FCP keeps crashing
 

I'm trying to work on a show because of deadlines, of course. FCP keeps crashing. I edited a show on it with few filters and effects and it was fine. On one with a lot of soft wipes and cc and other effects, it crashed repeatedly. (And today when I tried to use QT to output a finished version of that one it crashed without finishing it - I finally gave up.)

Now I'm cutting another show. This one has one layer of video. The opening montage has (on most clips) a motion effect (a move or slomo), color correction and a magic bullet look. I tried to have it render the open, which is about a minute or so long, and it it has crashed repeatedly. I know the clips are on the Fusion drive, and the render is going back to the fusion drive. Right now it's finally rendering because I'm selecting one clip at a time and rendering that, and it's working.

The system was put together for me by a local vendor. The RAID is a Fusion D800 8TB. The computer is a dual 3.0 Quad-Core Xeon with 8 gig of ram. Video card is NVIDIA GeForce 880 GT 512MB. And I have a Kona 3 card.

Now, on my Liquid Chrome system that this is eventually supposed to supplant, the RAIDs have always been set as RAID 0. The dealer has this this FUSION one set up as RAID 5, and assured me that it would handle the xdcam footage just fine. I'm mentioning that as a place to start.

I'll concede that it may be something I'm doing, since I'm still learning the system. I crashed it a few times by clicking on a clip in a bin before all the other visible clips loaded, for example..

I've looked at the crash reports the system generates to send to apple, and one of the first items seems to always be an access error.

Given the number of FCP users I have trouble imagining this is normal behavior for a system. If I'm doing something wrong I seriously need to know what it is, and if it's something with this particular system I really need to get it resolved.

So I appreciate any help anyone can give. I'm quiting for the day, but there's always tomorrow ...


Thanks,
John

John, did the local vendor act as a system integrator for you? if so I would have them come in a and take a look as it sounds like you have a bad install or something. FCP should be having no problem accessing clips in the bin regardless of other queued for import via XDCAM Transfer. This is in fact one of the beauties of the whole XDCAM workflow, accessing and working on clips and edits whilst other operations can continue as a background tasks. Your gut feeling is correct ... that your system is crashing if and when you do the simplest of these operations clearly indicates that it is not set up right.
As your vendor has likely warrantied the system then I would have them come in and troubleshoot it if that is at all practicable. Failing that you should be looking at isolating the cause of the issue by a process of elimination. For example:
Are you able to trigger a crash at will or is it happening entirely (or seemingly) at random? Does it happen only within FCP or within any and all of the Final Cut Studio suite of apps ... or is it even more general ie any app at all?
If at will, what are the exact steps to trigger it? Is there any perceivable pattern to this? Is it a perhaps specific filter of combination of filters, or perhaps only with a specific type of filter eg Fxlug? (Could it be an issue with the GPU)
If you have an alternative Scratch Disk available (a secondary internal for example) then copy some test files to this secondary location, relocate your Scratch Disk / Renders and XDCAM Transfer Import loaction / cache location there, then see if you can still replicate the issues.

Post back.

Andy

Andy,

Thanks for the reply. Yes, this was done by a systems integrator. I hope they will respond promptly and effectively. They haven't seemed eager to come back after the initial install and I want to have my ducks in a row when I talk with them Monday or Tuesday.

To clarify a couple of things, when I said it would crash when clip are loading I mean that I would open a bin, and if I don't wait for all the picons to load before clicking on a clip or moving a clip it will sometimes crash.

The filters are:
1. the FCP motion tab (a slight zoom on a couple of clips)
2. FCP basic color correction
3. a Magic Bullet look
in that order. They finally did render when I selected a clip or so and a dissolve and rendered just that, and worked my way through the section that way, but every time I tried a general render the app crashed.

And, as I said, in a different show/project, trying to export the entire show crashes FCP. I'm not using any of the other apps yet, so I only know what's happening with FCP. However, since I'm seeing similar crashing in different shows working with different material and different filters, I have to first suspect it's a system problem.

All material is on the Sonnet Fusion RAID, which *should* be able to handle the load. I don't have a secondary internal drive. I do have a couple of FW 800 g-raids.

