Green background after upgrade

I recently upgraded to 5.1.4 and now find my Viewer and Canvas have a green background even though it is set to black. Have switched this setting around and back to black but to no avail.

How do I get it to be black again?

Thanks in advance.

Bill Russo

Hey Bill - nice to see you on the forum

The bright green screen often means that your system doesn't have enough resources to cope with what you're doing. I've seen this on old machines trying to do very complicated work, and on machines with not enough RAM/ proc power to cope with the software version.

What are you running this on? Does it only happen in one busy project, or do you see it in a completely fresh project?

I've fought this beast twice before. Some good information from the last time it happened to me:

[www.lafcpug.org]

I admin three FCP machines, and it's happened on two of them. I blame it on poor workflow issues, and once I clean up the messes of users (media on desktop, full drives, bloated projects/timelines), it seems to stop happening. I've never really identified a specific cause.

Best of luck!

Ah yes, very interesting. Hi Jude!

I'm running a 2.1 gig Intel Core Duo 17" MBPro with 2 gig of ram and only doing reasonably simple work. I also have a second monitor connected. Have a fair bit of clutter on the desktop.

I am currently running on battery reading the web while eating breakfast and following the excellent advice here I thought, "wonder if the second monitor made the difference?"

Guess what - Black bg on Viewer and Canvas!! Running on battery and all.

Clearly this is a resource thing, shall clean up the desktop and reconnect all drives and 2nd monitor and see what happens. There are 2 lacie drives, (plenty of space on all) - 500g and 350g connected via FW 800 and a self powered FW 400 on the system. Wonder if the FW 400 is sucking up resources as well.

Thanks again. Shall report back when all is back together and tested.

Have just hooked the system back up and the black backgrounds have remained. Haven't changed a thing!

While separated from the "whole setup" on battery power all I did was reset the scratch disk to the system drive and black returned. Now having hooked up the 2nd monitor and drives and not touched anything else the black has remained.

Was the sytem just a little confused?

Whatever its all back to normal.

Thanks for all your help.

Bill Russo

Geez I wish we could get this one more pinned down. The last time I saw it, it was in a lab running about 8 G5s and two G5 iMacs. Both the iMacs had the problem, but none of the G5 towers did.

So it seemed to me that it *must* be a resources thing. But maybe it's just a random bug, possibly related to resources on the edge?

Thanks again, facinating fix. BTW this is not the first time I have had this, always seems to be after an upgrade. Will know what to do next time.

Bill R