Rendering issue and stuff....

Spec: mac intel quad 2.66 5gb ram, 1tb xsan server, MAC OS X 10.4.11 FCP 5.1.4

Hello!

i have a colleague who is working with an HDV sequence in the native codec. Now we are unable to work in pro-res or xdcam forvarious reasons and the native codec has been ok so far.

His sequence has become very complex with numerous filters added to the clips. Some of which are Magic Bullet ones. He is using an intel quad 2.66 machine with 5 gb ram and plenty of drive space. (All drives he is connected to are at least 50% free) yet while rendering and conforming it will stop and produce the 'out of memory' message. Is this a ram issue?

We have trashed prefs, repaired permissions (inside and outside of the OS) and used disk warrior.

Finally he has been told to break the 20 minute sequence in to 2 minute chunks, nest them and render/conform them this way. This has a 70% success rate and a very slow process.

So two questions really..... Does nesting reduce the work load on the computer in terms of rendering and conforming?

and

Whats up with the machine for it to struggle in this way and is there anything that should be done to prevent it happening again?

Many thanks in advance for any ideas and suggestions.......

Chris.

It's never a good idea to pile filters onto a heavily compressed timeline. That's just asking your system to do an insane amount of work.

Try rendering your timeline one shot at a time, using render-selection instead of render-all. When you identify the shots that won't render, figure out how to simplify the effects until they can render.

Then, if you're shooting HDV, upgrade your facility to Final Cut 6 immediately. Trying to work with heavily compressed footage without ProRes is a nightmare.

I've had a lot of problems with Magic Bullet. One way to deal with the problem is to print out self-contained Quicktimes with MB filters applied and then re-import and apply the rest of the effects/filters on top of readily effected video source.

It is too easy to loose a big chunk of rendered timeline with minor last-minute adjustments. With tight deadlines this can be catastrophic. You can go back with Autosave Vault but it is different and sometimes awkward process. I prefer to keep my shots readily effected with MB as independent QT files. This way, I am on top of things when it comes to estimating render -times and final delivery schedule for the project.

Quote

One way to deal with the problem is to print out self-contained Quicktimes

Print them out? What do you do, fax them to yourself and then scan them back in as bitmaps?

;-)

Now theres a market for some software!

Forgot to mention that the footage also has a de-interlace filter added to each clip plus 4-5 clips with various sapphire filters......

Could there be a RAM issue here? as in too much being asked of it?

Sounds like it's a workflow issue more than anything else. De-interlacing is a format conversion; the Sapphire sparks are effects. Piling a real-time effect on top of a real-time format conversion is ? well, okay, it's dumb. And adding more RAM won't fix dumb.

i agree, the machine has enough RAM already for FCP i just wondered if too much demand was being placed upon the RAM that is already there?