Hi, I am having serious problems with my mac and it is not the first ime this has happened when I work to a deadline. Surely this is not some cruel twist of fate, rather mismanagement on my part? But how, why?

I am running FCP 5.1.4 and Compressor 2. FCP will not load at all at the moment and I have tried using Onyx to clean up the system, FCP Rescue to delete preferences. I have freed up additional space on my start up drive, which was admittedly low before I did so. I have accidentally erased some scratch files, but have managed to get so far on start up as to reset them. I really do not know what to do here and am desperate to get to work. I can not get beyond the serial registration window, and Activity Monitor comes up FCP not responding, every time after about 30 seconds.
As for Compressor, well it seems to quit whenever it feels like it, and the batch monitor function crashes immediately up launch.

I am really deperate here for input, and have experienced these sorts of problems in the past when running decompressing to HD quality in FCP, simultaneously running Compressor and or DVD Studio Pro.

My machine should be powerful enough though with 4 x dual 2.5 processors and gigs of ram, or so I thought...

Thoughts very welcome. Thanks in advance!

Buy another hard drive, they're cheap. I use a two drive setup: the system on the first and video on the second. Wipe the drive clean after your project is finished. Any major software update can also mess things up.

One other thing FCP has trouble editing HDV you should convert it to Apple Intermediate Codec. You'll find less problems when running one program at a time.

I had a similar thing going on about a month ago. Compressor 2 wouldn't boot. And I couldn't simply re-install it from the disk. Turns out the solution in my case was to download AppDelete from the web, and delete all files associated with the Compressor program. After that, I was able to reinstall the software.

I had a similar thing going on about a month ago. Compressor 2 wouldn't boot. And I couldn't simply re-install it from the disk. Turns out the solution in my case was to download AppDelete from the web, and delete all files associated with the Compressor program. After that, I was able to reinstall the software.For these type of issues Apple's forum is a better resource. I'd say you're right its a matter of complete removing it and reinstalling. http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302845

Tom,

These issues are very common when making upgrades from previous versions, either apps or the OS. If you upgraded from FCP 4.5 to ver 5 then I'd suggest saving all your personal files, emails etc, wiping the main HDD, reinstall the OS and apps clean. If you keep up with maintenance you shouldn't ever have this problem again.

If your OS and apps were all originally clean installs then you've got other, deeper issues going on but it sounds like a full, clean install might be in order. Try the Macnn or Apple forums where you'll get Mac-centric help on this issue.

Thanks for the hard to hear but, honest answers. Looks like your collective reinstall suggestion is my only recourse. Pity this type of problem always seems to happpen when I have a deadline, but maybe its not coincidence, as this is of course when the most consistently heavy tasks are performed.

Cheers!