Not having a good time...

I have to admit that I'm not having a good time with my Final Cut and Mac Pro. I've reformatted the discs and reinstalled three times now... and when I finally thought I had the thing at least functioning if not exactly zipping along like I expected I found that Compressor wouldn't work and the trouble shooting advice is to do a complete uninstall and reinstall.

I assumed I could simply reinstall the one programme from my Final Cut Studio 2 but it wouldn't give me the option to do it, so it's now on another 24hr reinstallation cycle.

Is there a way to stop it and just reinstall Compressor? I can't find anyway of doing it. The go back button is greyed out. And I fear the whole thing will just freeze up if just switch the machine off.

Any ideas?

Read this

[docs.info.apple.com]

Michael Horton
-------------------

Done all that. So I'm reinstalling... but the disc from Final Cut Studio 2 didn't give me the option to just reinstall Compressor, and apparently you have to reinstall Motion as well.

It's reinstalling everything right this moment and I wonder if I missed something here. Is there a way of just telling it to reinstall the one component instead of having to leave it running for two days?

If you don't trash all those files on that list you got to reinstall the whole thing
This tool makes it easy if you have to do that

[www.digitalrebellion.com]

Michael Horton
-------------------

Hm, I thought I had trashed all the files.... Though I couldn't actually find all of the components it said should be in the library.

But then again I've been having problems with the machine not populating the contents of its files very quickly... I did wait ten minutes to make sure everything was there but...

I can see I'll have to reformat the discs and start from scratch, sigh, yet again...

All this seems awful drastic. Reinstalling is a last resort for everything and often will not solve the problem unless re-installing is the cure to the problem. What was original problem?

Michael Horton
-------------------

Original problem... it just seemed too slow. And crashed.

Since I was faced with reinstalling I thought I'd set up the RAID system... my system has four Terrabyte disks. So I followed instructions, which implied superior performance if I created everything as a single volume. Since then I've learnt that I probably should have left a boot disk separate.

Though i have to say it seems no faster or slower than when it was in its original state.
It still seemed slow populating files, responding to the mouse position on tool selection and trying to catch the playing head... But I noticed the same problem on the Macs I used at a course I went on and so assumed perhaps Macs are just like that! Though since mine's a Mac Pro I still think it should be a lot faster...

I have a Bella Keyboard for FCpro and that seemed to cause problems. The Jog and Shuttle function wasn't jogging the right things. it was opening menus and not moving the play head. So I reinstalled everything again and now the jog and shuttle doesn't work but all the rest of the keys are properly assigned. So maybe that was a cause of the earlier crashes.

So I was persevering as I can probably do without the Jog and Shuttle wheel trying out a few edits and now I tried out the compressor and got this...

Unable to submit to queue. Please restart your computer or verify your Compressor installation is correct.

And I find I'm reinstalling again.

If this works i'll test things again. But if not, then I'll try returning everything to four separate volumes with no RAID set up. (There is a Raid Card in my machine. it was recommended by the Apple salesman that I get one.)

First rule of troubleshooting is to unhook everything and then one by one hook it back up. The Bella might be a problem. You'd know if you had unhooked it and used a regular ol keyboard. The Raid is probably your problem here if all is sluggish. We all assume the internal drive that came with your Mac is where the AL your apps and OS reside?

Michael Horton
-------------------

It seems to be that one problem was solved by creating another problem.

All my drives are internal. I just took the package off the Apple web site that their salesguy said was recommended for Final Cut Studio.

I doubt the Bella has much to do with the Compressor but maybe the compressor doesn't like working with the Raid... who knows!

Anyway, if this reinstall doesn't get the Compressor working, I'll get myself a big back-up disk, take off the current projects, and then restore the whole system to what it was out of the box... Which, I have to say, seemed sluggish even then.

At that point if all is not fine, I start haranguing Apple for a replacement. Though they weren't very impressed with my complaint that it took five seconds to open files... considerably slower than my iMac.

Well you got a LOT of storage there my friend. 5 seconds is not so bad. You said 4 TBs? That is what is recommended by Apple for a FCS2 system? What are you doing, a 3 year doc? Someone had luck trashing these files in addition to all on that apple doc list.

Library/Receipts/AppleHDVCodec.pkg
/Library/Receipts/AppleIntermediateCodec.pkg
/Library/Receipts/AppleProRes422.pkg
/Library/Receipts/DVCPROHDCodec.pkg
/Library/Receipts/Helium.pkg
/Library/Receipts/IMXCodec.pkg
/Library/Receipts/PluginManager.pkg
/Library/Receipts/ProAppRuntime.pkg
/Library/Receipts/ProMediaIO.pkg
/Library/Receipts/Uncompressed422.pkg

last resort is re-install the OS but it seems you have done that already.

