Memory Leak, or something else? (10.6)

Morning guys.

I've been on FCPX since day one and am very happy with it. Recently I helped a friend on Maui organize his systems and drives across several computers and get FCPX installed and he's been editing happily for a few weeks now.

Cut to...he updates to 10.6 without me there, and is getting crashes and beach-balls constantly...cannot use the program. I don't think it is third party effects, as I am running 10.6 on two computers and I made sure he only purchased the same plugins as I have...so no trouble there.

Over Skype I got him to plug and unplug drives and use Event Manager X until we narrowed the problem down to a single project. With only that project open, things ran smoothly for about five minutes and then he got a message saying there wasn't enough application memory left with 50 gigs left on the drive. (50 gigs are free on the system SSD of 250gb total...most things live on a 1tb in the same iMac case).

This smells like a memory leak to me. Any thoughts? Permissions have been repaired, preferences trashed, application deleted and reinstalled, etc.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Cheers,

Stuart

Run Activity Monitor and look at the memory and see what's going on. How much RAM? What OS?

Thank you, 16GB of RAM, latest OS. I'll have him run activity monitor when it's morning in Hawaii!

Got a couple of screenshots back from Activity Monitor...for the few working minutes before beach ball and crash, nothing out of the ordinary...

Was that particular project started in 10.0.5 and does it have any compound clips in it?

Yes and yes!

A lot of things have changed regarding compound clips since the last update. CCs work absolutely much better now, but there are reports of people who have trouble with CCs that were created in 10.0.5 and opened in 10.0.6. The most import issues are with 10.0.5 compound clips that have been cut in the timeline and compound clips inside compound clips. These old CCs are real memory hogs and they don't seem to work well in 10.0.6.

One of the solutions (and I agree it's not a pleasant one) is to break apart the old CCs and replace the existing CCs in the Project timeline with their original clips (Open CC in Timeline, select all the clips, press CMD-X to cut the clips from the CC timeline, then paste them back into the Project timeline to replace the existing CC). When this is done you can create any new 10.0.6 compound clips again and they will work fine. I hope this will be of any help.

Thank you, this seems to be working. (It's a big project, still finding and breaking apart or replacing, but stability is being gained with each step.)

Yes I know it's a pain. Breaking up compound clips should be easier. But I'm glad it's working for you.