Right now I'm copying all the material for this current program to a g-raid, and I'm going to see if it renders properly on the macbook pro/FCP combo. If so that should clarify the situation.

All this is working with xdcam ex material. When I first emailed the systems integrator to get help, one of the things they replied was this:

"MPEG-Long-GOP codecs are a beast to deal with, and is one of the drawbacks with XDCAM and HDV cameras. It has to decode and encode playback on the fly. DVCPro HD from Panasonic doesn't behave like this. Just 3-4 years ago, an equivalent Mac desktop would barely be able to play a dissolve between XDCAM HD or an HDV clip. You actually had people converting those codecs to DVCPro HD just so they could edit better with them. This is also another reason a lot of people will transcode their XDCAM HD or HDV material to ProRes or DVCPro HD for editing and composting."

And they are sort of indicating that part of the problem is dealing with the xdcam format. That may have been true a few years ago, but I don't hear of people having these problems now. My B.S. detector is going off, but I do know I'm such a novice at FCP that I need to have my facts straight.

Thanks for the help.

John

Edit: I copied all the material to the g-raid and it rendered just fine on my macbook pro. Just put the same drive on the big system and it started rendering, then crashed FCP. So the problem is obviously with the big system.

xdcam ex footage and FCP
 

I'm posting this here in addition to the Mac editing forum because I'd like to know if anyone is having similar problems using xdcam ex material (I suspect not):

I'm trying to work on a show because of deadlines, of course. FCP keeps crashing. I edited a show on it with few filters and effects and it was fine. On one with a lot of soft wipes and cc and other effects, it crashed repeatedly. (And today when I tried to use QT to output a finished version of that one it crashed without finishing it - I finally gave up.)

Now I'm cutting another show. This one has one layer of video. The opening montage has (on most clips) a motion effect (a move or slomo), color correction and a magic bullet look. I tried to have it render the open, which is about a minute or so long, and it it has crashed repeatedly. I know the clips are on the Fusion drive, and the render is going back to the fusion drive. Right now it's finally rendering because I'm selecting one clip at a time and rendering that, and it's working.

The system was put together for me by a local vendor. The RAID is a Fusion D800 8TB. The computer is a dual 3.0 Quad-Core Xeon with 8 gig of ram. Video card is NVIDIA GeForce 880 GT 512MB. And I have a Kona 3 card.

Now, on my Liquid Chrome system that this is eventually supposed to supplant, the RAIDs have always been set as RAID 0. The dealer has this this FUSION one set up as RAID 5, and assured me that it would handle the xdcam footage just fine. I'm mentioning that as a place to start.

I'll concede that it may be something I'm doing, since I'm still learning the system. I crashed it a few times by clicking on a clip in a bin before all the other visible clips loaded, for example..

I've looked at the crash reports the system generates to send to apple, and one of the first items seems to always be an access error.

Given the number of FCP users I have trouble imagining this is normal behavior for a system. If I'm doing something wrong I seriously need to know what it is, and if it's something with this particular system I really need to get it resolved.

To clarify a couple of things, when I said it would crash when clip are loading I mean that I would open a bin, and if I don't wait for all the picons to load before clicking on a clip or moving a clip it will sometimes crash.

The filters are:
1. the FCP motion tab (a slight zoom on a couple of clips)
2. FCP basic color correction
3. a Magic Bullet look
in that order. They finally did render when I selected a clip or so and a dissolve and rendered just that, and worked my way through the section that way, but every time I tried a general render the app crashed. (NOTE: I have recently

And, as I said, in a different show/project, trying to export the entire show crashes FCP. I'm not using any of the other apps yet, so I only know what's happening with FCP. However, since I'm seeing similar crashing in different shows working with different material and different filters, I have to first suspect it's a system problem.

All this is working with xdcam ex material. When I first emailed the systems integrator to get help, one of the things they replied was this:

"MPEG-Long-GOP codecs are a beast to deal with, and is one of the drawbacks with XDCAM and HDV cameras. It has to decode and encode playback on the fly. DVCPro HD from Panasonic doesn't behave like this. Just 3-4 years ago, an equivalent Mac desktop would barely be able to play a dissolve between XDCAM HD or an HDV clip. You actually had people converting those codecs to DVCPro HD just so they could edit better with them. This is also another reason a lot of people will transcode their XDCAM HD or HDV material to ProRes or DVCPro HD for editing and composting."

