[Andrew Brose]

Hi Dan,

I’m very inclined to agree with you’re saying and have often wondered from the beginning if this has been a RAM issue. Hopefully when I finish my hardware test I can confirm or deny that, but regardless it seems like the problem has to do with the RAM being pushed to it’s capacity.

In fact on a handful of occasions I was stress testing the suite trying to recreate the circumstances of a crash, but instead I wound up getting the green flashes in my canvas and timeline without FCP actually crashing. As long as I stayed in FCP the frequency and the length of the flashes would increase, but if I momentarily switched applications (i.e. browsing Safari for troubleshooting tips) the green flashes in FCP would disappear. Ultimately FCP would crash but it was like the temporary switch in the applications gave the memory a chance to refresh itself. I don’t know if that’s right but it seems like it could be a logical conclusion to me.

If this problem is RAM related and it’s a question of FCP not being able to properly harness the system’s resources then I think we’ll be making some changes to our workflow (i.e. stripping down the size of our project file and performing lots of Command + S).

Anyone else have any thoughts or suggestions? Are we looking at a major RAM issue?

Cheers,

Andrew

[Andrew Brose]

Thanks guys,

We’ve been very diligent at keeping thumbnails and waveforms turned off, being quite aware of the lag it cause with the system. Our project is about 200MB big which we could try to make smaller, but with the nature of the crash my gut just doesn’t seem to point to that as the problem. I could be wrong though.

What I don’t understand is why I’ve never run into this problem on my personal edit suite? Or why the other editors I’ve talked to who are also doing large XDCAM EX projects on machines with almost the same specs as ours aren’t having this problem? Is it one of those situations/formats where sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t and nobody really knows why?

Cheers,

Andrew

[Andrew Brose]

Brian,

MPEG Streamclip is an excellent freeware program you can download for this particular application. Once you’ve installed the software, open your DVD and export your project to almost any format. The program is quite straight forward and simple to use.

Good Luck!

Andrew