Mike Parfit
Forum Replies Created
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Thanks for writing,
The source footage is varied. Most of it is HDV captured through SDI into ProRes422HQ. Other stuff is DV uprezzed to ProRes1080i using Compressor. One clip that really suffers is a high resolution still.
In addition to the problems above, I’ve also noticed that some clips have a few places where other colors, mostly green, pop up here and there — not necessarily at the brightest parts of the picture, and again only when rendering in 10 bit.
The timeline is ProResHQ at 1080i 60.
Thanks for any help you may have,
Mike
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Hi, Lucas,
I’ve had this problem using HDV, DVCPRO HD, and ProRes422HQ. I’ve had it the entire time I have been using HD codecs, including before the advent of ProRes. I have a pretty big project file, but I also have some crashes with small ones. Doesn’t crash on specific clip renders, so I can’t isolate it. I have one main workaround. I physically remove the Kona 3 card. That seems to reduce the crashing a lot. In fact, I have an old G5 that used to crash a lot when the Kona 3 was in it, and I use it on the network to do much of my rendering because it’s rock solid without the card. (That, of course, requires the purchase of a second copy of FCP.)
AJA has been trying to help me solve this for about two years. We have had no luck. After watching the Activity Monitor a great deal, I believe there’s a memory leak in Final Cut that contributes to it, and the Kona 3 is not the cause but somehow makes the problem in FCP more acute.
When I called Apple for tech support they told me it’s AJA’s problem. I don’t think that’s the case.
Good luck.
Mike
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Two simple questions:
How will faster storage fix a problem of crashing while rendering? No journaling. No sleep, ever. No attached firewire drives. Lots of room on the SATA drives. Memory swapped and moved and checked and resettled. OEM memory, proper configuration.
How do you explain that the crashes only seem to occur when the real memory use in the Activity Monitor builds up over time during a render to a point beyond 2GB? Is that somehow related to storage? It seems counterintuitive to me to blame this on storage, but I have certainly been around computers long enough to understand that counterintuitive is sometimes right.
Thank you,
Mike
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Hi, all,
Sorry. I am not trying to annoy people. I am trying to get answers. My understanding is that this is what forums like this are for. Perhaps they are exactly for helping educate people who do not have access to, let’s say, the urban areas where one can find users groups and folks who can come over and help with your difficulties. Perhaps they are exactly for people who try many things to solve their problems — such as searching these forums — but may have overlooked one parameter in the software that twitches everything. Perhaps they are exactly for people who trying to reach beyond their grasp and learn while doing.
I’m sorry I tried to describe why I can’t come up with $5,000 for an array right now, because it is not fair to compare wealth and poverty and that tends to rub people the wrong way, so my genuine apologies for that.
But I have to say that expressing annoyance that I may not know as much as you do seems exactly contrary to the purpose of all these forums, in which everyone is still learning one facet or another of an extremely complex and swiftly-evolving business. I am here exactly because I am hoping that you know more than I do. I respect that knowledge, and when I post here I try to do so in great detail, including the things I have tried and the way I operate, precisely because I am hoping that my problems are indeed user error, and someone else who has made it through the same mistake will have the generosity of his or her time to help me get past it.
And as far as the money goes — does no one in this business besides me have a person or a department in charge of budgeting in which someone regularly rolls his or her eyes when you come into the room, knowing that you’re going to ask for yet another piece of expensive hardware? Does no one recall or regularly experience that same individual or department simply saying, ‘You said the same thing last time, and this time you’re just going to have to make do?’ Does no one ever have the experience that when you ask for money the person with the money, or rather, what’s left of it, reads you the equipment requirements for certain software, and points out that what you already have far exceeds those requirements, but still you’re asking for more?
We are editing with video — HDV and DVCProHD — that does not require particularly fast disks, and we have an internal raid array that far exceeds the required speed. We do not suffer from significant numbers of dropped frames and if we do because of a cluttered timeline we have excellent workarounds to solve that by making single clips of what we need to play back. We routinely output to HDCAM which gets shown on the big screen with no problems. What we suffer from is regular, repeated crashing during editing and rendering. Now, can one of you go in to that department that has the money and tell those folks that it makes sense to spend $5,000 on faster disks primarily to prevent renders from crashing? Can any of you say with authority that rendering requires very fast disk read and write numbers? If you can, you know more than I do and you’re smarter than I am, which is probably the bitter truth anyway. But I haven’t been able to make that case.