Don't expect your Mac to be lickety split fast with all this storage. It will be faster than your iMac once you start filling it up, but there is a lot of reading and writing going on here with this much storage.

Generally speaking a complete uninstall of FCS2 and then a reinstall should fix this problem. Shouldn't be that way, but it seems to be the cure.

Also remember that the goofy "spotlight" is doing its index thing right after an install and that slows things down a bunch until it indexes every last damn word.

Michael Horton
-------------------

<<<We all assume the internal drive that came with your Mac is where the AL your apps and OS reside?>>>

I didn't see an answer to that question. Your System Drive is a nice fast 40G internal drive, right, with tons of storage on separate drives over and above that?

If you tried to put the OS and Final Cut on one of the multiple t-byte drives, you will spend the rest of your life editing through cold black strap molasses. If you tried to put your system on a large RAID, you could go on vacation in Schenectady waiting for something to happen.

The size of the hard drive thing should only affect the speed. If you have machine problems over and above that, then you have an unstable machine, too.

There are basic tests you can do to make sure this will ever work.

The danger signal is, "I rebuilt my machine four times." Maybe the PC people get to do that, but that's not how Macs work.

Stop when you get just OS-X on the machine, forget Final Cut for a while, and we'll do a few tests.

Koz

I'm trying to deal with as near to uncompressed HD as you can get plus I have plans for using 4K cameras and that's where I thought I'd need as big a work space as possible...

Upgrading my whole operation to industrial standard equipment is proving a steep learning curve... But... gotta do it. Call it my mid-life crisis. Others buy a fast car. Me, I buy a big camera.

I did wonder if Spotlight was doing things and also I was trying to convince myself that it was beginning to work more as expected as I began putting files in and editing stuff.

The mouse pointer though is very frustrating on a Mac. Things don't always respond when you click. Hence no doubt Macaholics obsession with the hotkey and why I bought the jog and shuttle system.

Anyway...

Enough whingeing. It only costs a fortune and is supposed to do exactly what I want it to do, unlike anything else on the market. But it would be nice if one could just stick the disks in and have it install everything and not have to have all this Update nonsense before anything works. Which makes me wonder if different components get out of sync with each other.

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Re: Not having a good time... new
Posted by: Kozikowski (IP Logged)
Date: June 17, 2008 11:22PM

<<<We all assume the internal drive that came with your Mac is where the AL your apps and OS reside?>>>

I didn't see an answer to that question. Your System Drive is a nice fast 40G internal drive, right, with tons of storage on separate drives over and above that?

If you tried to put the OS and Final Cut on one of the multiple t-byte drives, you will spend the rest of your life editing through cold black strap molasses. If you tried to put your system on a large RAID, you could go on vacation in Schenectady waiting for something to happen.

The size of the hard drive thing should only affect the speed. If you have machine problems over and above that, then you have an unstable machine, too.

There are basic tests you can do to make sure this will ever work.

The danger signal is, "I rebuilt my machine four times." Maybe the PC people get to do that, but that's not how Macs work.

Stop when you get just OS-X on the machine, forget Final Cut for a while, and we'll do a few tests.

Koz


All four of the disks are T-byte.

If I get to reformatting everything back to scratch, no doubt I'll be looking for those tests. I did run a few tests with the Apple Support guys talking me thru it on the phone and they seemed to think it was OK... but then they thought my perception of things being a tad slow was purely my subjective opinion. Despite my saying, er, five seconds to open a file is a bit slow... I do have an HP laptop that has a similar problem for no reason I can think of... But that aint half the power of the power mac.

Like I said, can't really offer any more information at the moment. I was just hoping someone could tell me there was a better way than reinstalling every single programme in the FC Studio 2 suite just to get the Compressor working.

I'm seeing hints of some really weird underlying stuff here. The mouse pointer? Things don't respond when clicked? This is not, underscore not, normal.

My system is similar to yours, albeit not identical. It's a Mac Pro with four internal drives. There's a 400 GB disk partitioned in half (so I can keep a known-stable clone of my startup volume when trying out OS and FCP upgrades). There's a 300-odd GB data volume for project files, graphics, basically anything that needs to be backed up by Time Machine. Then there's a striped volume made up of two 750 GB disks; I use this only for footage and scratch, stuff that could be replaced or wouldn't be missed if I lost that volume to a hardware failure. There's also a 750 GB external USB drive that I use for Time Machine. I kept that external because I told myself I could just unplug it temporarily if Time Machine gave me troubles during heavy editing, but it never has, so I just let it sit there and do its thing.

