[Duane Martin]

Truth is there are many kinds of environments in which editing is done and FCP X will satisfy some and possibly not others. That isn’t really the point, at least not for me. Though Hoffman and Ross are comfortable with one-person shops keeping all the tools in their belt (AVID, Adobe, Apple) many editors, like myself, have to function in larger, collaborative environments, and Biscardi is our “voice of sanity”. With multiple edit stations and editors, assistants, and clients, facilities seek a streamlined workflow that will address as many needs as possible and will remain stable into the future. In the world of Apple post production FCP 7 is not as capable as current competing products and FCP X remains an unknown.

Apple has put businesses in the predicament where their current FCP solution has fallen behind, their future FCP roadmap is unknown and, rightly or wrongly, in doubt; as a consultant it would be irresponsible to make a business argument in favour of FCP in the current environment, and I personally resent Apple’s practices that have created this situation. Some facilities have taken my advice and planned their next upgrade cycle around the release of a 64-bit, modern FCP, and now they are asking what happened to that plan? I don’t have an answer; who would have predicted this mess of uncertainty? Being “secretive” has served Apple well in the consumer market, but look at Apple’s record in the business sector; there is a pattern here.

If I ever go back to making my living working from my basement I will rejoice in the choices available. In the meanwhile I am expecting to see the reverse of the trend seen over the last 5 years locally and witness a facility migration away from FCP. It may be that FCP X 1.0 when released will surpass current expectations, but then it might not matter; that’s just business.

Duane Martin
Calgary FCPUG

[Duane Martin]

It is worth noting Apple released an update for Pro Applications (2010-02) today (Sept 15, 2010) that specifically mentions “Several memory fragmentation issues have been resolved.” I will report Friday whether this resolves the above mentioned problem in any way.

Duane Martin
Calgary FCPUG

[Duane Martin]

I came to this thread when I was seeing the problem of green frames in the Canvas and/or Viewer windows that was frequently followed by a crash in FCP. Gary’s comment that the “green flashes durning(sic) playback with ProRes materials are encode-decode errors from the CPU ” struck me as odd as looking at activity monitor it was apparent my CPU was not being stretched. In fact, on a 2008 Quad 2.8GHz Mac Pro I am able to run 4 simultaneous streams (PIP) of the Apple ProRes Proxy clips and not push the processors past 50% and with no green frames. It seemed possible something else was happening on my systems.

The trick to defining a problem is to ensure it consistently repeatable, and on more than one system; our problem turned out to be a memory error, probably related to how FCP 7.0.2 handles RAM(?). Originally it was one editor’s projects that would always trigger the issue, and he has a workflow that generates very large project files (>250MB with 200+ Sequences inside; it’s the Sequences that bloat projects). Watching Activity Monitor (Applications / Utilities) I can watch FCP Real RAM usage creep up as I open projects and Sequences. Around the 2.55GB range the green frames would start. Oddly they could be made to disappear by deleting a text item in a Sequence, and then undoing; but the green frames would start again soon enough. Quitting a project would not necessarily relieve the problem, but a combination of quitting a project and toggling clips would (reset memory usage?).

To further investigate we used FCP Internal Tools to do a Perf Dump and in the resulting file we could see a warning that (in one case) 112% of physical memory was being used and 96% of virtual memory. On any machine that was seeing these green frames you could cause a FCP crash by opening just one more moderate size project (always) or trying an Undo or edit (often). Even basic playback could result in a crash (sometimes) if the RAM was full.

Keep in mind that FCP 7 is still a 32-bit application with restricted memory usage. Regardless of how much RAM you have installed, regardless if you are running Leopard or Snow Leopard, FCP is physically limited to approximately 2.56GB of real memory. My experiments demonstrate it is unstable at this level of usage.

This was repeatable across three separate Mac Pros (2x 2006 and 1 x2008) all similarly configured except for a mix of Kona LHe (x2) and Kona 3 cards. All were running Mac OS X 10.5.8 and had a either 6GB RAM or 8GB RAM configured according to Apple. It did not require that a particular project file be open but rather any combination of project files that would overload the RAM.

If you are seeing green frames and experiencing crashes take a look at FCP’s RAM usage. Our solution is to manage project file sizes and be aware of how many projects are open at once. Past experience in FCP has shown me that large project files (>150MB, and definitely >250MB) are problematic; this is the first time I have quantified the problem with RAM usage.

My observation may not be related to all cases of green frames and crashes and I do not mean to imply that the issue is not related to the CPU in some cases. I would sincerely appreciate an experiment that would demonstrate the issue being caused by the CPU which I could repeat to ensure the problem on my systems do not have more than a single cause.

Duane Martin
Calgary FCPUG

[Duane Martin]

I have a better idea. Change the System Preference setting while FCP is not open. Quit FCP, make sure the settings are changed, and then open FCP again and your problem will be solved, I promise. Deleting Prefs is far too often recommended for problems that are simply not understood, and it will not help you with this particular problem.

Duane Martin
Calgary FCPUG

[Duane Martin]

Thanks for the clarification. Wish I could have been there in Amsterdam, but I am looking forward to learning the details of the update when it is released. Nice piece of maintenance, I do believe. Thanks Apple!

Duane Martin
Calgary FCPUG

[Duane Martin]

Absolutely with you there, Peter. I try to encourage all of my clients to keep a couple boot drives. One for what is new, and one for what is old. Sometimes you simply do not want to update your project file into the latest and greatest FCP version available, but when starting new projects it seems a shame to not take advantage of new features. Having a boot drive with FCP Now and one with FCP Yesterday has been a tried and true solution for me for years.

Duane Martin
Calgary FCPUG

[Duane Martin]

I saw this recently with a client. Check your System Preferences > Displays and ensure that your Colors pop-up button is set to millions. Let us know if that is the issue.

Duane Martin
Calgary FCPUG

[Duane Martin]

Has Apple officially posted any of this information on their website as yet? Is there a press release? Any official posting at IBC? I ask only because there seems to be a fair number of forum postings appearing, but I have yet to see an Apple site with info. Admittedly it would be unusual of Apple to “officially” post information regarding unreleased products, so I am not losing sleep over it. This is by far the most thorough posting yet, but there are so many unanswered questions.

Certainly keeps life interesting, which is not a bad thing.

Duane Martin
Calgary FCPUG