Best wishes to all. I have learned a lot in these forums. Just not enough yet.
Thank you,
Mike
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Hi, Walter,
Thanks. I don’t think we disagree here, except in terms of budget. $5,000 is just out of our reach. I mean, it is more than we paid for the machine itself.
It has so much to do with what a filmmaker is doing. You are putting out a series and a lot of other stuff regularly and your cash flow is quite different from ours. We’ve been working on a single feature doc for four years. We’ve won awards out on the festival circuit and have significant distributor interest, but we’re taking the highest-risk route here and trying to have an effective theatrical release, so we are flat broke, and have been for the whole four years, as we’ve put everything into shooting and editing time, and then publicity. Five grand is just out of reach. It doesn’t mean that we’re less professional, but it does mean that we’re on a different budget track.
Sure, it probably makes sense for us to have borrowed enough at the start to buy one of those excellent external raid systems that you and many others have been reviewing for us all these years, but this comes down to my only real crankiness about all this. If working on large projects requires such a system in order for FCP to be stable, Apple should tell us in its system requirements, and then we could take that cost into consideration at purchase time. Instead, the stated requirements and ALL the advertising indicate otherwise. The only stuff published about high-performance raid systems in both the FCP and AJA documents is related to whether you have a system fast enough to avoid dropping frames on capture or playback. There is nothing about system stability, but that is the big problem.
That’s my gripe — that Apple does not accept this problem. And the other thing that is still preventing us from finding that five grand somewhere is the strong likelihood that it just won’t improve things much. For a long time we used DVCPRO HD and HDV all on a 3-disk internal array, with great read and write numbers, far beyond what those high-compression codecs require, and that didn’t make any difference in the marginal stability of the system.
Oddly, one of the other very effective things we’ve done is to take OUT 2 GB of ram, which takes our system down to just 2 GB total. The system doesn’t crash then, but it does give a lot of “Out of Memory” errors. (By the way, just in case you’re thinking, ‘Ah ha, he has bad memory,’ I have alternately swapped out different sticks of memory just to be sure it’s not something in one of the sticks.) It’s as if FCP has proper error-catching code at 2GB of memory, but at 4GB or larger it just crashes.
Thanks for the response,
Mike
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Hi,
Yes, we have a big project, and we have almost exactly the same problems. Our crashes happen mostly during rendering, but also at apparent random. We also have had the playback problems you describe, and sometimes they happen even when the program is set to stop on dropped frames. In other words sometimes the program does not think it has dropped frames but apparently it has; it then goes out of sync and we have to stop and start to get it back.
We reduce the crashes by reducing the size of the project file, mostly by restricting the numbers of sequences in the project. We tend to duplicate sequences often for backup and to retain earlier versions, so we often save a new project and delete the old sequences. We find that it helps to have the project size well under 100 MB. When we need to do a lot of rendering, we also remove our Kona 3 card from the system, which helps a great deal.
In the case of the IoHD, we used one briefly and found something different. With our Kona 3 card all we had to do was remove the card itself, not the software, to dramatically improve our stability. With the IoHD, however, unplugging the unit and rebooting did not help at all, but when we uninstalled the software, that did help.
These removals do not solve the problem entirely, but greatly reduce the crashing issues. (The playback can’t be helped this way, of course, because we have to playback through the Kona.)
We think there is a memory leak in Final Cut that steadily locks up memory and eventually leads to a crash. We have come to that conclusion because several times we set the program to render a long clip on one monitor and used the other monitor to show the OSX Activity Monitor. Since it was a very long render, we set up a video camera to record the Activity Monitor. As the render continued, the memory use gradually increased, until it passed 2GB (we have 4GB in the machine), at which point it worked for about another five or ten minutes, then crashed. We repeated this test several times with different size projects, and it was always the same. With the Kona 3 card out of the system the machine took longer to get to the 2GB spot and longer to crash, but it usually did.
This guess at the source of the problem is also supported by another symptom. We sometimes crash just when scrolling through a non-rendered clip on the timeline, even when we have not been doing much rendering. These kinds of crashes never occur during the first few hours of working with Final Cut. They always happen after we’ve been at the desk for some time. This, too, would seem to indicate that there’s a memory leak somewhere, that builds up as the program is used over time.