My system works great. It just churns through everything I do. I cut a 1920x1080 29.97 show in ProRes last week, and never had a single glitch that couldn't be attributed to workflow or operator sleepiness.

But I keep my system as lean-and-mean as possible. Very little is installed other than Final Cut Studio, Photoshop and After Effects. My one concession to extraneous software is an install of Parallels so I can run my email and other whatnots in a single big virtual machine disk image instead of cluttering up my system disk with extra applications and files. I'm still iffy about having that on there, but it's been fine for months, so I guess it's okay. Though I remain prepared to yank it off at the very first sign of weirdness.

What other stuff do you have attached to, installed in or associated with your editing system? Do you have any third-party software installed, or thousands of fonts, or any unusual USB widgets attached? Anything like that?

Nothing else is on. It's brand new. The only thing on it is the usual Safari, Mail etc. and FC Studio 2

Point one - do NOT load your OS onto the RAID set. Keep the applications on a different drive than the captures, etc.

The Mac Pro has at least a 320 GB factory loaded HD, so just use it for all the applications. You can even choose to load the content for Motion, Soundtrack Pro and DVD Studio onto the RAID, if you wish.

Point two - While it is sweet to have 4 TB of RAID disks, using them as RAID 0 is taking risks. If any of those four disks fails, for any reason, you loose EVERYTHING. You need to be at last RAID 5, for safety. Apple has a very expensive RAID controller but I prefer HighPoint RAID controllers. They allow for every conceivable RAID setups possible. They also work only with external disk enclosures.

Look into the latest SATA controllers as some provide port-multiplication and can address up to 20 SATA drives.

Point three - Your Mac Pro is running Leopard -10.5.x - yes? When loading Final Cut Studio, it is extremely important to have the correct version of Quicktime loaded before starting.
Also, let the Software updater tell you what needs to be upgraded next, even if you do it manually, because it knows what pieces come next.

Finally, be sure to go to Utilities>Disk Utility and run Repair Disk permissions after loading everything, and before starting up anything. Might want to Verify Disk while you are there.

Hope this helps somewhat!

<<<I have a Bella Keyboard for FCpro and that seemed to cause problems.>>>

I'm with the crew that wants you to push the machine back to original manufacturer's configuration. Mac mouse. Mac keyboard. OS-X/UNIX operating systems will go insane with bad hardware.

<<<instead of having to leave it running for two days?>>>

There is a command for Terminal call "uptime." It will tell you how long the machine has been operating continuously without error. We expect that number to be months and on some machines, years.


<<<The mouse pointer? Things don't respond when clicked? This is not, underscore not, normal. >>>

See above.

<<<So maybe that was a cause of the earlier crashes.>>>

Have you done the plain, unexciting Disk Utilities tests? If the machine made it that far, it may be time for more serious tests.

[www.memtestosx.org]

This is a little utility (not free when I bought it) that you run from the command line (the best way) and sits there chugging away at all the memory tests it can think of one after the other. Then it starts over and does it again. Your machine should do that overnight without failing. We leave it running 24 hours.

If the machine is unstable because of many different problems unrelated to memory (power supply, ventilation), it won't make it. It's not unusual for a memory check to fail several hours in, so no, running it once won't do it. You have to let it loop.

Did you put third party memory in, or do you have Mac certified memory?

Yes, it's unfortunate that you put the OS on one of the enormous drives, but that shouldn't cause crashes.

Koz

I've been working on some projects after getting Compressor working... clean uninstall and then reinstall everything! I hope I can avoid that sort of time consuming action for a while.

It seems to be working reasonable well at the moment. Though I have managed to crash FCpro once since then and for some reason it lost all it's contents and the Recent Project menu lost its content. Luckily I have it automatically saving every minute and so can return to the scratch file and find the latest edit.

Soundtrack Pro has a bad habit of losing everything as well, especially if you are clicking through the various sound samples to see what is there. Every so often the sample causes a crash. unfortunately with Soundtrack Pro it doesn't seem to have an auto-save function. At least none that I can find at the moment.

I don't think it compares favourably with Acid Pro as a scoring application. That seems far easier to create music to the action of the edit where Soundtrack is more of a sound cleaner and FX machine... I could be wrong. There might be a beat mapper in there. I haven't investigated everything.

