[Craig Alan]

If I’m wrong about the 2nd graphic card being an issue, I would clone my system and install everything fresh.

I understand what you are going through. It sounds like you know as much as I do, but when things are going wrong it can get really frustrating. Been there.

FCP X does have some kinks to work out, but massive melt downs are not the norm. It is way faster than 7 ever was.

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Camcorders: Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV30/40, Sony Z7U, VX2000, PD170; FCP 6 certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

“entire screen melted to that dreaded gray with the warning to ‘restart your computer.’ ”

That’s a kernal panic.

I’m not saying I know about your specific graphic cards but I was told that I could not use the two cards (on the approved list) I had together with FCP X. I had to remove one. I was able to use it with a pci in/out card for my broadcast monitor.

I have the NVIDIA Quadro 4000 and had a nvidia geforce gt120. Based on advice using the Quadro for other programs I did not want to hook up the cinema display to it. But I had no choice. FC would not support both cards and I had lots of problems – it was really slow and crashed. I took out the Nvidia and bingo I was a happy camper. The new Mac Pro as yet unreleased seems to have addressed this problem.

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Camcorders: Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV30/40, Sony Z7U, VX2000, PD170; FCP 6 certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

I’ve also noticed that FCP X will not undo many types of actions. That is definitely a UI thing. For example, in the precision editor if you move to a new edit point with the up and down arrows, depending on your project, the interface will jump into a completely different configuration. If you understand the rules of the precision editor, it doesn’t bother you in the least. But if you’re new to it, you can get baffled.
You opened it to edit a particular edit point and suddenly its re-merged and yet you are still in the precision editor.

Undo is a safety net. It should undo whatever you just did. It should do this consistently. It should undo your keystrokes not some of your keystrokes. That way you are free to experiment (and/or learn the program) without screwing up your project.

Undo should also allow you to watch each step going back in time so you can learn what you did and see it unfold in reverse. To make matters worse, when you try to undo some of these types of actions you get that can’t-undo-beep and Edit>undo is grayed out. Now you are really in a panic.

And yes it’s user error, but there is no reason for a selective undo. IMO undo should work even after a save. Or in FCP X’s case, after quitting the app. Granted not even MS Word does that and it has one of the best undo-s and has had one of the best undo-s for many years.

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Camcorders: Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV30/40, Sony Z7U, VX2000, PD170; FCP 6 certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

That gray is a kernal panic It could be OS corruption or bad ram or may some component or external the system doesn’t like. FC is certainly demanding. Is your graphic card on the approved list?

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Camcorders: Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV30/40, Sony Z7U, VX2000, PD170; FCP 6 certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

Got me. I’m just learning too. But I’ll certainly keep your fix in mind. Still seems unlike OS X to have the whole system go down, demanding a reboot. That said, I did have a situation in which my timeline would not play but would scrub. Only a hard reboot solved it. Maybe it has something to do with X communicating with the media on an external drive? I will say that X reboots pretty fast. And I have never lost anything even when it’s gotten weird. But I have heard of folks getting corrupted project files. Nothing new there. The legacy FC best practice was to back up the project files.

Does your project hold original files or aliases? Is your organization clean? Did you make any changes on the finder level?

[Landy Folsom] “Event corruption?”

Do you mean project corruption? I assume your new project uses the same media files.

Did the original project have these problems as well or just the new short version?

I have also read that it is good practice to relink files following any organization correction in the browser.

Maybe by creating a new project (timeline) you essentially accomplished this?

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Camcorders: Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV30/40, Sony Z7U, VX2000, PD170; FCP 6 certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

I’ve had FC crash more times than I like but never had that message. I would repair permissions, run disc warrior, test the ram. Your media drive has lots of overhead what about your system drive?

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Camcorders: Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV30/40, Sony Z7U, VX2000, PD170; FCP 6 certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

I would back up your small project files using FCP itself.

https://help.apple.com/finalcutpro/mac/10.0.6/#verb6acb2fb

“Control-click your project in the Project Library, and choose Duplicate Project from the shortcut menu.

In the window that appears, type a name for the new (duplicate) project and choose your external storage device from the Location pop-up menu.

Select an option to specify what is duplicated:

Duplicate Project Only: Duplicates files specific to the project you selected. You may want to select this option if you use the same clips in multiple projects and plan to back up your events separately (perhaps in your backup copy of your entire Project Library and events). This option does not duplicate event media.”

And to back up the entire sparse image, I would use CCC (or the like) to make a clone of it.

If it had been previously backed up and you haven’t added any new media and you have at least two copies of the project file, I think you are pretty well covered. If the footage is valuable I would have a second back up of the raw footage on yet another drive.

This is the one thing I miss about tape. It was a pain to digitize but the tape itself was way more reliable and easier to store. A labeled tape cannot be mistaken for anything but what it is. I think as SSDs get bigger & better this might all become easier and more reliable. They have no moving parts. Run cooler. Etc.

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Camcorders: Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV30/40, Sony Z7U, VX2000, PD170; FCP 6 certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

As long as we are revisiting from other threads:

some end users are reporting that their sparse images are slower than the media drives they are in and a call to Apple Care pro app department got me a strong recommendation not to use sparse images – that they would slow things down. My tests on a raid with plenty of overhead and relatively small images housed in it did not show this however. I used Black Magic and AJA apps to test the speed of the raid and the sparse image. If anything the images were faster.

Do any of you experience speed/performance issues using sparse images in FC?

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Camcorders: Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV30/40, Sony Z7U, VX2000, PD170; FCP 6 certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

I think by default it should reference a new parent clip and have the option to make a global change. Or if not by default then at least by default between midnight and 9am.

Seriously how many times do you want to edit changes in a timeline you are not working on? I could see it coming in handy at times but more often not.

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Camcorders: Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV30/40, Sony Z7U, VX2000, PD170; FCP 6 certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

Why not make an empty sparse bundle image and clone the sparse image to it? Any reason that would not work?

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Camcorders: Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV30/40, Sony Z7U, VX2000, PD170; FCP 6 certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.