And they are sort of indicating that part of the problem is dealing with the xdcam format. That may have been true a few years ago, but I don't hear of people having these problems now. My B.S. detector is going off, but I do know I'm such a novice at FCP that I need to have my facts straight.

NOTE: I copied all the material to a FW800 g-raid and it rendered just fine on my macbook pro. Just put the same drive on the big system and it started rendering, then crashed FCP. So the problem is obviously with the big system. But I would still like to know if anyone has any remotely similar problems with xdcam ex footage.

Thanks very much

John

The problem is not the codec nor FCP or your Mac's ability to deal with the processing. This is an extremely widely used format and should such issues exist they would be equally widely reported. Your systems integrator should be ready willing and able to come in and support you ... depending of course on the support contract you have in place.
The immediate thing they could do would be to run a full hardware test ... especially to check that all the RAM is good. Also it would be wise to install a new system drive and do a fresh OS and applications install. If and when the installation is proved stable then it should be cloned to the old system disk (which can then be kept as an emergency backup system disk). If the issue is with the hardware rather than the OS/app install then the original disk can be retained as a emergency backup system disk as is.

Regarding the picon crash .. as an immediate workaround you might want to consider changing the bin display to a list view rather than icon view. Meanwhile I've been trying to reproduce the picon crash here with XDCAM HD clips in a project on my lowly MBP (1GB RAM) but its not crashing for me.


Regarding the flters, try creating a duplicate sequence and the remove the Magic Bullet filers from that sequence ... see if the big render will still cause a crash. (Basically, as MB is the only 3rd party filter involved then it would be good to eliminate that as a possible cause)

Andy,

I did as you suggested with the Magic Bullet filters and it still crashed, plus the project, again, rendered with those same filters on the macbook pro system. The only other factor I haven't mentioned is that I have some Conoa plug-ins installed and Delerium plugins installed. None of those are in use on any project, they're just installed. I wouldn't think thoise would be an issue, especially since they aren't even being used.

I really appreciate your help. I'm gone for a couple of hours and will be back later today. I suspect in your part of the world is may be getting toward sleep time.

Best,
John

Sounds like your systems integrator is coping out. A system like yours should handle Long GOP no problem.

There are far too many reasons for crashes to occur to be able to tell what's what.

I'd set your sequence to render in ProRes although keep the editing codec as XDCAM EX. It's just a slight modification of the sequence preset and you avoid the long gop conform and your FX are done in 4:2:2 color space, no GOP. That probably has nothing to do with your crashes though.

It could be a RAM issue or a corrupted render file. Try rendering the FX section in question in two parts using in and out points. It can cure or, at least, target the issue (to a given section or file).

I'd toss the preference files and and renders and test again. It can be the project file too. Try creating a new project file and move the sequence to it. Try creating a new user with Admin status and try from that. Try doing a RAM check or pulling new RAM sticks (tedious I know).

Threads merged.

One thread per topic, please... and the appropriate forum is NLE-Mac. There's nothing wrong with soliciting responses from fellow XDCAM EX camera owners, but we expect our members to use the *entire* community. Therefore this forum is the right one for this particular topic. Thanks for understanding,

Have you tried trashing your preferences. Many unexplained FCP crashes can be cured by simply getting rid of your old preferences and creating a new set. You could also try FCP rescue.
FCP Rescue Download site

Chris,
Point taken, thanks.

Craig,
I expect my systems integrator to come in early this coming week and deal with this. The exact same project and video did render and work correctly on my macbook pro.

Alister (and Craig),
As I said, I'm very new to FCP. Where do I find the preferences to trash them? And what should I expect from FCP rescue? And, being new to macs in general, if I should uninstall the Conoa and Delerium plug-ins, just to elimenate them as variables, how do you uninstall on a Mac?

Frankly, I like the idea that this is a hardware issue and the systems guy will be able to deal with it. That support is why I went with a local dealer.

