project takes 15 minutes to open

[John Burgan]

Check your project file size. If it’s above 10-12Mb, you need to slim things down and adopt a different workflow.

Break the project down first into Media/Edits, then further down into chapters/acts/interviews, whatever seems most logical. Also weed out redundant edits by archiving them, keeping the project with your main edit up to date and as lean as possible.

There’s no problem for FCP to have multiple projects open simultaneously, you can copy, cut and paste between them.

Also, make sure that you regularly save your projects using the “Save As…” dialogue, forcing the whole file to be re-written from the ground up on a regular basis. Apparently months of saving to the same file is a recipe for corruption, and simply backing up a buggy file is no insurance against losing your work.

[Bouncing Account needs new email address]

THE FOLLOWING COMES FROM THE KEN STONE WEBSITE:
“Over 5,000 years ago Confucius wrote: ‘If you are toiling away, you have changed nothing and FCP heads South on you, [starts behaving in strange ways] then it is time to trash your FCP Preferences.’ ”

Click the following link for instructions.

https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/trashing_fcp_prefs.html

A great way to do this is to use “FCP Rescue” a free Apple Script that will Trash the Preferences for you (and restore nearly all of your user settings afterward).
There are versions for FCPro & FCExpress.

Download these free Apple Scripts at

https://fcprescue.andersholck.com/

[Josephine Healey]

How big is your project size? would love to know for the rest of us how big the file is.

[A.lee]

john-
if you do that, isn’t it a pain in the butt when you go to archive the project?

I was having pretty big file sizes and so I started dividing them up. After the project is over, I find it sucks to have to archive each project file..( or maybe I don’t need to do that?) ..seems kind of messy to me..but it does help open up the files faster.

[Mark Raudonis]

Seanjayy,

You’re not alone. We’re regularly working with multiple projects in the 115 -150MB range. Yes, these are huge. Yes, they can take up to ten minutes to open.

Sometimes it’s impossible to “slim down” the size of the project. In that case, I’d suggest a quick trip to Starbucks for a double latte to get you through the long night ahead!

We’re also noticing that when you have four or five of these “monster” projects open simultaneously, you’re risking an “unexpected quit”. Even though we’ve maxed out the RAM (6 gigs), we’re still seeing a fair amount of crashes. This “project ballooning” seems to be a result of multicam in 5.02. I’m curious to hear about anyone else’s experiences with these kind of large projeccts.

Mark

[John Burgan]

Mark – I’d be interested to know why you claim it is “impossible” to slim down large projects.

It’s just a question of organisation, surely. I’ve now cut several feature-length projects on FCP which would have topped 100Mb if they had been left as a single project file, but I have always managed to break them down to several, smaller size files as suggested in my first post. Ever since adopting this practice I’ve never experienced the problems being described here. It’s well worth the initial effort.

[John Burgan]

It’s a pain in the butt having projects that go south or take ages to open. Archiving several project files is a fairly minor disadvantage in my book.

[John Burgan]

Mark, just realised you’re referring to the Real World multi-editor set up which is probably why you want to avoid multiple project files – fair enough.

I still think that for a single project/single editor workflow breaking things down has far more advantages than minus points.