Out Of Memory Error When Opening FCP Project

Hi all.


I am trying to help a friend with a FCP problem, and I was wondering if anyone can help.

My friend has an original 17 inch Powerbook with 1 GB RAM and Mac OS X 10.3.8. He uses an external 200 GB FireWire drive. His project file size is about 148 MB. His media files total about 130 GB. He uses FCP Pro 4.5 HD. Here is the problem, as described by him.

He can double click and open the FCP project file without problems. However, when he tries to open his sequence (into the Canvas I guess), he gets an "Out of Memory" error.

As I have yet to work on a project this big, I have never personally experienced this problem. The obvious thing would probably be for him to install 2 GB RAM into his Powerbook instead of having just 1 GB installed. However, I want to make sure that the problem is not a memory tuning or other tuning problem.

Has anyone experienced such a problem? Does my friend truly need to install more RAM into his Powerbook, or could something else be going on? If more information is needed, please let me know, and I will get it.


Thanks in advance.

-DH

This can happen with a corrupt font or corrupt render file or corrupt media.

Ian

<<<The obvious thing would probably be for him to install 2 GB RAM into his Powerbook instead of having just 1 GB installed. >>>

That would be obvious, but possibly wrong.

This is also the error message you get when you run out of hard drive space.

Can you fit your show twice on the media drives--on a wild guess, 600G free space? Does your System Drive have 10% to 20% free space at the top?

This is typically what goes wrong when people start juggling really large shows. suddenly, all sorts of media management problems crop up.

Koz

That is one massive project file...does he truly need to access so many items at the same time?

One very common and easy way to reduce the size of project files is to keep batch lists and logs stored separately in another project file. Since FCP is able to have multiple projects open anyway, this may help reduce the time it takes to open a project file (I imagine your friend has to wait five, 10 minutes for a 148MB project file to open...), save, autosave, and so on. What exactly did he do to make his project file so big? 130GB of media doesn't sound like too much; I assistant-edited on a feature doc with 200 tapes and the file size was only about 20MB, and even then it takes two full minutes to open. That would lead me to believe it's his edits (including previous versions, etc.) that are making his project file bloated.