FC though, does compare favourably with my old Edius machine, though speed and stability wise I'd say my PC with the Canopus card but then it doesn't have a massive memory on it or deals with High Definition editing. FC's easy image manipulation and time line functions just rock.

I'm testing the memory on the machine now to see if everything is functioning and if there's a reason for the crashes other than my doing stuff other people have learnt that they shouldn't do!

You've got Final Cut auto-saving every minute? No wonder your system is sluggish.

Afraid this seems the best way of avoiding losing stuff.

> You've got Final Cut auto-saving every minute? No wonder your system is sluggish.

I agree. Autosave isn't supposed to replace, well, actual saving. Also, Autosave isn't as stable as an actual save, backed by routine manual backups.


www.derekmok.com

Seriously you can't autosave every minute. You have to be able to remember what cuts or actions you did within the last minute. You should be able to rebuilt 15 or 20 minutes work without difficulty. I can go back and do 30 minutes of work without problem and in a quarter of the time. More importantly though if your system is so unstable and the application crashing that often that you need backup every minute the system has major issues and you need to let a technician look it over.

One should be able to remember a lot of things... but it's so much easier to have the machine do it for you and not waste the time.

I'm compiling a file on the crashes trying to work out why... ran various tests but they haven't shown anything. The machine is brand new so should be replaced, but only if I can actually demonstrate that it has a problem. And that's not easy with random events.

So I shall continue and see what happens and work out the quirks... like the best way of grabbing the play head to scrub along the line. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes not. Is there a knack to it? Or is that a sympton of underlying problem?

> One should be able to remember a lot of things... but it's so much easier to have the machine
> do it for you and not waste the time.

Jeez...I suppose you'll be asking Final Cut Pro to automatically edit the scenes for you next. And I guess it'd be easier to "let the machine" maintain itself rather than paying attention to what's happening?

Not bothering to save is inexcusable. You're putting your own work in danger...as well as the project schedule. Get into that habit, and get into the habit of manual backups. You can't expect the computer to do your job for you. Otherwise, might as well just hire a nice computer to be the editor.

Most of us in here have developed a "left-hand twitch": APPLE-S, APPLE-S, APPLE-S. As Tom says, if that plus a 15-to-20-minute Autosave schedule aren't enough, then there's something intrinsically wrong with the system that needs to be diagnosed.

> like the best way of grabbing the play head to scrub along the line. Sometimes it's easy,
> sometimes not. Is there a knack to it?

This sounds to me like you're from an Avid background. The timeline ruler is the only place you can grab the playhead. The sensitivity of the scrub is also dependent on (in the Viewer) how long the clip is, or (in the Timeline) how long the Sequence is.

> The mouse pointer though is very frustrating on a Mac. Things don't always respond when you
> click.

I don't get that either. No problems here. Maybe you don't have your Mouse Preferences set to the optimal balance for your hand. I always set Tracking and Double-Click Speed to maximum -- no problems.


www.derekmok.com

LW, maybe I'm lost but I still didn't see an answer to the question... do you have all of your Applications on the RAID?

I HAVE A NEW MAC PRO (3MONTHS).

yes it gave me headaches at first till i took it too the apple store and had them erase and install the os.

i came back home with it and installed FCS2 with no hick ups. till i had ta do what you did for compressor.

===============

1tb drives have been known not to be the best for the os. My os runs on a 500g (apps only).

I Like foley's POINT1&2

From the sound of things i would say you had a pretty nice budget, so i would suggest using a 500/750 JBOD SOLO for my os. then raiding in pairs rather than trips or quads.

I haven't really heard about your ram either. (HD at least 6gig ram). I still use sd dv and have 7gigs.

MY fcp604 takes about 1-3min to load so you are doing better than me on that. LUCKY FOOL:-)

P.S.
Mok, when he mentioned the autosave, I could have copied and pasted an answer you gave me a year or so ago. I started laughing as i read it cause i knew what was coming next.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

I save. I have backups.

And the autosave is on as an additional safety measure because without it, I lost edits. With it I don't. I see no reason why I should waste time and for that matter FC, as people tell me and as I believe, should not crash in the first place.

And yes, if they could come up with a decent programme that edited it all for me, then I'd go for it! And given how many times I've seen the templates and heard the music loops on the five hundred odd TV channels pumped into my apartment I'd say FC practically does edit it for them... One of the reasons I bought it.

I have 8gig ram which should be enough.

The mouse settings... hmm... I've optimised those and this seems to be as good as it gets.

