Trimming = crash.

Hello all. Long-time reader, first-time poster.

I postes this at the Cow, but no response. Maybe some thoughts here?


First the specs: X 10.1.4, Retina 15" MacBook Pro, media for this project on a G-Drive USB 3 2TB drive.

It's a sales sizzle reel, with lots of compositing via compound clips. Media is a mix of ProRes and MXF (Avid DnXHD 145 pulled from an ISIS and some DnX MXF in a QT wrapper.)

Starting about a week ago, trimming a clip by dragging the in or out point directly causes an instant crash. Slip trimming (also using the mouse inside the clip boundaries) usually causes instant crash. Selecting the edge and trimming via Shift + < or > is fine. Over the last couple of days, sometimes just selecting the clip edge can cause a crash (maybe 1 out of 20 times, randomly). Maybe I'm bumping the edge inadvertently as I'm selecting it.

Obviously, troubling behavior.

Never had this happen before. Started all of a sudden, and I can't correlate any particular change or event to the start of the trouble. It's a composite-heavy edit (sometimes 3 or 4 layers of nested compound clips) that needs rendering for smooth playback, but that's to be expected.

I'm reluctant to take too many troubleshooting steps, as the project is still a week or so away from delivery. But I'd appreciate any thoughts from the assembled Cow on the potential cause and/or solution of this issue.

OT: anyone have a good solution for preventing the media drive from spinning down? Prefs already set to "never" for drive sleep behavior.

Thanks in advance.
Jeff M.

Start with trashing prefs. System prefs don't control external drives. Try Disksomnia.

Hi Tom.

Resetting prefs seems to have fixed it.

Although, the current version of the project has most of the complex video replaced with finished graphics, so I should probably go back to an earlier version with the multiple compounds to see if this fix really took. If anyone cares, will report back.

Jeff,

Welcome to the forum, good to see you posting here.

We absolutely care about your feedback, please keep us updated on this issue.

- Ronny

Well, so far so good. Tried working with an older version of the project that had all the layers and no crashes. Glad it was a simple fix.

Since I have your attention...

On this gig I have everything on the external G-Drive: library, media, renders, etc. Backups are on the system drive in the movies folder, as usual.

I wonder if it would be better practice to have the library on a different drive than the media? But if I put the library on the system drive, won't that be problematic? And I especially don't want renders or waveform caches clogging up my limited system drive space (256 gigs, typical of MacBook Pro Retina).

AJA disk test shows a read/write speed of 135 MB/sec on the external USB 3 G-Drive, which ought to be fine for simple HD work. I'm fine rendering the multiple layers for playback, as it's only a 4 minute project.

While not directly related to my earlier trimming issue, I just wonder if I'm asking to much of this one drive to deliver consistent, non-sluggish performance.

Happy to hear it works fine now.

135 MB/s is more than fast enough for handling this project with everything stored on the external drive. You could move your Library to the system drive and set your Library Properties so that Media (imported files, proxy files, optimized files, consolidated files) and Cache (render files, analysis files, thumbnail images, audio waveform files) stay external on the G-Drive, but in your case that won't make much difference. Your setup is okay.

- Ronny

Good to know, Ronny.

While this is only a temporary setup (me bringing in my own stuff to setup alongside the company Avid), it's striking a major first blow in getting this (un-named) network interactive division to move away from Avid and over to FCP. It's been like pulling teeth, fighting entrenched engineering and timid managers. But I was able to do this project so much faster and with much more complex rough cuts than previous years, so jaws are dropping left and right. Yay.

Jeff, I know exactly what you mean. In a few weeks I will have an article that could be interesting for you. How a big Avid-centric production company that is part of a world-leading television group has embraced FCP X. The only way you can break the initial resilience is by proving beyond any doubt how great it really is to work with FCP X and how it can improve their workflow and their production value. It will take time, but eventually they will face reality and things will change. So keep up the good work and if you have any questions or if you need any advice about implementing FCP X in large collaborative environments, post here or drop me an e-mail: ronnycourtens(at)mac(dot)com

- Ronny