh. I may have to do it in pieces, but I’ll see how far I can get this way. Hopefully, soon I can have a textless master to play with. Thanks for your help.

Does anyone know what the deal is with the memory allocation thing? I don’t know if the utility is misreading it or if FCP is not interacting with the OS properly or what. I can’t help thinking this is related to the problems we’re having. I’d just love to know….