!@#*$%!!!

[spinner]

Does anyone have any idea WHY Final Cut has the tendency to quit running????

I didn't have to go to work today so I worked on my project all day. I only had to put in credits which were relatively done when FCP shuts off on me!

Yes, I save as and I have the program save every few minutes. Everything I did today is gone and I wanted to get this to my 'client' tomorrow!!!!

...maybe I'll go shave my head, that should make everything better.... AUUUGGGHHH!!!!


-- spinner

 

[oakstreetphotovideo]

did you check the autosave vault? There should be several autosaves. One of them has to have some of your work in it.

I have no idea why FCP would just quit. It may be a plug-in. Do you have any 3rd party Quicktime or FxPlug plug-ins? I'd drag all of my 3rd party extensions into a folder for safe keeping and see if the system stabilizes. Especially ones you're not using at the moment.

 

[oakstreetphotovideo]

p.s. Shaving your head won't help. You may save on shampoo and use less water when you shower, but it will not help with Final Cut Pro problems.

 

[spinner]

Thanks, I think I'll keep my hair...this time...

I was able to put the sections back together rather quickly. I guess because I wasn't reviewing and re-doing things, I just had to put it all back. I guess I have a good memory. All my titles are gone however. I don't like doing those, I just find it to be a headache...

Well, we'll see if I can finish all the titles and add the 'business cards' for the guys that put on the show and who let me use their recordings of the music. Not a bad little battle of the bands, this event. I do remember my arms getting tired, but I will be ordering a monopod in the next few days so maybe that problem will go away....

....happy to be keeping my hair...

EDIT; incidently, this isn't the first time this has happened to me. No I don't have any extra plug-ins or anything. Anyway, problem averted.

-- spinner

 

[oakstreetphotovideo]

Regarding titles, when you have some time, you may want to learn to use Motion (if you have it), I find titling in Motion to be far less painless and it's pretty easy to get the titles back into your timeline (especially easy since Final Cut Suite).

 

[clive]

I agree, Motion is a wonderful tool

 

[Thunderclap]

I've never heard of FCP just quitting. Do you have extra programs running that can be turned off such as Safari, Mail, iCal, etc? How much memory does your system have? If you're running FCP with the minimum requirements maybe you're running out of memory?

I'd recommend going to Apple's support forums and see if you can find anything there if it continues.

 

[oakstreetphotovideo]

It's more likely that FCP would get very slow if real memory were constrained. I'd attribute a crash to a hardware or driver problem, if not related to a 3rd party extension. It could be that it was just an intermittent RAM error, or a video card problem, etc. Normally in the event of a software error, including in a 3rd party plug-in, you'd get a crash report. If there was no crash report, I would look for a driver or hardware level problem. Either way, the problem is most likely specific to Spinner's HW/SW configuration.

Spinner, when you're shutting your computer down for the day, you may want to consider booting it into the hardware diagnostic and letting your computer run the diagnostics repeatedly all night to see if they uncover any intermittent failures. If you knew what was failing, it would probably not be a huge expense to replace it.

Having said that, systems this complex sometimes fail for no obvious reason. If it doesn't happen again for a couple of weeks, I'd just let it go. It's always a good idea to save often, but you said you had done that. (?)

Doug

 

[knightly]

Pull down your apple menu to "About this Mac". How much ram does it say you have installed? I'd recommend maxing out your machine if possible.

If you're using scrolling credits in FCP, they are notoriously slow. I also recommend using Motion for them. It also wants tons of RAM though. I have 2Gb on my desktop and it's barely enough to do scrolling credits using the "title crawl" feature. Although, in the past I've just made a very tall card in photoshop (or other graphics package) and keyframed its position to move upwards. That worked alot better than the built in title scroller.

 

[spinner]

Thanks for the suggestions, everybody

okay, using motion: if what you mean is a part of FCP already, I am just now reading up on using it. If you mean a plug-in, I don't have it.

I have 1.5 GB DDR SDRAM.... (er, that's what about this mac says....)

I do have safari, but it was not in use at the time of the 'crash'...

I've been walked through diagnositics before, thanks knightly, but I don't pretend to know what I was doing there. (sort of the equivalent of charlie brown's talking adults, wah, wah, wah... )

Oddly enough, I had the same thing happen to me before a couple of years ago on a completely different system. It was FCP, but it was on a friend's computer. I lost alot of work that time too, but that was before I knew to save.

At this time, what I really only need to do is put in the titles, the credits which are not enough to roll IMO, and a little motion effect if I can get it to work right considering I've never done it before. (I'm going to just try to use my keyframes to shrink the size of a picture to about a third of its size. I haven't tried that yet.)

I was able to re-do everything but the titles which are decidedly simple for this project. Once this is done, I will be teaching myself how to use LiveType and the motion effects. So I hope to get this last project out of the way so I can get started on that in a few days.

I will let you know how it comes out, I'll be putting it on my myspace page....

-- spinner

 

[knightly]

Motion a full application which is part of Final Cut Studio. Its icon is a gyroscope.
Keyframes are cool and can really help take your titling and editing to the next level.
Live type I haven't played much with.

As for FCP crashing, don't know the cause, you have a decent amount of RAM. Curious to know how much Hard Drive you have free on your main drive. That may be a factor. You want at least 10% of your drive free for various systemy things.

