[Loic De lame]

And just tried doing an import rather than AMA and then Consolidate. Avid is successful in doing a fast import, so there’s the solution.

Ssssooo….operator error?

~ Loïc

[Loic De lame]

Funny thing is I’m having this problem now too!!

Anyone have a solution? Pretty desperate to not have to transcode as it looks like it will take ffffooooorrrreeeeevvvveeeeerrrr…….

Aaaaahhhhhh technology…

~ Loïc

[Loic De lame]

Just played with some settings myself and it looks like the Thumbnail disk cache is limited to 999,999KB. So 900MB would be 921600K. Nice round number.

Additionally, it looks like the Application and Stills Memory Usage are separate, yet linked. What I mean by that is that FCP itself can only use up to 2560MB. However, you can set the Still Memory Usage to 2410MB. So that would make the total RAM use of FCP to 4GB. But, I believe (from my understanding) that the Application Memory Usage won’t be affected by the Stills Memory Usage setting.

However, they are linked because if you reduce the Application usage, the Stills usage gets decreased as well. So separate in the sense that Application and Stills are not using the same RAM, so to speak. But linked because the Application setting limits the Stills setting.

I have a MacPro with 16GB RAM, so I just maxed out my memory on both and gave the Thumbnails Disk 921600K of space and 1024K RAM.

But again, all up to experimentation and preference. As always! ;~)

~ Loïc

[Loic De lame]

Haha! Yeah….no problem with your hard drive setup. Wish I could get one of those…..oi…another story.

For the bin views, looks like the thumbnail view forces you into opening windows for each bin you want to view. However, you can keep the browser in a detail view while your other bins are in thumbnail view. And, it looks like the bins remember the view that they are in. So you can open them in a seaparate window that’s a thumbnail view. Then, if you expand the bin in the browser window, it’ll be a list view. But double-click the bin in the list view, and it opens in a separate window in thumbnail view. Noice!

As for setting the thumbnail cache, here are a few things.

The way I setup my system is I put all the scratch disk preferences in System Settings on a drive other than the system drive. Obviously, that helps. If you wanted, you can put the Waveform, Thumbnail and Autosave on your HD Pro RAID. The autosave being the one that may be the exception since you may want it on another, completely separate drive from where your project and renders/media are.

Now, as to another setting, which I believe you’ve touched on, is on the Memory & Cache tab of the System Settings. There, you can set the amount of space the Thumbnail Cache uses of the RAM. Keep in mind that the amount of RAM you allocate to the Thumbnail cache is taken from the Application Memory Usage (checked in the manual, Volume IV: Media Management and Output –> Part IV: Settings and Preferences –> Choosing Settings and Preferences –> Changing System Settings –> Memory & Cache tab; Volume IV Page 320). Also, I just checked on two of my systems and the FCP Application Memory Usage setting is limited to 2560MB.

So, for the thumbnail cache in RAM, what you could do is if you’re logging, give it maybe 1/2 of the 2560MB. Or more. Then, when you move onto editing and such, reduce it a bit since you won’t need it as much. In either case, if the performance of FCP as a whole is degraded, this is a setting that you can adjust to get the best middle ground.

Then, the Disk Thumbnail cache may be something you would want to look into possibly increasing. I don’t know myself how many thumbnails you can store in 8192KB. But making it a GB or 2 would probably be more than enough for all the clips you have. Something worth investigating I would imagine in your case.

~ Loïc

[Loic De lame]

Hey.

Glad I could be of help.

To answer your question about RAM, you’re more than set. FCP can’t use more than 4GB of RAM max because it’s a 32bit application. So no problem there. Honestly, with my experiences with corrupt projects (up to now, 2 in the past 4/5 years), there’s nothing that can really explain it. Which is something that sucks about FCP; once the project is corrupt, oops….(one thing that is nice about Avid in comparison; the fact that it saves bins separately and you don’t loose everything).

As for viewing bins, completely up to you. However, in adding notes, you can double click on folders that you’ve created to open them in a new window, which may help in managing your viewing.

As for adding comments, it seems a bit awkward having to do it in a bin view. Of course, you can help yourself by moving the column to the left so you don’t have to open your window as wide.

Also, another idea that just came to me is that you can load the clip in the viewer and add markers to the clips. The interest in that is that you can at minimum add a marker with a comment at the beginning of the shot. Or, you can go more in depth and add markers throughout the clip with a name and comment, splitting up the subject matter. This will also allow you to create subclips more easily if you decide to utilize that function. In addition, you’ll be able to go to the markers quickly by right-clicking on the timecode display of the Viewer (top right TC window) and you’ll see your markers by name at the bottom of the pop-up menu).

