FCP crashing

[Gregory Sheffer]

I am editing a short 7 min history on two brothers that lived 100 years ago. I am shooting interviews and a little b-roll on my RED and the rest is High Rez scanned photos of the brothers and their lives. I am having multiple problems with FCP and motion clips – things I have never experienced before, so I am wondering if it is something with how I am using the RED footage.

Computer
MAC 2x2.66 dual core
OS 10.5.6
8 gb ram
Latest version of FC studio

Project
Timeline is 1920x1080
Footage – converted to 1080 prores using red rushes. Some of the footage is 4K some is 2K, but all brought through RED Rushes.
Memory is at 10000 for disk and stills

Issues
Refresh rate on the timeline is super slow and often if I move footage around too fast it crashes
Often it gives me a render error “out of memory” even though the drive has 600 gb available. After rebooting this often fixes itself, but often it does not.
I’ll do zooms/scolls on the photos using Motion then import those clips to my bin. Often after rendering in fcp the motion clips appear completely black. I’ll go back into motion and the photo file is on the timeline, but it is just a black screen. I’ll double click it and the photo reappears. Then I save it. Render in FCP and the motion movie is a black screen again.
I can work in my FCP timeline for about two minutes before it crashes. It will crash working with any of the material – photo tifs, motion movies, red footage.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated for the project and my nerves.

 

[Alex Carr]

delete your preferences in FCP,

 

[Gregory Sheffer]

Tried that. I opened up my project right after I deleted prefs and it crashed before I could do anything.

 

[Gregory Sheffer]

Now I open the project and it crashes.

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

what codec of your sequence ? are the photo's TIFFs or JPEG?

 

[Gregory Sheffer]

Photos are tiffs - sequence prores HQ

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

Photos are tiffs - sequence prores HQ

I willing to bet if you change your tiffs to jpegs - your troubles will go away.

If you can - run a little test - take the media "offline" and re-open your project - convert a few tiffs to jpegs - reconnect to those -

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

are you in high precision YUV under video processing?

 

[Gregory Sheffer]

Not sure what YUV is

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

Not sure what YUV is

do you have this checked?

 

[Gregory Sheffer]

I have "render 10 bit material in high YUV" checked

 

[Alex Carr]

Can you open FCP at all? Can you get to preferences Panel?

 

[Gregory Sheffer]

yes, I can open it and get to the preferences panel

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

I have "render 10 bit material in high YUV" checked

try "all YUV - high precision YUV"

 

[Gregory Sheffer]

I just checked "high YUV" and it now is rendering without crashing so that might be it. Normally, JPEGS are better to use than TIFFs?

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

I just checked "high YUV" and it now is rendering without crashing so that might be it. Normally, JPEGS are better to use than TIFFs?

FCP has a hard time with files with lots of bit depth. TIFFs are better - but FCP has a tougher time. I think you are okay now.

 

[Alex Carr]

After you say composite your tifs, make self-contained movies of them to create a 'proxy' or placeholder until the final render. Then re-insert the tifs. There are several ways to avoid this issue, same thing with .jpgs use them as placeholders or offline files.

I hate re-rendering jpgs to the sequence every time I need to move something next to them. So I just render out a proxy of the same codec.

 

[Ziggy Uszkurat]

If you insist on using tiffs, make sure they are RGB and NOT CMYK - FCP does not like CMYK tiffs.

Ziggx