Thanks all.

John

Install FCP rescue, run it and press the "trash" button. It will remove your old preferences. When you re-start FCP you will need to set up your scratch disc's etc.

Hi John,
I also am a Mac rookie and have a Mac Pro and MBP, and the Mac Pro crashes more. I capture all the HDV footage shot with a V1U or HV20 into ProRes... still crashes occasionally.

From what I've been reading, step one after a crash is to use Disk Utility to Repair Permissions (and also Verify the Disk...in this case the Fusion drive).

I'm hoping to find stability by reformatting the system drive and doing a clean install of Leopard and FCS2.

I'll be curious to see what turns up when the systems integrator steps to the plate.

So I'm happy to report that the systems guy actually replied to my email today, on a holiday Sunday. His main recommendation is also to trash preferences. I *think* I successfully did that, both manually and using FCP Rescue (thanks again), but FCP just crashed again, on the timeline with the Magic Bullet looks applied, and now on the timeline with the MB look removed, also. It did, however, render the whole other show (in another project) that has no MB looks at all.

I have the same crashing problems on my Mac Octo setup. Over the last year I have done absolutely everything possible to fix this: trashing prefs, reinstalling FCP, reinstalling system, doing complete installation onto a new internal drive, different RAM, replaced main logic board, and other suggestions.

I still get crashes during renders.

One thing I have noticed is that if I leave it to autorender itself it hardly ever crashes. So I set my autorender to kick in after 10 minutes.

It's either that or rendering in little chunks.

There is, in my opinion, no cure.

If you find one I will award you a small prize and put you in my will.

I have given up trying to cure this problem.

You are not alone.

Best wishes

Harry

Harry,
Holy Frijoles, that's super heinously BAD, like manure for breakfast, lunch and dinner with a dollop of sour cream for dessert. Wow \*/__]-C-{},J,^|>L<| (that spells pizzlesprung BTW)

So

I guess your workflow and operation are not completely paralyZed? Why keep the Octo? Why not invest less in a straight quad or mbp? Or does letting it autorender get the job done and still leverage the 8 cores?

did you consider vidcard as an incompatibility?

I just got used to either rendering small portions or letting it autorender.

At least with the Octo, the rendering is really fast.

It may be the video card (Blackmagic) but at this stage I'm kinda numb and I've got used to it.

You do bring up a good point, though. I should get hold of Blackmagic and ask them some questions.

Harry

PS.

I notice that the original poster, John Godwin, has an Nvidia card. I have a Blackmagic card, so that quite probably rules out the video card as the culprit.

Harry

John, you should never use your source (media) drive as both the playback and the "render to" drive. Render your output files to another drive. Look at it this way - you are asking your drives to both read and write large files to and from the same drive at the same time. You are stressing your drives and jamming the pipeline with info flowing to and from the drives at the same time. Almost every time I've had a rendering problem it's because I neglected to designate a different drive for the final files.

Before I read Rick's post I was about to mention the same thing. This error could very well be a render drive problem. As suggested before, always, always, always use an different drive to capture and redered to than your system disk. The best is to have a Fiber Channel or SCSI array in RAID 0 formation. If you can't swing that, get a G-RAID2 from G-Tech. They are all firewire 800 and playback DVCPRO HD and one stream of uncompressed fine.
If you are really stuck, this worked for a feature. BUT, it is dangerous. Use the media tool to consolidate. This will downsize and destroy some of your media (but if it is backed up, this is no problem). When you navigate to your migrated project, new render files will need to be created. Since your original media has been altered (I usually leave handles) it will usually fix render problems associated with problematic media. But I suggest this as a last resort. The media tool is very dangerous and has a high learning curve just to get favorable results.
-C

Harry: Sorry to hear you have those problems. Maybe this'll get resolved and help you too.

Rick & Christopher: My liquid system is set up with separate media/render drives, which speeds up the processing, but it works with a single raid when necessary. I went with the single RAID on this FCP system because my systems integrator indicated that would be sufficient and, being almost totally unfamiliar with FCP & Macs, I thought that might be the case.