Reading the responses here it sounds like there is always an inconsistency in the function of the mouse as it depends upon size of clips on the time line when you try scrubbing. Sounds like something Apple need more work on.

And yes I've used other editing packages. They all have their quirks. The mouse on the PC's always did work better than the mouse on the Mac, hence the popularity of hot keys when operating Macs... I hot key... but scrubbing the time line! I mean, that's fundamental to editing.

And there seems some debate here whether putting everything onto the Raid set up causes the crashes or whether that simply causes the slow opening of menus. If it's all a problem of the Raid set up it seems curable by completely wiping the machine and setting up a smaller volume for the system and programmes. Though I have to say I had crashes before I played with the Raid system and thought, stupidly I know, that I was actually curing this by re-installing and setting up my present set up. Others here seem to think that there's a fundamental problem with the machine as the set up shouldn't cause crashes.

When I phoned Apple's technicians they merely said that FC crashes under many circumstances and it was a matter of my own perspective whether this was abnormal. In short, my choice is to spend a few days completely reformatting and reinstalling - yet again - just to see if it makes a difference. Or persevere and see if there are an unworkable number of instances of random breakdowns that I can report and prove a real fault in the machine or whether it is just things that I do that cause the crashes... opening combinations of programmes, clicking through templates and various configurations to see what they do - Experienced guys will have worked out all that... and the work arounds.

Regarding using a separate and faster disk for the OS, I did actually question the Mac sales guy about this option and he didn't think it would make much difference. Hence the set up I bought... Now he could have been lying. The required disks might not have been in stock and he was pushing a configuration that would clear his stocks. But another friend who was FC experienced had a similar set up to the one I bought... except he had a Kona capture card added to his, which was beyond my budget and since I'm working with an XD Cam, I didn't really need a capture card. But I think that card gives his set up a real boost. I did question the guy running the FC course I took as to whether I really needed such a card and he didn't think so.

That's the situation... Like I said. I'm getting the hang of the machine and FC is pretty good... Soundtrack Pro doesn't seem to have the capabilities I'd like and a habit of crashing when I scroll through the pre-installed loops... Is that just me? A fault? A limitation of the Ram? Who knows? Eventually I'll stop scrolling through the bleeps bumps and loops because I'll have an idea what is available and maybe then the crashes will stop.

Compressor... which some people complain about... now that I've got it actually working... seems a very easy and useful means of pumping out batches in different formats. So maybe installation problems are at the heart of a lot of people's problems... once installed properly everything might work perfectly. But why there are installation problems I don't know. And I don't think there should be. I had hoped Apple would have set up the system for me before hand but they didn't. I was led to believe they would, but apparently no. (Long phone calls with lots of people... I think in my region they run their help lines from Australia and India, judging by the accents.

Rogue hardware, bad product design, or incompetent operator... take your pick. I think the jury is out at the moment. Just finished the memory test someone suggested for the machine. It reported back that the memory was "unlocked". This was the only error it reported.

Any idea what that means?

"The mouse on the PC's always did work better than the mouse on the Mac, hence the popularity of hot keys when operating Macs"

My hand to God, I feel like these messages have fallen through a hole in space from some parallel universe.

I'm not going to rise to the bait and call you incompetent. That'd be uncalled for. I'm just gonna say that you're complaining about a lot of thing that I've never heard complained about before. You've definitely got something weird going on, and it sounds systemic. This isn't the kind of thing you're going to be able to revolve on a message board.

I think your next call should be to an integrator who supports Final Cut Pro and who can get hands-on with your system to figure out what's screwed up.

Agree. Time to get an expert on site. I use and troubleshoot many systems, and I see maybe three crashes on average per year. That's three times out of thousands of hours of work where FCP suddenly drops out. Then I reopen the program and continue working.

I did recently have a meltdown, but I saw it coming from a mile off, and warned the guy in charge, who ignored me and kept filling up his drives. For the record, it was a 300GB drive that failed at about 16GB free. Just so you know, it's true that you shouldn't let drives fill up to more than 10% free.

Quote
LWG
The mouse settings... hmm... I've optimised those and this seems to be as good as it gets.
The mouse on the PC's always did work better than the mouse on the Mac, hence the popularity of hot keys when operating Macs... I hot key... but scrubbing the time line! I mean, that's fundamental to editing.

from what i have read apple changed the acceleration curve at Jaguar. I dont know why.
I have STEER-MOUSE . Its the only thing that lets me get full use of my MX Revolution mouse.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"