[Alan Langdon]

Walter-

All your help is much appreciated!

I am almost there, it seems. My CS4 AE at home also allows me to choose DPX as the extension, so should’ve been fine… BUT, when I try to choose RGB+Alpha (I need both, and at Trillions of Colors+, I would assume), it doesn’t let me: its either RGB or Alpha, but not both… what am I missing? Or is this a CS4 bug? I didn’t check at the production house I was at if there I could have exported RGB + Alpha…
I need to export titles, for the client to integrate with footage in Smoke.

[Alan Langdon]

Walter, I appreciate your quick reply.
I apologize for such a simple issue: why couldn’t I see the DPX option in the Cineon options?
I am at a production house, where they have CS5, and where I can see the DPX option. At home, where the mentioned job is being done, I shall locate it within CS4 just the same, I bet.

Furthermore, many thanks!!

[Alan Langdon]

Thomas, I have been reading the thread and am interested in what you are saying. I am runnign FCP 7.0.3 completely updated, on a 2 x 2.4 GHz QuadCore INtel Xeon with 20 GB of RAM, a ATI Radeon HD 5770 video card (1 GB VRAM ) and also a Matrox MX02 for broadcast monitoring.
I noticed you had asked Rafael Amador if he was using a Matrox card and thus thought of dropping you a line about my similar problem. I have been working on an hour-long feature in 1080p shot in XDCAM. THousands of clips in dozens of folders, and the need to open folders with thumbnails has been crashing my system very often. Watching the Activity Monitor, I notice RAM running up to 2 GB as I open folders and view more thumbs, and eventually the system crashes.

I just discovered that by emptying the Constant Frames render files within Render Manager, I immediately trim about 0.5 GB of RAM usage of FCP, keeping me safe within the 2 GB limit I seem to have.

Other than this, I have trashed prefs, Thumbnail Cache, but always RAM seems to run out and crash teh system, often with the gold ol’ green screen of death.

Any info is much appreciated! And I will try turning off Matrox output to see if this helps reduce memory usage in FCP.

[Alan Langdon]

Aeolan-

I have been practicing your tips, trying to keep FCP from crashing, but nothing has been ultimately helpful… I think the issue might lie elsewhere. And I wanted to run by you (and others here at the Cow) something I just discovered. I have been watching the Activity Monitor while using FCP, just to see how the RAM is gobbled up as I open windows, thumbnails, etc… and of course, as I scroll down and visualize more and more thumbs, sure enough, RAM gets up into the 2 GB level for FCP, and crashes the program.
Since thumbnails AND green flashing frames/flashing video fragments have been haunting me at the same time, I tried using Render Manager to delete the COnstant Frames (which always seem to creep up and cause crashing too) and immediately my RAM usage for FCP went from 1.85 GB to 1.25 GB…

Does anybody know anything about Constant Frames not being dumped/used properly and adding up until the system crashes?

[Alan Langdon]

Todd, I seem to have the same problem you had years ago, now in 2012 on my Dual Core Xeon MacPro… Did you ever figure out what it was? I have the same issue, causing several crashes per day. Seems linked to opening too many bins with thumbnails visible…
Any info on how (if) you solved this wil be much welcome!

[Alan Langdon]

Aeolan-

Thanks again for being there.
So, I have trashed the pref files you suggested to trash, and the problem occurred again: crashing, with FCP sending the crash report to Apple.
I think there MIGHT be two issues at hand, but maybe they are the same:
1- The thumbnails maxing out the RAM and causing slow down to load thumb images and then crashing
2- The Canvas window going green or green-stripped and then FCP crashing.

Answering you about the videocard, these are the specs:

Chipset Model: ATI Radeon HD 5770
Type: GPU
Bus: PCIe
Slot: Slot-1
PCIe Lane Width: x16
VRAM (Total): 1024 MB
Vendor: ATI (0x1002)
Device ID: 0x68b8
Revision ID: 0x0000
ROM Revision: 113-C0160C-155
EFI Driver Version: 01.00.436

Most likely, what came with the MacPro.
There’s also a MATROX MX02 LE installed, sending audio and image via HDMI to a HD TV. COuld it be freaking out the video card?

Can/should I change/increase the amount of Still Cache, or Thumbnail Cache (System Settings/Memory & Cache)? This is set at :
Disk : 28192
RAM: 2048
(After trashing the prefs today I bumped these up to this, the default I think is 8192 and 512, respectively.

Again, thanks! Any help is much welcome.
Your method of using the OS thumbnails as oposed to FCPs might be the next and only way out, but I am trying to find a FCP solution…

[Alan Langdon]

Thanks for such an extensive answer.. your tips seem like they will help, let me try those this week and see. The computer I am working on is at a production house where I freelance, so I need to make sure I can go about trashing prefs and such.
I hope to get back with a positive result, thanks again!

[Alan Langdon]

Thanks for the info, very helpful. WHiel reseraching for this topic, I dug into Color Management, somehting I never even thought about, I always just used 16 or 32 bpc. So now I am learning about linear light (gamma 1.0), as well as Color Space workflow. And it looks like the 35mm transfer house which will join the Apple Pro Res HQ footage with my TIF sequence will need to provide me with the proper COlor Space they want the TIFs to be in, so compositing works fine.

[Alan Langdon]

Thanks for the response.

Is the AVID DNxHD codec you mention available for dowload? I presume I would have to install it on my MAc and the client on his PC, correct?

[Alan Langdon]

The scratch disk is a Lacie 1 TB 7200 rpm external drive, connected via FW800. It has about 150 GB free. Initially the footage was on the internal drive of the MacMini, but then I presumed the internal drive must be 5400 rpm and less reliable, so I swapped everything over into the external Lacie, but still the same issue. When I bring the footage into the iMac (mentioned before), it runs smoothly with the footage still on the Lacie external drive.

The funny thing is I never noticed this when I was using my previous 2010 MacMini with less ram (4 gb) or even my MacBook Pro 2008 (4 gb ram, 2.2 ghz) …but then in both cases the monitor was not 1080p, but something less, like 1680×1200 or something. So the new 1080p resolution / monitor is also an element, possibly, that the video board is not handling well?

I was thinking of getting the server model and ended up not, good to know it runs well FCP. My experience is that FCP runs pretty well almost on any mac from 2009 and up, especially when not talking about 1080p footage.