[Mike Parfit]

Hi, Jason,

No programs ported to the new Mac. Dedicated FCP machine. Even made sure Tiger didn’t load iLife. Installed iDVD only later. Did complete minimal reinstall of system and FCP on fresh hard drive.

Thanks for the ideas, though. I keep hoping it’s one of these really obvious things that everyone else does when they install or setup FCP and that I’m just missing. But I read all the instructions and do everything.

Mike

[Mike Parfit]

Thanks,

We’ve had 3 Kona cards. No difference. The Kona seems to work fine if we just have 2 GB of RAM instead of 4. Only with 4 does it make a difference to take it out.

Mike

[Mike Parfit]

Hi, Jeremy,

Thanks for asking. We presently use Colorista. That’s all. However, we only started using it recently and the problem existed in exactly the present form throughout our use of FCP in these two machines. In addition, when we did the clean install recently I waited to install Colorista again until it was clear that we hadn’t solved the problem with the clean install.

We have gone through many, many procedures to try to fix this, including such things as making sure there are no 3rd party codecs in the QuickTime library, etc., etc. A thousand preference trashings with FCP Rescue. Regular system maintenance with Onyx. Making sure the PCI settings are correct for the Kona 3. Hardware tests. The problem never changes except when we take out the Kona 3 or half the memory.

Take care,

Mike

[Mike Parfit]

Hi, Jerry,

Well, that pretty much answers that question. To answer yours, this problem has been consistent through SEVERAL complete reinstallations from the ground up. I mean, we have been fairly desperate here and have done everything that has been suggested over the year plus of this experience, including purchasing a whole new system. The fact that it appears to work almost perfectly with 2 GB of RAM but not with 4 GB would also seem to indicate that it’s not an installation problem.

The only other wildcard is the Kona 3. I can usually get my renders done fine by taking the Kona 3 card out of the machine, even with 4GB in there. AJA has been great to work with and has replaced the Kona 3 several times.

I have noticed that some other people do seem to have these kinds of problems, but others have absolutely solid systems. I have suspected some kind of preferences setting that is not intuitive is getting in the way through some leaky back channel or something, but I’ve been very careful to make sure with each of my installations, etc., to follow all directions.

The fact is that a properly-written program should not simply disappear regularly without some kind of error message that provides the user with a way to at least work around the problem, so it makes me irritated at FCP. But I also think it must be something I am doing that provokes some hidden piece of crummy code, since others with identical systems are fully functional.

Nevertheless, I’m stuck. Last night, for instance, I seriously needed a render to H.264. Left the Kona card in, asked for the render through QuickTime conversion, came back in the morning to a blank screen, Final Cut gone. No report menu, nothing. This happens all the time.

Sorry for the rant. It’s very frustrating. We need to be able to work with 4GB because with 2 we regularly get out of memory messages with the larger projects loaded.

Take care,

Mike

[Mike Parfit]

Hi,

I have all the latest updates, and they don’t solve the problem. Interesting what the Apple person said. I keep thinking that the Kona card amplifies some problem that mostly lies hidden in Final Cut. If so, Apple and AJA ought to work it out, because they’re working so closely on things like the new IO machine.

Anyway, I’m pretty discouraged about ever getting it working properly. I took the card out again last night for a render, which went flawlessly after the card was gone. But I’m sure I’m going to damage the card soon enough with all this activity.

Take care,

Mike

[Mike Parfit]

Hi,

Rendering in smaller chunks usually works. (10 minute clips or less.) This makes it impossible to set up a major render and leave for a while, let’s say to sleep. However, the small ones frequently crash, too.

The idea that 4GB of ram is not enough to run Final Cut properly may be correct, but if it is then Apple is guilty of false advertising, since the system requirements text clearly states this:

2GB of RAM when working with compressed HD and uncompressed SD sources
4GB of RAM when working with uncompressed HD sources.

I am working only with DVCProHD and HDV, both highly compressed, and I have 4GB

There should not be a memory problem, because the program writes the render to disk. You can see it growing. It is clearly related in some way to the complexity of the project file, because if I render a single clip it is much more likely to be successful than if I render a timeline with many clips and several active video and audio tracks.