We significantly reduce our problems by rendering small clips from the timeline of the bigger projects, then putting those smaller clips on a separate timeline. When the timeline is restricted to one video track and two or four audio tracks, we are able to render 93-minute clips with no problem. With a single big clip like that on a single drive, the playback is no problem.
Like you, we have tried MANY, MANY fixes suggested by people on this forum. Not one of those fixes have changed the outcome in any way at all. The only fix we haven’t tried is what Walter suggests, the addition of a very fast array that looks like a single drive to the system. I think that might help, but we simply don’t have the thousands of dollars necessary. And if there’s a memory leak that makes large project files crash more frequently than smaller ones, it won’t help much.
My additional suggestion is that you do what we’ve been planning but haven’t gotten around to — chop your film into reels and have a separate (much smaller) project file for each reel. It’s not difficult to work with a couple of files in FCP when you need to shift sequences from one to another, either nested or just cut and pasted, so it shouldn’t handicap you much. Also, it seems to help somewhat to have as few video tracks as possible, so if you have a few places with complex composites, I’d put them on a separate timeline, render them out and put the result on the main timeline on track 1.
I hope you find some solutions. Personally, I think this is a problem that has been with FCP from the start and will only be fixed by the eventual complete code rewrite. But I may be wrong and there may be some simple fix. So, good luck.
Best wishes,
Mike
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Yes, it does sound familiar to me. Exactly the same. Sometimes I’ll just be scrolling the playhead across the timeline looking for something and it kind of catches on a non-rendered chunk and boom, it’s gone. In my case the report option sometimes doesn’t even come up.
Also, about the removal of the 2gb of memory. In my case it is unrelated to there being an actual memory problem. It has been explained to me as a problem that Final Cut sometimes has in actually dealing with memory larger than 2GB. The reason I know it’s not the memory is that 1. Exactly the same stuff happened on two different machines whose memory had been tested, and 2. It didn’t matter WHICH 2GB of memory I removed, I still had the improvement.
It’s interesting that you have so much trouble with a small project file size, but this is such a strange and hard-to-duplicate problem that I’m not surprised.
Good luck,
Mike
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Hi, Latch,
This problem you are experiencing is not unique. People will tell you that it is, and that you are obviously doing something wrong, but you are not doing something wrong and the problem is real. It just somehow seems hard for people who are not having it to accept that it exists outside of a simple human error. Hell, I haven’t accepted that, and keep looking for that error. But I’ve done a lot of stuff to try to find it, and haven’t yet. And to me a respectable program should catch such errors and inform the user about them instead of just crashing.
I am working with DVCproHD and HDV on a Mac Pro with 4GB memory and a Kona3. I have been reporting this problem myself and some others have been having it in one form or another. For me it has occurred consistently for almost two years, through two computers, and many, many iterations of Final Cut Pro and OS10. I have tried everything suggested in this forum, including having virtually everything in the computer replaced, including the logic board, and replacing the original G5 with a Mac Pro. Nothing has helped.
I have had the most assistance from AJA, which has been very attentive but has not solved the problem. An Apple tech I met at a film festival promised to help but never answered repeated e-mail requests. AJA and I are still working on it.
For me the most useful solution is to have a machine without a Kona 3 in it to do my long rendering work. That results in one crash every few weeks. With the Kona 3 in the situation is much like what you describe. The other solutions have been:
1. Remove 2 GB of my 4 GB of memory. This results in a lot of Out of Memory messages, but they seem to replace the crashes, which is good.
2. Remove the Kona 3 card temporarily. This is such a substantial improvement that I routinely do that now every time I have to do a lot of rendering that I can’t easily do on the other machine — essentially anything more than a minute or two of timeline. I do not have to uninstall the software.
3. Use much smaller FCP project files. We are making a documentary with 300 hours of footage and a very busy timeline — routinely 26 or more audio tracks and 7 to 10 video tracks. (Not many effects, though) I also often duplicate my master sequence — 1.5 hours runtime — in order to make major changes reversible. Each sequence uses a lot of space, so I quickly get a FCP project file of about 100 MB in size. When that loads it occupies over 1GB of memory.
However, saving the file with a new name and deleting the extra sequences reduces the file size and I find that the smaller the initial project file is and the less memory it initially occupies, the longer the program will render before crashing. So that helps.