HOWEVER, what you say makes sense, so I just tried it - changed the render drive to a g-raid. Unfortunately, FCP just crashed again. I had already copied all the material to a FW800 g-raid and it rendered just fine on my macbook pro, from and to the single g-raid drive. When I put the same drive on the big system it started rendering, then crashed FCP. So the problem is obviously with the big system, and it behaves the same way with the Fusion drive alone, with just the g-raid, or with both, the fusion as the media source and the g-raid as the render drive. Is the 8-core so fast it just overwhelms both drives? I don't have the skill to do it but it occurrs to me it would be interesting to *underclock* the processors and see if the crashing stops.

*Edit: And, also, the drive lights on the Fusion hardly indicate it working too hard. When I copied the material over to the g-raid the lights were solid blue for the whole time. When the system is rendering the lights hardly blink at all. On playback they indicate more effort. And, Christopher, it sounds like I'd be better off to avoid the media tool for now. I can get through the immediate issues by rendering small segments, evidently, and that sounds a lot less risky.*

My systems guy (and someone else in this thread) have suggested copying the timeline and bins to a new project and seeing if that fixes things - I guess that's next for the morning. My edit time is being eaten alive by the troubleshooting.

Okay. Based on input from my systems guy, I just ditched preferences, using FCP Rescue, emptied the trash, rebooted, and it rendered normally. Finally.

Apparently emptying the trash and rebooting helped. When I deleted preferences before I didn't do that, just restarted FCP. That may be the standard way of doing it but being new to FCP and Macs, my clues are scant. Don't know yet if this is the fix (but I sure hope so, because it's simple and repeatable if necessary) but I'm going to keep trying tests until about noon and then edit regardless. I'll post results later today for the benefit of anyone else this may help.

Edit: So far it's handled everything just fine, rendering to one drive, promptly, not crashing.

Edit: Spoke too soon. It worked well for a while then crashed once while waiting for a bin to open and display the picons, then again after I did another sequence with cc and MB filters. I need to go ahead and edit and just render short segments, which does work. I think my systems guy will get here tomorrow morning and hopefully sort this out.

John
Atlanta
"Montage" is French for "3 day shoot"

I hate to leave a thread hanging ... my systems guy came over Tuesday, saw what the system was doing, it did the same for him (including after he switched out all the memory), and left with the computer and left me with a loaner. The last I heard he had it working correctly again, rendering the questionable project correctly 3 times in a row, using my original footage, and was going to put the original memory back in and test that. He said he had to do a complete reinstall of FCP, and I think copied the material to a new project/timeline - all the things suggested in this thread. I think the only thing I hadn't done was the reinstall, but he had even tried that here before taking the computer.

So the best guess currently is some form of FCP or project corruption or some combination. The exact same project has worked correctly on the loaner machine. The only other possible difference is my machine is OS X 10.5.4 and the loaner is 10.5.3. But the macbook pro with the same project is also 10.5.4.

Gremlins.

Thanks to everyone who jumped in. If the computer comes back and everything is good I'll add that on, too.

Best,
John

FCP STILL crashing
 

Updating:

My systems integrator has done a great job of trying to trouble shoot this, and I think has covered everything suggested in this thread and more, but I resumed work on the project in question today and it's still crashing.

I actually haven't been doing any rendering to speak of, as I intend to do the filters and such as the last step, this time. But the killer now (and it has been doing this, too, all along) is that about every 3rd time I open a bin the clip picons start to load and then FCP freezes, gives me the twirly for a few seconds, then crashes. This is using both large picons and medium picons. It's been suggested that I use list mode but then I can see the images, and since the shots aren't cataloged I need to see them to pick them (this is pretty much all b-roll, the soundbites are laid on the timeline already).

So it takes a bit over 30 seconds to restart FCP and that's the fastest way to continue that I can see.

This is the largest xdcam project I have on the system. I have some others, but they (so far) don't seem to show the same behavior. And we have tried copying everything over to a brand new project. The only thing I can think of that we haven't tried is starting over from scratch, and that would cost way to much in time to do.

Does anyone else have any remotely similar problems using xdcam ex?

