Why Crashing every few hours on FCP 5.1 ?

[David Roth weiss]

That must be the longest doco in history? It sounds to me like you’ve managed to turn an NLE into a linear editor. Why pre tell is your time line so very long? I can assure you no NLE works well with that much material on the timeline.

DRW

[Uli Plank]

I’d also suggest breaking it up into shorter sequences.
But you should also check your RAM, I’d expect slowness, but no frequent crashing. Did you add RAM, and where does it come from?

Regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Elizabeth Yoffe]

I’m working with 150 hours of footage. I’m using a dual 2 gigs G5, my RAM is 3 gigs and I have over 2 terrabytes on Lacie drives. I’ll cut down my timeline from 6 hours as has been suggested. I always have the activity monitor window open to watch the system memory and it seems fine. The only issue is that it makes me nervous to feel that I might be working for two hours or more only to have it crash.

Even though Autosave helps, it’s not reliable enough. I have it set for every ten minutes but I find that sometimes it skips and doesn’t save. Of course I’m trying to save manually as much as I can.

[Mike Parfit]

Hi,

We have similar problems. Timeline is 3 hours long (tiny compared to yours!) but we have 300 hours of footage in bins, and quite a few backup sequences in the browser, and that seems to eat up a lot of memory, though never more than about 1.3 gigs. We have 4 total, but Final Cut can’t see them all. We have a G5 quad with about 4 terrabytes of firewire storage, and it crashes a couple of times a day at least. The crashes do not seem related to the length of the timeline, because I often just have a short sequence open and it still crashes. I think it may be more related to the amount of stuff in the browser, but for me the crashes also occur, though less frequently, on much smaller projects. The crashes do not seem to happen during any one particular activity, but rendering long chunks (more than 10 minutes) is almost always impossible.

We have recently run a long memory test with many passes, with no negative results. At last we’ve managed to get a couple of days in which we don’t need the machine and I’m going to take it into a shop to see if anything’s going on in the hardware. But my suggestion to you is that if it’s anything like what is going on here, this kind of problem seems to get worse with the overall amount of stuff in the bin, not just the length of the timeline. Removing older backup sequences from the browser significantly reduces the size of the project file, but in our case has not seemed to reduce the number of crashes.

Maybe there’s a firewire drive component to it, too. A lot of the people in this forum seem to do very well with their SATA arrays, etc., but when I’ve posted here before I haven’t heard from many firewire drive enthusiasts, that’s for sure. Even though the Kona speed tests that I’ve done have shown excellent read and write numbers, far faster than necessary for the HDV and DV I’m working with, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s something going on with these chained-up things anyway. You know, maybe Final Cut wants some specific bit that’s hanging out on the end of some chain, and there’s a drive out there yawning away from not having been accessed lately, and boom, down it goes.

Good luck,

Mike

[Uli Plank]

I’d still consider faulty memory, the usual tests don’t really tell you much. If you have the opportunity to swap it from another machine for a test, just do it.

Regarding external FW drives: Yes, having one of them going to sleep can spell problems. Make sure they are set in the Energy Saver to never sleep when you are editing. If I remember well, there used to be a freeware thing called “Spindown fix” if they still do.

Regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Elizabeth Yoffe]

By the way, the day I installed Sound Soap the crashes started. Someone suggested to remove Sound Soap plug-in from FCP because audio plug-ins may be causing the crashes. I did and so far no crashes lately. I don’t know how long that will last….

[Uli Plank]

Could be the reason, yes!
Apple started shifting their plug-in standard in FCP 5.1.2 from (more or less) AE-compatible to fxPlug (which before was used by Motion only). While this should normally affect video plugs only, who knows? Whenever a system starts showing erratical problems, it’s a very good idea to remove third-party plug-ins and see if it helps.

Regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Elizabeth Yoffe]

Any ideas about why Autosave is so erratic? Mine is set to save every ten minutes but I notice that sometimes it saves on schedule and other times it doesn’t save at all for long periods of time. When I manually save is it really a secure way of making sure my sequences are actually being saved so I shouldn’t worry about the glitchy autosave? There are sessions when the autosave does save every ten minutes and sessions when it just doesn’t save at all for four hours or more!

[Ron James]

I’ve been on FCP since version 1.0 and one thing has never changed:

the database is its biggest weak spot.

You need to split your project up. First, I wouldn’t have a timeline 12 hours long. That sounds unmanageable, to say the least.

Second, you should plunk your sequences into a new project file and delete them from the one that contains all your clips. The only drawback to this is the fact (I’m pretty sure) that you’re going to break the master/affiliate relationships. Perhaps you could, then, take only relevant clips and have different project files for each sequence and clip set.

The point is, your project file is too bloated. Some people mistake that for file size, but I’m talking database.

My workflow would avoid this scenario altogether. Is there any reason why you can’t dump a bunch of stuff or be more selective?