[Duncan Thomsen]

This is very useful, I am Avid from version 1 in the 90s, and also FCP as a mainstay of my work these days. Truly forgot how to do it in Avid, after nearly 20 years lol! And so easy in FCP. Nice one for the reminder! Big yourselves up!

[Duncan Thomsen]

Hi

I’me new in but have been reading on CC for about 5 years now. Thought it was about time as this problem has finally got me.

I use FCP for all forms of programmes and films, I offline, online, grade and colour using it, as well as often prepare fully finished for broadcast. I engineer and have beta tested through london facilities, backed by Apple to roll out kit.

I have had the same prob with XDcam. I broke 3 GDrives in 2 projects and crashed 2 suites with the next. We implemented a Prores transcoding buffer, which allows us to ingest and prepare for edit as well as provide a backup of the material just in case. We also moved to G Raids 4Tbs.

Until the prores route was introduced, any xdcam, timeline scrolling caused crashes, and complicated procedure did. This caused multiple issues with the systems (all best spec).

We have now gone up to FCP7 and snow leopard, this has got worse. So much so that anything with xdcam slows up the system and blam – crashes. As soon as prores was introduced to those suites, no issues apart from the normal crashes one gets and can deal with.

The main prob we have is in the finishing suite. 12gb ram, dual 3ghz xeon, lovely machine, Kona LH output. Edit away in prores, grading, correcting and mixing. then blam – crashes.

I can only assume the HDs aren’t up to it. Or the limited RAM usage is causing it to fall off just when it needs the extra memory. We eSata’d, and found that this was ok, but not as stable as FX800.

Anyone got any ideas? Is it the drives being too slow, the ram not being able to deal with four monitor outputs of HD Prores? (thats 2 computer monitors, a sony grading monitor and and interlaced crt). Would 64bit s/w like SL, cause a 32bit programme to open the RAM too much?

We checked spikes, and electricity sources but no joy. The prores offline works fine, but online? Maybe just too much. And project is kept to about 130mb for efficiency. Got autosave on 10 mins and a nervous twitch in my left hand for saving.

Please help!

Duncan