FCP 7 Trouble

[Mark Weisen]

Never had this much trouble with FCP7.0.3 before and of course it's happening when several projects are stacked up on my plate. FCP crashes at weird moments: when I copy/paste, insert a clip, move clip, fit to fill a clip....Projects also open more slowly than usual and renders are slower than usual.

After crashes, when I reboot FCP, my custom keyboard commands and favorite effects are gone. I deleted FCP prefs with Digital Rebellion utility, moved a ton of stuff off hard drive and ran disk repair from startup disk, rebuilt permissions several times, reset pram, I reboot machine after each crash....I'm going to move 300GB's of scratch media from my RAID to another scratch disk and I will try adding 8GB of RAM to exisitng 6GB...Kinda hate to think about a reinstall in the middle of rushing to get projects done.....

I'm running Desktop Pro 2X2.26 Quad-Core (6GB Ram), no heavy duty effects....

Any suggestions?

[Brandon Barnard]

What media are you working with? I have had similar issues when using large images.

[Mark Weisen]

AVCHD from my SONYFS100 mostly - There are a few, very large stills and I've noticed some weirdness when manipulating those but I can quit out, reboot and seems fine. I did just get additional memory and I've gone from 6GB to 12GB of RAM. Also was shocked to find how dusty inside of my machine was!!!
When I added memory rebooted all my renders were gone!

[Andy Wilkinson]

I used to use FCP 6.0.6 a lot (now CS 5.5 Prod Prem - so much better and faster - never went to FCP 7 as it seemed too much of a minor upgrade at the time) but I learnt early on that FCP does not like any hi-res stills in the timeline. So I used to resize them to say 2000x1500 pixels in Photoshop before importing them into my timelines (in my case, typically a XDCAM EX 1080p25) and then crop from that.

Rarely had any issues after that - it was all pretty much rock steady.

Not sure if this old news is relevant, or will help your problem - just mentioning it in case it does as we've all been there fighting tight client deadlines. Good luck!

[Mark Weisen]

FCP behaving a little better now - I trashed large images and brought them back in after resizing in Photoshop (thanks for suggestion!), doubled my RAM and I think perhaps best of all found a product from Digital Rebellion. I am on the trial version but will probably buy it - Troubleshot crashes, managed my plug ins, trashed my prefs (while backing up favorites) among other things - Recommended!