None of the many solutions I have tried seems to account for the fact that removing the Kona 3 card solves the problem. And there’s one more thing. This is the fourth Kona card I have had in the machine. AJA sent several new ones to see if that’d solve the problem. It didn’t. So it’s not some glitch in the individual card itself.

I believe that the term “memory leak” may indeed be a polite term for what is happening here. Other terms come to mind sometimes.

Cheers,

Mike

[Mike Parfit]

Hi,

My problem just happened again while trying to make a 25-min QT movie. Crash. I don’t just get an out of memory error. For me, Final Cut just disappears. Today, as many times, it just vanished without even providing the report opportunity.

I have to say, my problem is almost always solved by removing the Kona 3. With the card out, FCP virtually always gets through the long renders. I think I’ve had one FCP crash in a month with the card out, and I have one every time I try a long render with it in. I think the card is demanding some resources that makes some FCP problem much worse.

My project file is not huge — just 50MB. By the way, prior to the last render I used Onyx and did all the maintenance operations available. Still crashed.

Are there any solutions out there?

Mike

[Mike Parfit]

OK, I have had this problem for a year, with a G5 and a Mac Pro, FCP5 and 6. Identical problem. Large file, long render, always crashes. Also dropped frames. I have a Kona 3.

My workaround: Save. Shut down. Unplug. Take the Kona card out of the computer. That’s right. Take it out. Put it somewhere very dry, safe, and memorable. Don’t step on it.

Plug in. Start up. Then render a full single clip of the show. It will now probably render all the way through. My crashes are almost entirely gone when the card is out of the machine.

Shut down. Unplug. Put the Kona card back in. Put that clip on a timeline by itself. Print to tape. It should play through without a dropped frame.

This is not a good thing to be doing to this card. It’s not built for it. But in your kind of emergency it may be necessary. I have to do it every time I need to make single clip for a DVD or something.

Please let me know if this workaround succeeds. AJA has been working with me for months to try to solve this, and I have not wanted to put it on the forum because they’ve gone to a lot of effort to try to fix it and I don’t want to give that fine organization any grief here. But they have given me the impression that I am the only one who has encountered this problem. If that is not the case then they need everyone’s feedback and I would like to see that. And I would like to get my system to actually work as advertised.

Thank you,

Mike

[Mike Parfit]

[Russell Lasson] “Your machine seems abnomally unreliable. It quite possiblely be mid grade RAM that’s causing your issues. What brand is it and where did you get it?”

Hi, Russell,

I think you’re addressing Greg rather than me, but just to address the memory issue thoroughly, I have all factory memory that came with the machine. The identical problem has happened to me on these successive machines: A dual G4, a Quad G5, and the present Mac Pro intel.That’s why I believe it is something in my configuration or workflow practices, and since other people seem to share this issue, there must be something to be learned here from people who aren’t suffering from it or who have solved it.

Thanks,

Mike

[Mike Parfit]

[Greg Nosaty] ” I can never just set the show to render all my color grading and effects and walk away, I always have to nurse it along. “

Hi, Greg,

It is a relief to see someone else going through the same stuff I’ve been seeing for several years and several versions of Final Cut. Identical experience, except that when I try to do the long render much of the time the program simply crashes without the courtesy of the out of memory message, and then all the rendering is lost. I’ve been told it was a problem with firewire drives, so I got rid of them; no improvement. Tried everything all the posters here have suggested. The only thing that helped for a very short time was a complete reinstallation from the OS up.

The improvements lasted about three days, then we’re back to crashes and out of memory, so that sure seems to indicate there is some kind of corruption building up somewhere, perhaps among the render files. I, too, have relatively long timelines — 40 to 60 minutes.

It seems clear that this is not a universal experience, but it is shared among some of us, so there must be something about our settings or systems that makes it happen. I would be very interested to see if you find something that solves it. I would also be interested to know if people who are not experiencing this are using significantly different workflows for longer pieces, such as nested sequences, etc.

One further puzzle is that we have not had similar problems with our Macbook Pro, using firewire 800 drives and the same project. Granted, we don’t use it as much for editing, but on several occasions I set it to rendering a whole timeline overnight — on a project on which there had been previous renders and problems on the Mac Pro — and came back in the morning to find that it had worked.

Thanks,

Mike

Mac Pro 2.66
4 GB
3-drive internal SATA Raid
Kona 3