[John Magin]

I end to favor Kona products both on the bench and in the field for their reliabilty and the fact that Aja stays on the ball in terms of driver versioning/issues.

The guys at Aja get back to me literally within minutes and I know them on a first name basis.

I’m also a big fan of the work they put into their control panel and utility apps.

BMD is good, but it’s a back-end issue and from my experience the guys at Aja have my vote.

[John Magin]

I know this is an old thread- but as of August, FCP 5.0 is no longer supported in Leopard.

[John Magin]

Personally and professionally, I skew towards Aja. Primarily it’s their ease of use, intuitive control panels ( you can see when a signal is active, upconverting, etc) Their driver development s on-point and their tech support has been a boon to me when I have been on site. I have yet to RMA-check an AJA card. I have done 3 for Blackmagic within the past year.
I think BMD is good, but Aja is better, fwiw.
Go for the LHe if you’re not planning Dual link/massive rez projects.

[John Magin]

You can also “trick” FCP into resetting its obj cache by disconnecting the media, opening a project file without reconnecting media- then power up the drives again and open the project file and reconnect. Kind of sideways but sometimes it works.

[John Magin]

did you select “remove advanced pulldown and duplicate frames” from the preferences pulldown in L & T?

[John Magin]

Most dual platform builds we do entail either a dual partition or dedicated drives. The main reason, even though you may have a QT and OS version that are simpatico- often times Apple will update QT, iTunes and FCP concurrently to add more functionality. If you do upgrade to MC3 you will need Leopard and QT 7.4.5-7.5 which coexists more with FCP, that being said though they are each using resources codependent of each other. In a troubleshooting scenario it’s best to have them isolated as well. Best of luck.

[John Magin]

Ditto that, I dedicated a separate drive on my Mac Pro for that XP install-

[John Magin]

Notes: No other software seems affected. I have tried systematically taking our RAM modules to see if this helped (it didn’t). It seems as if it is filling up all available ram and not letting it go for some reason. (No, I haven’t benchmarked this- just a theory.)
the FCP disappearing routine began just after doing a small edit which included cutting out part of the beginning of a soundtrack project file.
I did try deleting the prefs files (but not the whole folder) at one point, which did not help.

> does FCP give you an “Unexpectedly quit” error or just goes “poof”. I would look into Diskwarrior and other utilities ( Techtool Pro, Drive Genius are good staples) as your directory structure may be borked. If you are running OS 10.4.2 or higher, you can run Drive Verification in Disk Utility- also if you haven’t repaired permissions in a while that’s a good thing to do while in DU.

[John Magin]

Questions:
What version of FCP?
How large is the project? Generally accepted practice is to keep it under 100 mb. How many timelines do you have in the project? often what happens is one scraggly piece of media can become corupt, be it a still image file, a transposed QT or a render file. This can flag during project opening and cause it to crash. If you are savvy enough, you can go into your Utilities/Console and look at the CrashReporter. Look at the last thread state(it lists the last thread first, but numbers it ascending order) and it may provide a clue to what operation caused the kerfuffle. Also, your project cache file may be corrupt. go to User/library/preferences/Final Cut Pro User Data (FC Studio 1 or higher) and whack the whole folder- you can copy/move custom button bars/layouts if you have them to back that up. Reopen FCP and try to open the project file.

John Magin
Tekserve Pro Video Services
john@tekserve.com