Punks and perfection — The instability debate

[Delano Bryant]

Well I for one agree with you Cory on the needed User problems tracking site. I’d throw in an additional 100 clams to get that off the ground. I noticed that noone took you serious or didn’t delve into the real solutions that could be derived from such a user group site.

Delano

0 1’s thats all it is

Is that the color red you want to use?

[Jim Watt]

The reformat & reinstall worked great and seems to have solved all issues…that is of course only working for a few hours on the system, but several of the operations I’ve done would have caused problems before.

jw

[David Roth weiss]

[Jim Watt] “The reformat & reinstall worked great and seems to have solved all issues”

Jim,

That doesn’t surprise me. A clean install is normally highly recommended on most systems when movong between major versions. The fact that Apple enables the majority of users to sucessfully update/upgrade without a clean install is a really tribute to their ingenuity.

Unfortunately, some users, like yourself in this instance, will always have to revert to a clean install. You may be pleasantly surprised to realize other unforseen benefits you hadn’t expected, as all user preferences will be set to factory defaults for the new version, which can make things operate very smoothly in ways you may never have experienced since the day you acquired your computer.

David

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Jim Watt]

Thanks David,

What’s puzzling, is I started with a clean install with the new machine, but it was done at Pro Max in LA, then shipped up here, and something obviously was corrupted along the way or once I stated working with it.

thx…jw

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
10 years ago I was called in to troubleshoot a new Targa 2000 card Mac OS 7.6.1 capture problem – trying to capture caused a crash every time.

I spent several days repeatedly reinstalling everything – doing an erase of the SCSI system drive each time. No joy, a crash every time.

Because I was only working during office hours on the system, I at first didn’t want to waste the best part of a day doing a low-level drive format, so I just did an erase, but after many days getting nowhere, I twiddled my thumbs for the hours it took to do the full SCSI format.

Problem solved, the software/hardware thenceforth worked absolutely fine.

Well nowadays low-level formatting has disappeared into history, but if I was confronted by a similar intractable problem I would do a full write-zeros scan of the system hard drive, because the problem then had to be caused by some persistent sector corruption on the hard drive.
And if that could happen then I’m sure it could now…

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Jim Watt] “The reformat & reinstall worked great and seems to have solved all issues”

Well whaddya know? You mean something was setup wrong without your knowledge? Man, I am sure that you MEANT to set it up wrong in the first place and that you really WANTED to drag yourself through another install and hours of downtime. I know I try and do it on a weekly basis. There’s nothing like watching progress bars on software installs. Titillating.

In all seriousness, Jim, thank you for actually not taking this personal and doing the most highly recommended thing: when something is awry and you can’t get it to work, start over and reinstall, especially when new operating systems come around.

Jeremy

[Jeremy Garchow]

[PaulD] “And if that could happen then I’m sure it could now…”

No doubt about that. That combined with Apple’s Disk Utility defaulting to APM formatting instead of GUID formatting for disks used in intel machines. Not a really smooth move.

Jeremy

[Stephen Hopes]

Hi Mike,
Wow I feel like I’ve found a partner in the horror movie that is FCS 2 Intel Macs and the various cards etc that are required to make these things work…
I recently hired out one of our FCP suites for an on-line that was budgeted for three days, five weeks later the guy had a master…Please see below one of my responses to your original thread about the 4G’s of Ram…oh and by the way both our systems have 4Gb’s of ram…

Name: Stephen Hopes
Date: Oct 20, 2007 at 7:02:05 pm
Subject: Re: Do you have 4GB RAM? Are you crashing?

Hi Walter,
It’s so gratifying to read these posts…My life has been a nightmare for months, pretty much since upgrading our two edit suites to FCS 2 and 3Ghz Intel Mac Pros.. We use ATTO with Huge Systems and Blackmagic HD Extreme all with the latest drivers.

We make long form documentaries 90 minutes average and rendering is exactly the same as everyone is describing.. I’ve taken out all 3rd party plugins tried several reinstalls of everything and nothing is working, my partner and I have to sit through these hellish renders (2 or 3 minutes at a time) overnight usually, sometimes to find that the render files have all disappeared the following morning.

I can’t export a sequence with Compressor, I have to export a reference movie and put that to work in Compressor…And nothing from Apple on this…

I got so fed up recently that I bought a G5 2.5Ghz quad on ebay and went back to an old FCP5.1 project file of our current project to see if it would work ok…and voila not even a hint of instability, overnight renders perfectly and then working for days with no crashes at all none….So we have a brand new Mac Pro sitting in the corner doing nothing, with 4Gb’s of ram I might add, and we’ve had to redo all the editing of the project twice because the 6.01 project file isn’t backwards compaptible…
If you have any sway at all with the powers that be at Apple can you try to get some movement on this…
We’re seriously considering moving to the other side….AVID…aarrrrrgh!!!

Steve Hopes
Sydney, Australia

[Stephen Hopes]

Hi Shane,
I agree with you but….. having run many many stable FCP systems with all sorts of raids and firewire drives etc….I have to say that having spent a lot of money upgrading to our latest systems…(3ghz intel macpros with FCS 2, BMD HD extreme and ATTO scsi raids) no other uses for these machines but video editing… I’ve had nightmares that you would not believe…and I am a virgo and really vigilant about what plugins that we add and all sorts of other maintenance regimes to make sure that we have optimum systems at all times… this is what we do, so forgive me if I say that I find the tone of your response a little patronising…

I do not solely blame FCP but it’s the hub of all this activity and there doesn’t seem to be much recognition from apple that there are some MAJOR problems here and sorry but it ain’t all down to me….

Steve

[Tom Daigon]

Boy Im certainly am glad I have the luxury of a “wait and see” attitude before I sink major bucks into a 8 core system for my FCS2 at home. I empathize with the trauma that folks like Stephen Hopes must be going through. At this rate, it might be around NAB (hopefully) that I make the purchase Ive been anticipating for about a year now. Or maybe not at all if Apple doesnt aknowledge and fix these very basic crucial
problems.