Also, keep in mind that with markers, you can mark a range of time. The shortcut keys for markers are the ` (top left keyboard accent key) to make a marker and then Option-` to extend the end. If you hit ` over a marker, then it’ll enter the Edit Marker function where you can give the marker a name and then add comments. If you wanted to make a point-marker (so no range of time), you can quickly do so with M. Hit M after making a marker (or when you’re over an existing one) to enter the Edit Marker mode to create/change the name and comments. All these options are available in the Mark –> Markers menu, btw. But keyboard shortcuts are your friend. :~)

One thing that can help you out, if you don’t know about this, is that you can make the text bigger. Go to Final Cut Pro –> User Preferences… and then in the General tab on near the bottom right above the Auto Render options, there’s Browser Text Size. Change that to whatever suits your needs and hopefully that’ll help.

Post back and hope this helps!

P.S. One this that I’m curious about is where this media is stored. Meaning is it on an internal hard drive or external? And if external, what’s the connection that you’re using? E.g. FW800, FW400, USB, eSATA, etc. And what format? SD/HD, etc.

Thanks!

~ Loïc

[Loic De lame]

Hello!

Been itching to respond, but been having trouble with my cell network!

I have been in that situation where a project file of mine became corrupt and even my autosaves were corrupt all the way up to the first one of the previous day.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find a way to recover the work I lost. And looking around online (this was somewhere like a year and a half ago or so), people were saying that they experienced the same problems, but with different sized files than what I had.

For example, my project at the time was around 100MB and some people were saying that they had problems with projects that were like 50MB while others said they had projects that were 500MB!

So, short answer is that unfortunately, there’s no real way out except to redo what you did.

However, as a workflow method for your project, you can do the following to maybe help you out.

Basically, what I did as a backup for myself at the end of the day, is to export an XML of my entire project. To do this, select the FCP browser window and make sure to not select anything (clips, bins, or sequences). Then do a File –> Export –> XML. Save it and back that up.

The only thing I don’t know is if a corrupt project will translate/be exported into an XML. The project I was working on at the time was running smoothly the whole time and I had no indication that it was corrupt of any sort until the next day.

I made a post of it and when I find the link I’ll post it. Good luck!

Also, I’ve been curious about saving FCP project files to dropbox and using that as a backup method since it saves past versions. Maybe that can act as an “Autosave”. Of course, that’s dependant on you manually saving the project frequently. ;~)

[Loic De lame]

If it’s of any use, https://www.digitalrebellion.com/promaintenance/ has their Pro Maintenance Tools software. Specifically the Corrupt Clip Finder may be of interest.

~ Loïc

[Loic De lame]

Hey.

Sorry to hear that nothing’s working.

If I were you, I’d try to do a reinstall of just FCP with the FCS Remover and such. Cause it saves A LOT of time.

But good luck and please post back if you’re successful or not! Always helpful to know the outcome of things.

~ Loïc

[Loic De lame]

W.E.I.R.D.

If I understand correctly, no matter where you move the media (internal or external) the audio still exhibits strange behaviors. However, now you hear both channels, except that they sound like their at different sample rates.

Is this true of archived projects?
This media that your working with worked correctly before your first post, as an idiot check…
If you play the media in QT, VLC, etc., does it still have that weird sample rate discrepancy?

When you say you’ve duplicated the problem with audio never touched by FCP, I assume you mean that it started acting weird after you put it in FCP?

Have you double checked sequence settings (idiot check)?
Would deleting the render files with Render Manager be of any use? And maybe removing any filters you may have?
Are these sequences nested?

Out of curiosity, if you export an OMF/AAF and bring it into SoundTrack, does it still do its weird thing?

Considering that you say that you duplicated the problem with audio completely unrelated to your project, I’m assuming that if you started a new project and used this audio it would continue to have these problems?

Trying to throw ideas out there….

Hoping that you won’t have to do this next part, but….

One thing worth trying is removing FCP with FCS Removerand then reinstalling just FCP from the install disc by getting to the install package of Final Cut.

If memory serves (hopefully), load your FCP disc and, in Finder, right-click the installer package and select Show Contents. I believe that it will open up a Finder window showing all the packages that get installed for the apps. You want to select the Final Cut package that doesn’t have an m in the extension (so .pkg if I’m right). That will install only Final Cut. While that’s going on, get the FCP 6.0.6 Update downloaded and install that when FCP is finished installing.

If you have some user prefs, you’ll have to copy those in order to put them back and not have to rebuild them yourself, btw.

Let me know if you need some further explanation on the reinstall and I’ll see if I can be more useful. :~P

Good luck and I’ll post again if I think of any other ideas.

P.S. Just saw your post in my email as I was writing this.

~ Loïc

[Loic De lame]

P.S. Just did a quick search about resetting the audio system of a mac and found this.

https://hintsforums.macworld.com/archive/index.php/t-101741.html

2nd to last post says….

If you have admin privileges on your Mac, you can restart coreaudio from the command line as follows:

start Terminal.app
enter the command:
sudo kill -9 `ps ax|grep ‘coreaudio[a-z]’ |awk ‘{print $1}’`
press enter
enter your password when prompted and press return

Might be worth a shot……?