 

[barnaclelapse]

Definitely.

I learned that the hard way when I got my first laptop a few years back.

 

[VPTurner]

I was having this problem with Premiere Pro 2.0 under Windows XP. It was a conflict with the Creative Labs resident applications. I thought Macs weren't supposed to have these kinds of problems.

 

[spinner]

I was having this problem with Premiere Pro 2.0 under Windows XP. It was a conflict with the Creative Labs resident applications. I thought Macs weren't supposed to have these kinds of problems.

Whoo hoo!

First person you know to destroy the mighty Macintosh! We're number one!

...seriously, I avoided this problem initially by getting a IEEE card for my mac (did I get the initials right?) So now everything saves into my external. However, I still seem to be filling up my laptop harddrive. After clearing it out, I am back to only about 7gigs on my laptop. I gotta clean it out again, I just don't like dumping out my documents, where my writings are. I know, put them on a disc as back up, I am, I am....I just put alot of my writing stuff on my laptop.

I did get the simple motion to work. I tend to make things harder than they are. Can't wait to find out what other stuff I get to do...a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!

I'll let you know when the project is online, should be this week...

-- spinner

 

[Will Vincent]

Are you sure you're not accumulating render files and such on the internal drive?

I thought Macs weren't supposed to have these kinds of problems.

So they say... I can't tell you how many times I've watched macs crash and lock up over the past year though.. the most amusing was mid-"My mac is fully stable"-speech. On the other hand though, hard drive and memory can and do go bad, that plagues everybody, but no computer is crash proof, despite how stable it may be eventually it will crash or die...

Of course in some cases that may be years down the road.

 

[VPTurner]

...

So they say... I can't tell you how many times I've watched macs crash and lock up over the past year though.. the most amusing was mid-"My mac is fully stable"-speech. On the other hand though, hard drive and memory can and do go bad, that plagues everybody, but no computer is crash proof, despite how stable it may be eventually it will crash or die...

Of course in some cases that may be years down the road.

I was being facetious and poking fun at all the recent Vista versus Mac commercials.

 

[Will Vincent]

I was being facetious and poking fun at all the recent Vista versus Mac commercials.

I know..

my *nix machine is more stable than your ____ machine..

 

[oakstreetphotovideo]

I use a Mac to host my Windoze software development. I know more about MS-Windows internals than most people. I've been dealing with its quirks for a long time, at the programming/API level. You'll have to pry my Apple out of my cold dead fingers if the only option is MS-Windows.

Now, having said that, Apple is beginning to reach critical mass and their application software is NOT as stable or bug free as it used to be ... especially Final Cut Pro. If you want a really solid version of FCP, go back to version 4.5. It's sad, but every program reaches it's peak of reliability around the 2nd or 3rd major release. After that, they start adding features with a jackhammer and bastardizing the original design to the point that it becomes less stable with each new release. FCP 5.x was pretty bad. FCP 6 was hatched rather quickly, and it took to 6.02 to get major bugs worked out of the FxPlug interface.

In case anyone thinks I'm lambasting MS, hailing Apple, or predicting the demise of Apple, let me add that the software systems I've built personally have suffered this same problem. You start with a solid design and a set of functional requirements, you build a rather well thought out system, you work the bugs out of it, then you start adding and redesigning until the original design is unrecognizable and the original code base should probably be scrapped, but nobody wants to pay millions of dollars to rewrite it.

I'm using FCP 6.02. I'm waiting on updating to 6.03 because 6.02 has proven to be very stable on my system.

My final word on all this is that my G5 has not crashed this year, and I make it work very hard, day after day. It only gets shut down for system updates. I've generally got FCP, Motion, Lightwave3D, a couple of browsers, an e-mail client, an FTP client, an HTML editor, Photoshop, X-Windows (with several X-apps open), my calendar, and XCode open simultaneously. I have 4GB of RAM, and I use it all.

I wouldn't take Windows away from anyone who prefers it, but I would suggest that you spend a month with OS X before you make any hasty judgments. As a developer, I get to use everything, and as the owner of my own business, I can decide what I want to work on. I choose OS X (the Apple hardware is nice, but I might build my own system if I could run OS X reliably and legally on it). I find OS X to be stable, robust, and reasonably easy to use.

Doug

 

[oakstreetphotovideo]

Spinner, if you want to run diagnostics on your computer, you just need to insert the install disk that came with your computer, reboot, and hold down the [option] key while the system is booting. You should get a selection of boot options and one of them should be hardware diagnostics. Once you boot into the diagnostics, you just want to run all tests repeatedly to see if it detects any errors.

I hope that didn't sound too much like "blah, blah, blah". I think Apple has a nice instructional page in their knowledge base, if you search for hardware diagnostics.

 

[oakstreetphotovideo]

I know..

my *nix machine is more stable than your ____ machine..

I wouldn't bet on that, Will. OS X is based on a Free BSD kernel. If the software updater didn't force me to reboot, my Apple would run as long as my Linux servers do between boots. I've been a Linux user for a long time. I've got 4 servers here running Linux, but I still prefer the OS X interface in terms of usability (I wish they had just written a windows manager on top of X11R6, but unfortunately I must run X as an App). I often develop and test my Un*x code on OS X before porting it over to Linux.

Furthermore, your machine is idle. Even Windows will run for 2 years if you don't do anything with it!