10.08 crashing a lot

I'm editing 25 music videos I shot. Multicam clips, all media stored on external USB2 HD. iMac 27" 3.4GHz 32GB RAM. OSX 10.7.5. Editing with proxy media. I'm getting maybe 25 crashes a day, sometimes the program quits, sometimes it totally freezes the iMac. Been trashing prefs, running Lion cache cleaner maintenance etc etc.

Is it mainly to do with the USB2 drive being too slow? The crashes seem to happen when I'm working fast and there's a bit of background rendering going on. If I wait for each change to render, it crashes less.

Any advice?

It's a funny idea to use USB 2.0 for FCPX and than Multicam clips. Get at least a firewire drive, or USB 3.0 or a thunderbolt drive. USB 2.0 and FCPX will make you very unhappy. If you happen to have a 2012 iMac the internal drives are impressively fast, as I noticed.

Hi Guys

My computer was working really well using multicam shoot then the software suddenly crashed. I've re opened FTPX but the footage is now runing slow.

It's driving me mad and my client needs the footage by 5pm this eve.


I'm taking the footage directly from the hard drive.
Any ideas on how to solve this.

My computer about 2 weeks old and is a

mac mini
Processor 2.6 GHz Intel Core i7
Memory 16GB
Intel HD Graphics 4000 768mb

and presumed it word be fast enough when I bought it ?

Neil

The FCPX software needs to be on the same hard drive as the OS Operating System, all media, projects & events on a DIFFERENT Hard Drive which is at least Firewire 800 7200 rpm, or preferably ThunderBolt.

TrixTrax9000 wrote: The FCPX software needs to be on the same hard drive as the OS Operating System, all media, projects & events on a DIFFERENT Hard Drive which is at least Firewire 800 7200 rpm, or preferably ThunderBolt.

Why different drives, I don't under stand this ?

Neil

Trash your prefs, it should fix the crashing. Get preferences manager from digital rebellion, it is free.

If you really are using a USB 2 drive, that is not ideal. Probably want to get a usb3 or thunderbolt drive after this job.

The issue in a nutshell for the OP.

Video editing software runs several streams of live video and audio to and from the hard drive. Hard drives have limited data bandwidth, just like your Internet connection. Video editing can eat up all that bandwidth really fast.

The OS and apps need a certain amount of free bandwidth so the overall system runs smoothly, also.

Putting all of that on one drive eats up the bandwidth, slows down the system, and can cause other symptoms such as apps locking up, apps unexpectedly quitting, and system crashes. Very similar to what can happen when a drive becomes too full (all drives need 10-15% of their capacity as free space).

So we put Projects and Events on a secondary drive, so that that media has plenty of bandwidth to stream. Then the OS and apps have plenty of bandwidth to work properly.

USB 2.0 is too slow for video editing. You can physically use it to a point, but it will give you problems in the long run. There is nothing that will fix it short of finding a drive that is capable of proper video editing speeds, such as FW800, USB 3.0, Thunderbolt. Also, all spinning disk drives MUST be 7200rpm for video editing, as the read/write speed needs to keep up with the speed required for streaming all of that video and audio.

RAID enclosures can be even faster.

Bear in mind that an unrendered timeline, each clip is a separate stream. The purpose of rendering is to write it all to one video and two audio streams, giving better playback, not to be multiple video and several audio streams at one time.

I get the crashes on occasion too and I believe it is a .8 bug when cutting multicams. I have sent several reports (everytime FCPX crashes) and also using the feedback form online. I just live with it until they fix the bug but then they create another bug - it's life.

I have done all the necessary maintenance processes: trash prefs, disk warrior, repair permissions, trash renders, etc.

I run a late-2012 iMac, 32GB RAM, 2GB VRAM, 3TB Fusion, Media/Projects/Events on a Pegasus R6 12TB Thunderbolt RAID5. My system drive has 1TB free space & the R6 has 7.9TB free space. It doesn't matter how fast my system is, FCPX will halt my workflow especially when in the zone. I love FCPX but also hate it.

In the OP's situation, USB2.0 is too slow but even when you have the latest greatest machines, FCPX will throw a wrench in and crash or slow down. I believe .8 has a multicam bug.

Bummer about the crashes you are having. That has to be frustrating. We do quite a bit of multicam editing at our place and haven't had trouble with 10.0.8. On a 2013 iMac as well as a 2006 MacPro and 2007 iMac.

For what it is worth, one large problem we have had with FCPX, as well as many other apps (Latest Creative Suite seems to crash very frequently, but Photoshop has no autosave), are corrupted fonts and font caches. You might want to try something that would clear you font caches. Just a shot in the dark.

I agree. Corrupted fonts can wreak havoc. I would also be careful to keep the database files for your events under 100 mb in size. If they grow larger than that, it can cause severe slow downs and crashes.

If it's larger than 100mb, then create a new event, and move some of your collections into the new event.

Does it matter if you're not using fonts in that particular project? I am cutting a multicam in its own project...I used to do it within a Compound Clip but now avoid it. No effects, titles, etc. Just a plain angle cuts so that when I'm finished with the multicam, I can copy all of it then bring it to my main timeline.

I've come across other posts saying it's the fonts, corrupted clips in the timeline, prefs, corrupt renders, etc - so it's hard to know which one is actually causing an error. At any rate, I send all my crash reports with comments stating what I was doing and how I arrived to a crash. I hope Apple sorts this out.

If you are not using many fonts, then yes it would definitely be less of a problem

It can be hard to troubleshoot sometimes as troubleshooting in general is time consuming. Any chance you are using broadcast monitoring? I did have problems with my Matrox and crashing a while back. I have the same setup except I have a Thunderbolt to esata RAID, and I'm having zero problems with multicam.

If you want to figure this out a bit more contact me through my company web site, onecreative.net. You can perhaps send me some logs and I can give you some more ideas.

I have a work computer and a personal computer, they are both exactly the same (27" iMac i7, 16GB RAM, 2GB VRAM, external Thunderbolt), except my iMac has a SSD, is running Mountain Lion, and I did not upgrade to 10.0.8. The work computer is running Lion, regular HDD, and 10.0.8. It does crash and lock up more than my personal computer. However, I'm not editing as intensely on my home computer and the last person to use my work computer wasn't as OCD about organization as I am, so there are probably other issues.

So while I've noticed more issues on the Lion and 10.0.8, I can't really say that those are the reasons for the crashes, I just know that overall, this computer is not as awesome as my personal workstation.

But I would also jump on the bandwagon and say that you're gonna go bald if you keep editing with USB 2.0.

Thanks for all the input folks! I think it is definitely related to the speed of the USB2 drive. If I slow down and allow background rendering time to do it's work between edits, the crashes become a lot less frequent. A thunderbolt drive is on my shopping list, and at the risk of starting another debate entirely, which drive(s) would you recommend that don't cost a fortune? I've been told G-Raid are good?