It is memory use that seems to lead to these crashes. I have even set up a camera and filmed the Activity Monitor while the program was rendering to see at which point it crashes. As the render occurs the memory use slowly builds up. As far as I can tell it seems to crash when the real memory use gets over 2GB (this with 4GB in the machine). It looks like a memory leak to me but I am not enough of a geek — in a positive sense — to run that down.
I have been saving the reports that FCP sometimes makes after a crash and have been sending them to AJA. So far, although the crashes almost always seem to occur during the operation of something called the AppleVAdriver, AJA has not some up with a specific reason for them.
I am sorry not to be of more help. This is a discouraging problem. Crashes are so disconcerting even when everything is saved, and they always take a significant amount of time to recover from, so I completely understand and share your frustration. Please keep after the people and companies you have been keeping after. This problem is real. It should not happen with a respectable program, and it needs to be fixed. I feel like a shrink: This is not your fault. You can do things to reduce it, but it is a problem built in to Final Cut. It apparently only pops up in relatively rare situations, but it needs to be fixed by the good but inaccessible people who brought you this fine program.
Good luck,
Mike
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Hi,
Honestly, I have a different story. Our system crashes frequently, and has done so consistently through updates and upgrades. We have a Mac Pro with 4GB of memory and a Kona 3 card. Most of our crashes occur during renders. We simply cannot complete any lengthy render without a crash. We use DVCProHD and HDV. Our projects are large — one to two-hour timelines. No nested sequences. We do not have a fast RAID array, but did use 3 internal Seagates in a RAID 0 for a while with no improvement.
We can render with Color or with Compressor at length without similar crashes.
We can make two changes that reduce the crashing considerably:
1. Remove 2GB of memory. This causes a lot of Out of Memory messages but reduces the numbers of crashes dramatically.
2. Remove the Kona 3 card. This has the same useful effect but the Out of Memory messages don’t appear.
To get significant amounts of rendering done we routinely take out the Kona 3 card, then put it back in and use it for its many great services. (I don’t think this is directly an AJA problem; I think it’s related to capture cards and FCP in general, somehow connected to memory use. I have seen a description of very similar problems with the other brand as well.)
We know most people do not have these problems. However, this is not simply solved. We have been trying to find the source of this problem with the remarkably helpful AJA tech support people for over a year. Our efforts to fix it have included many complete reformat-reinstall procedures, one entire new system, changes in the configuration of hard drives, etc. Important to note here that these problems predate FCP 6. We had the identical situation with FCP 5.
We have a Mac Book on which we have a second (licenced!) copy of Final Cut Studio 2. We keep it at the same configuration — updates, etc., as the Mac Pro. It simply doesn’t crash, using the same project files. However, it has only 2GB memory.
I suspect we are indeed doing something wrong as we install this thing and as we use it. However, we do nothing unusual, have no additional plugins that predate the problem, and have done multiple installations on fresh hard drives all according to the various instructions (Apple and AJA). On this forum and others we have been told with patience by some folks and scorn from others that we need a professional systems integrator to set up our system. That may be true.
However, as far as I am concerned if that is the case then Apple should not give the impression in its advertising and many other places that FCP is a user-friendly, solid application that is accessible and practical for the home or relatively low-budget user — compared to Avid, at least. (We do this professionally, but we are a small shop in a remote location.)
In fact, if you look at some of the advice given in this very thread and elsewhere, you will find testimony to FCP’s tenderness even from those who have stable systems. Witness Walter’s urging that you should use very fast RAID arrays, even though he mostly uses DVCProHD, which does not by any stretch require that level of throughput. Witness frequent advice to avoid updates until they’ve had time to breathe and possibly choke while they’re being used by us more naive users who take Apple at its word that this will work.
My conclusion here is that FCP Studio’s flagship program, FCP 6, is a terrific application with a great deal of power, clarity and utility that has a soft underbelly, particularly with regard to memory use, which leaves it vulnerable to a few circumstances that are not easily identified and rectified. My specific advice is that it is probably worth making the switch, but do exactly what people have been telling me to do: Get your system put together by someone who does it for a living, has done so for a while, and will stand beside it if you run into a problem like mine.
Good luck,
Mike
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Hi, Walter,
Yeah, this instability has been the topic of a lot of different threads, mostly over at the FCP forum. A number of people are having similar but not identical problems to mine, largely involving crashing on long renders. But as you note, a topic for elsewhere. I just hope Leopard helps.
Mike