[Pelai Vancar]

Now here’s an interesting turnpoint.

I did a more thorough search in the forum and found a few threads on FCP crashing on rendering large pieces and following Dave Jenkins advice I proceeded rendering the HDV material not to ProRes but to HDV in small 2 minute pieces.
This time I managed not only to render the whole timeline but also to export it and here is the interesting part:
Time for exporting as a selfcontained movie (default settings): 5 minutes (as opposed to 8 hours announced in Prores + crash) for 33 min of HDV.
Exporting as a Reference file: 2 minutes (as opposed to 8 hours announced when rendered in Prores + crash)

By Dave Jenkins previous post mentioning mad exporting times when rendering HDV to Prores in both 6.00 + 6.01 I am bound to think this is not an issue arising from 6.02 nor QT 7.3.

It is obvious that HDV rendered in Prores is a big NONO for the time being.

I am of course very happy to have found the cause as I managed finally to export the film and get it delivered.

[Pelai Vancar]

Rafael,

I thought too that it was a clip that had it’s media corrupted. I therefore did put media offline and rebatched. But I still get crashing on rendering. So this is not it.
I am now going through my editing on timeline to see if there is anything I can see wrong with any effects.

[Pelai Vancar]

Thanx Rafael for jumping in again!

I’m going to try that out and see if that gives me any results.

thanx

Pelai

[Pelai Vancar]

OK,

Here’s an update of the situation hoping maybe one of you might have a suggestion as to what might be my next step.

With new media imported I had again FCP crash on me on rendering, HDV or Prores.
I erased and installed my OS and FCP 6.02 without any external plug-ins and again a crash on rendering.

I would think something on my editing timeline is probably gone wrong.

My timeline contains lots of nested sequences containing smoothcamfilter and scaling and I am beginning to worry maybe it’s the smoothcamfilter that’s causing this issue.

If you know of any way to troubleshoot this I would much appreciate any help.

Thanx

[Pelai Vancar]

Hi Dave,

Your suggestion sounds interesting and I am now trying it out.

I once again deleted the previous renderfiles and had FCP crashing this time on rendering at about 10% of the project, wich is roughly where FCP crashed when I was trying to export.
I then rebatched the media and had the smoothcam analisys run all night.
I am now rendering again, this time, conforming to HDV and not Prores.
I am really hoping this might help.

Thanx for your input!

[Pelai Vancar]

HI Rafalaos,

Nice to see you again and thanx for your willingness to help.
Unfortunately your answers do not help me much. I think you have misunderstood me.
1: I don’t save any renderfiles on my main internal systemdrive. All media is on an external drive.
2: The HDV (rendered in prores) sequence I intend to watch has been rendered so there should not be any dropped frames on playback.

3: You say that I am asking to much out of an iMac when wanting to watch an already rendered Prores on an external monitor. Actually an iMac should be able to handle this.

I am sure there is a problem with the graphicscard.
What I am not sure about is why an already rendered sequence cannot export. And why even a reference file export should take hours to export according to FCP and then crash. If this also is due to my faulty graphicscard then I would have to wait for an exchange by apple but it seems weird.

I did use discwarrior, have used it repeatedly so the magic solution is not there. The apple hardware test also states that graphicscard is fine, but so it did for hundreds of iMac users that are now having their graphicscard changed. I really wish I could have afforded a Macpro in retrospect but unfortunately I couldn’t.

I will probably try getting the media offline and then reimport the footage and see if that changes anything. If my media is corrupt this could be a solution.

If you think of anything else, don’t hesitate. I am willing to try anything to get this project out as soon as possible.

[Pelai Vancar]

OK,

After a few days of work I have now been able to do some e
I have now used diskwarrior on my internal systemdrive and got myself a new external media drive (to be sure the Lacie wasn’t causing this issue).
After a few days of work I have now been able to do some editing and unfortunately the issue still remains.

I am starting to think that it is graphics-card related, since so many new iMac users are having problems with it…

If think of anything else, don’t hesitate to post.

Thanx again

Pelai

[Pelai Vancar]

Thanxs Rafael & Jeremy for your generous help.

I downloaded the Lacie updater tool but apparently I’m ok there.
I will run discwarrior as soon as I have a chance, I really hope that it is that simple, cause last night folllowing Jeremy’s advice I still had a slowdown.

I have run discwarrior on the external disc before and used apples hardware test on the iMac to check it. I have not run diskwarrior on the iMac itself though so this will definetely be my next step.

I’ll post back as soon as I have tried this.

There is one thing though that just ocurred to me but maybe it has no relation to my problem. When I first recieved my iMac a month ago and started editing I had a sort of bug. Whenever I left the computer for half an hour or so in the middle of editing and then got back to it there was always a problem on the timeline. Wherever I pressed play the sound rolled fine but the video would just jump between same three frames. The only way to make it alright was to either restart Final Cut or close the timeline and then reopen the sequences.

I still can reproduce this but I can also avoid it by setting the computer to never sleep and never put drives to sleep.

Secondly, even when the iMac is off it apparently gives the harddrives power through firewire 400/800. I’m not sure if this is intended cause my old G5 imac and Powerbook do not have have this “feature”.

What do you think about this?

thanx again guys!

[Pelai Vancar]

Hi Jeremy,

Thanx for your suggestion.
I did find a render files folder but containing only a constant frames folder. Du you believe this might be the culprit? Anyway, I trashed the folder and prefs as you suggested.
I’ll post back in a few days when I get a chance to edit again and see if there is some improvement.

Otherwise there is something that has occured to me. My scratch disc is a Lacie Big Disk (with two 320 raided discs inside). I know that when this slowdown occurs the fan on the Lacie disc is runnning quite loudly and the top of the disc feels quite warm as well. Is it possible that overheating the disc could be slowing it down after some intensive hours of use? I have checked with the AJA Kona System Test what my reading & write speeds are when this happens but they are all ok.

thanx again for your help

Pelai

[Pelai Vancar]

Hi Rafael,

I did a fresh erase and install of OSX 10.4.10 and then installed FCP studio 2 without practically any other software. My internal bootdrive is journaled but the external scratchdisc is not (I even tried moving the project to another newly formatted external disc when this problem first arose but I still had this same problem).
I have repaired permissions and trashed prefs.

I would think there is nothing wrong with my system.

Is there anything else you might think of?

Thanx

Pelai