Two crashes - Two different systems

I've only been using FCPX (10.1.13) for about 4 months now today I had the same problem on two computers. I am fixing it now but would really like to know what I did so I don't do it again.

Problem #1 - System: 2013 Imac I7 / Graid 4TB drive
Project is a marching band competition with a timeline about 2.5 hours long
I was exporting segments of the timeline as separate 720p files when things froze up
I forced quit and when I restarted FCP the program would not start. Just a spinning ball.

Ran disk warrior, disk utilities - all ok
Tried to open backup - same problem

I copied the entire 2tb library to a different drive and was able to open, but all files were not linked. I am now in the 4th hour of waiting for the files to slowly link.

Problem #2 - System 2013 Macbook Pro / 1TB Thunderbolt Drive
Marching Band Project same deal while trying to export files system froze (realized I was low on disk space)
Forced quit and when I restarted my timeline was empty!
Found a backup that had information on the timeline but now have to re-render everything.

All files are optimized media. Motion titles used for each group.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

On a separate note, now that I am working out of the backup Library, it is not autosaving. When I quit final cut, it lists the time modified as two hours ago, thus losing all of my render.

How much RAM do you have on each of your systems?

What is the format of the original footage? Are you working with the native footage or with optimized media?

- Ronny

Original footage AVCHD. Working with optimized on one project (IMAC) native on the macbook pro.

16GB Ram on IMAC
8GB Ram on Macbook

I found a thread here that probably would have saved me most of the day. It talked about leaving media in original library and replacing everything else with files from the backup. I did the opposite and I think that caused a lot of the linking problems I was having earlier. Still not sure what caused the problems. My biggest concern was when I opened up a file and the timeline was just empty. 2 Minutes before there was 3hours of edited footage and then poof! Gone!

If your Libraries are managed you should not have any media going offline in the first place. Something must have damaged your Library database during the crash.

To prevent such crashes in the future I think it would be better for you to work with individual timelines for the bands. You are exporting individual parts of the timeline for the different bands anyway, so you could just create a Project for each band and export each Project as a completed movie for each band. You can always join different movies to create a longer project with all the bands.

- Ronny

I had some problems of anormal disk activity on long multi cam timeline. No background render task and during 10 minutes even proxies couldn't be read. Perharps your export began during a moment like this and cause the crash.

My advice is don't use managed Libraries, keep your Library in your startup disk and the medias on an external disk.
For me it works better and faster.

It's perhaps a little part of your problems be it's a start.

ronny courtens wrote: If your Libraries are managed you should not have any media going offline in the first place. Something must have damaged your Library database during the crash.

To prevent such crashes in the future I think it would be better for you to work with individual timelines for the bands. You are exporting individual parts of the timeline for the different bands anyway, so you could just create a Project for each band and export each Project as a completed movie for each band. You can always join different movies to create a longer project with all the bands.

Ronny,

I was doing this at first but with 40+ bands I was trying to save time setting up the multi cam. It was nice to be able to select all of the footage and make one long multi cam event instead of sitting for an hour making individual clips.

Ponponpostprod wrote: I had some problems of anormal disk activity on long multi cam timeline. No background render task and during 10 minutes even proxies couldn't be read. Perharps your export began during a moment like this and cause the crash.

My advice is don't use managed Libraries, keep your Library in your startup disk and the medias on an external disk.
For me it works better and faster.

It's perhaps a little part of your problems be it's a start.

I thought that this was one of the benefits of FCPX to keep everything together in one place. Do most people do this? It's no big deal since it's how I operated in FCP7 but I sure liked knowing where everything was all of the time.

Keep media and Libraries on a secondary drives, not the system drive.

I never put anything on the system drive. I thought he meant to keep the event itself separate from the where the media is stored for each Library.

In FCPX, medias are really easy to manage externally, even the media created by FCPX like waveform...
I've managed to correct problems of editors, just changing the way they managed their medias and more often they were in the library.
About the place of the library, i've made test for a one hour film I've edited with 40 hours of rushes, with library in my disk system (it's a SSD), it open twice as fast than on the 2Raid0 HDD. My system disk have time machine so it's one other security , backup of the library is on the external disk.

I'm sure there's not only one good way, but it's the experience I have and it works.