Thanks,
John

Could it be the project is simply too large? Try splitting it in some reasonable fashion. FCP uses up more RAM (and other resources) on large projects so try breaking into 2 or more projects.

Craig,
 

Thanks for the reply. I don't know, I've wondered the same thing, but how large it too large? My experience is using Liquid, and it handles much larger projects than this. And the systems integrator didn't say anything about it being too large.

There are 15 bins. Most have 50-60- maybe 70 clips in them. A few have a few more, and 2 or three of them have only a handful of clips. There are 8 or 9 customized effects in the main bin, 3 sequences (none especially complex, and it was crashing with only 1 sequence originally) and two bins of music. Those are set as lists and no crashing seems to come from them. Does that sound especially large for FCP?

Since I'm drawing on all of the material it would be fairly impractical to split it up.

I am going to try turning the picons off entirely once I finish a rough catalog of what's in each bin, and see if that makes a difference. Once I see what that does I'm going to try and pull all the material I think I need from each bin while it's open and place it on the timeline, to minimize crashes when bins open. But somehow I don't think things are supposed to work this way.

The project I'm working on right now (FCP 6.0.3 under OS10.4.11 on a white iMac with 2GB RAM) is about that size and (knock on wood), I'm still stable. I probably have more bins than that actually. All my media is on an external FW drive, if that makes a difference.

Thanks, Shaun...

This is on pretty tricked-out Mac Pro and an 8-drive SATA raid, which you'd think would handle it. I was seriously asking the question, as I have no real idea of how big a project would have to be to make FCP bog down.

What is the size in MB of the Project File itself?

20.2 MB, evidently.

That shouldn't be too bad. Hmm.

By the way, folks, I discovered about a week ago that I had my Blackmagic card in the wrong slot on the Mac - it should be in the top (fastest) slot.

That has improved the crashing about 50%, but the issue is by no means cured. The latest Pro Apps and QT which came out a couple of days ago has helped somewhat too.

I never said that I wasn't an idiot.

Harry.

I would hope it would have to be a project with several times the material and much more complex timelines. I did just try copying the timeline and turning it into Pro Res instead of xdcam, to see if that helped the render issue, but that crashes, too.

Harry: I'll mention that to my systems guy, since he built the system.

Thanks.

Check for bad RAM also. Pull the RAM (or have your system person do it) and reboot. Things would certainly get sluggish but if the crashes stop that could be it.

That was the first thing he tried a couple of weeks ago when he was here. I'm thinking maybe we should try it againn, maybe with a different brand of RAM.

Just as a reality check, I took the project and the material (on a g-raid) over to my Macbook Pro, again. All the bins open fine without locking up and it renders without problems ... so far. Evidently it is some specific combination of hardware and software on the Mac Pro.

I started the xdcam transfer application outside of Final Cut and got the attached screen, warning that the MPEG IMX Codecs are need by xdcam transfer and evidently are missing. Now, FCP has had a full reinstall during all this and so have the xdcam utilities.

Does anyone know:
How to check if these are installed somewhere?
If not, do I need to install them?
Where to get and install them?
If this actually might be the source of these crashing problems?

I hope.

blame XDCAM
 

I keep having the same problem with XDCAM HD. It seems to be a codec problem from sony on the MacPro.
There are some work arounds posted at Random crashing with XDCAM HD : Apple Final Cut Pro

Matt,

There was a gentleman who has similar issues that replied earlier in this thread. He doesn't use xdcam. I do think there are some issues with xdcam but I don't think that's the main issue.

My vendor completely reinstalled everything from the operating system on about a week ago. It did help with the problems, but it didn't fix them, merely cut down on the occurences. I'm really hoping Apple issues a patch that resolves this.

And, again, NONE of this happens on the Macbook pro laptop.

Further Update:

Finally, today, my vendor and I removed the Kona 3 card from the system, and uninstalled the software. No crashing. Put the card back in, crashes.

Tomorrow we're trying a different Kona 3 card.

John, I am having the same problem with my Blackmagic multibridge pro. I would be interested if you and your vendor finally solved the problem. I am now using media manager to convert entire projects to prorez. Hope this will be stable, even though I have had mixed success with this codec.