Out of Memory Error… FCP 7… project too large?

[Chris Pelser]

I would try to convert the photo images to smaller file sizes. Keep in mind that the DPI setting is much less required for video edit. Doing this your file sizes will be reduced and it should work better.
You have to watch the Photoshop type files as they can slow down things a lot.

Hope this helps?

Chris

[Chandra sekhara azad Patibandla]

hi Ash

I use to have the same problem while working with documentary films.you can use jpegs.If you decrease the quality of the images you can solve the problem.no need of converting you files.

Azad.Patibandla

[John Perrault]

There is no reason why I should get an out of memory error when the project that I’m working on is only 35 seconds long. No complex edits, no extra sequences, and not a lot of footage, but when I click on a clip to preview it, it won’t pull up the clip and says out of memory. Any suggestions before I throw my computer through the wall and switch to Avid, not like I can get a job only using FCP anyways.

[Brien Longobardi]

hey guys I have had the same problem in the past working with large amount of footage in different formats and a ton of pix, First FCP can not handle PSD files Motion Files and large reso on pix. Also if you are going to another app for onlining for color like DaVinci, Color etc you need to flatten al the pix, motion effects, speed fx, Freeze Frames, Motion files because none of these apps can import/ read them. So my advice is once you have the pix, effects the way you want export a Apple ProRes 422HQ file of each indi section of pictures and FX areas and slap in the timeline it will make the system run faster and will also help you get the project ready for on lining. The problem lies in FCP architect it saves render titles etc to the project file which. I have had project files 500 mb. Currently I’m editing a Doc with 300 hours of footage and 7,000 pictures and my project file is 253mb. So what I just did was break the project into 2 acts and those 2 acts into 2 parts + 4 parts so I can edit faster and move around but also keeping a master project. Its a pain in the balls but I do not see any other way around it. After this project I will be switching back to Avid, I never ran into these problems because Avid saves each bin in its on separate folder which in turn keeps the project file smaller also if you have corruption it only corrupts that bin instead of the whole project.
Brien
Editior / director

[Matthew Marchesi]

I’m using FCP 7 on Lion (without the support updates) and I’ve been getting the same error message too.

I’m not using stills of any kind and I only had one sequence in the project.

The one comment that was helpful was the comment was Chee-Han Wong’s comment about FCP not liking H.264 format. All of my screenshot video’s are in that format.

However, I do not think that was the entire problem, and I think some of it is related to the render files, which I’ve been having a lot of problems with anyway.

My fix was:

– I deleted the render files
– I copied everything in the timeline over to a new sequence
– I started adding more videos to the timeline
– I have rendered the new videos
– I have not rendered all the previous edits

Everything seems to be working alright now. I will continue to edit until I’m finished (or run out of memory again). I’ll post back with any more problems.

~Matt

[Lewis Stiefel]

Hello to all you frustrated FCP7 editors. I to have suffered through the maddening out of memory
error…. even after pairing down my project to a single sequence!! There is a simple solution that
seems to have worked after trying everything else mentioned in other posts. Here it is…go to your
sequence setting then go to video processing change whatever setting you have…may have to use
trial and error but this has worked for me.

[Rajesh Barnabas]

I think the overall consensus here is that you have to break it into chunks. Render parts of it, rather than the entire sequence timeline. Render All won’t work. Not a tidy solution. This worked for me.

[Rajesh Barnabas]

Also courtesy of another creative cow thread: https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/1027544

If you are bringing in PNGs, or Photoshop Docs, with transparency, that may be throwing things off. You need to put the MODIFY>Alpha Type > Straight to the those individual stills.

[Edwin Adkins]

Just adding my experience to the (growing) list:

I have a fairly long (one hour) sequence with lots of motion and color correction. But towards the end of the sequence, where I had a combination of “bloom” effects and some single color frames (essentially slugs, but white) I started to see problems with output. I got the same error maybe 9 times “Out of Memory”, so I pared down the project file as much as I could and removed all still images I could. But it still didn’t work. Only once, on about the tenth output failure, did I get an error that actually explained a bit about what was happening, and it was worded something like “the effect Bloom failed to render your hardware cannot render at the requested size and depth”. I was surprised to get an error that actually seemed useful. I made some other small changes in the sequence, and it returned to giving the “out of memory” error. But at least by that time I had enough of a clue of what to change. I adjusted the video processing settings to 8 bit (down from 10 bit) and it seems to be working (a few test runs including the bloom effect sections worked, and I’m now 4 hours into an output that shows no errors yet).

basically, working through a few different remedies given in this thread, the one that seemed to work for my situation was the change in video processing. I am a bit concerned that the resulting video output will be degraded to some degree, but the test runs didn’t show that much difference between 8 and 10 bit YUV.

I’ve spent a few days on this particular problem — not a tragedy, but I have better ways to use my time. Although I’m not sure this is an FCP bug, I’m not sure what else to call it: I add effects to clips in layers, and the computer gives no warnings that anything is wrong… until I try to output and then I get a simple and mysterious failure. by the stage my only remedy is to crawl the forums and hope for the best. It would have been nice to get more instructive error messages along the way.

most important, as this and other threads have emphasized, I can’t help but feel that FCP itself is really imperiling my workflow. Luckily, I’m not under a strict deadline right now, but I could have been. Regardless, I can’t really trouble shoot this for weeks on end.

I know all software has issues, but I’ve had many of these with FCP, and I have 95% decided to shift totally to Premiere (bought the software, and started doing simple projects with it). My experience with FCP has been frustrating. I admit I have older hardware, but it’s not bad, and the demands I’m putting on it don’t seem excessive.

From what I’ve seen of both Final Cut Pro 7, and now Final Cut X, it seems appropriate that they’ve simply dropped the “pro” from the name entirely, and are aiming for a rather different user base… They may be happy to leave users like me behind, and I’ll be happy to leave final cut behind.

[Rich Morrant]

Hi All

I also found that if you go into Tools—> Render Manager and look at the lists, sometimes you will find a large render ‘cache’ you msy not need. I had one over 94GB!!! Just check the ‘remove’ column and hey presto – it frees up render memory space. ***all in layman’s terms***