Crashing.... ALOT

Getting a ton of crashes between myself, and the editor's system. 4 on his in a matter of 4 hours! MY system averaging 3-4 a day.

1 system is a 2.66 8 core Nahalem with 16gb ram, the other is a 8 core 3.2ghz 4gb ram. Both systems have 10.6.3, FCP 7.0.2. Both systems have a Blackmagic Intensity Pro card. We have mirrored drives, running on internal raid. The system that is crashing more has a Euphonix mix on it. Keyframes galore on the audio. One system has dual 30" ACD, the other has a 23" and a 30" ACD. both systems have the most current Blackmagic firmware/drivers.

There is a third system that crashes not nearly as often. That is a quad core, with an IOHD attached. This is 10.6.3, 7.0.2, 2 23" ACD, internal raid.

We are cutting with ProRes(proxy), 23.98, 1080p. 48k 24bit audio.

The crashes vary. Sometimes they happen during scrubbing, sometimes while simply importing, sometimes dropping a shot from finder into browser. Almost always it is simply a FCP crash. Every couple of days it is a kernel panic. They happen regardless of RT settings.

We have trashed preferences, track layouts, window layouts, and so on. Still persists. All of our timelines have 24 tracks of keyframed audio.

Next step is going through the hardware I suppose. Seeing as how the intensity is the common element missing from the "stable" system it feels like a good palce to start. I'm going to uninstall my blackmagic on my system to see if things change.

Anyone encountering or heard of anything similar to our setups?

A kernel panic every couple of days? Not a good sign at all. The first thing I always suspect is storage. Check all drives, backup crucial data to external drives, run DiskWarrior, check how much free space is available.

Since you have mirrored media, I'd also go through the media making sure you don't have corruptions. Unfortunately, that's a phone book of potential suspects -- bad or overlarge still-image files, complicated codecs, QuickTime corruptions...

One place where I work switched from AJA to Blackmagic. I have been unimpressed with the features so far, but it doesn't cause crashes.


www.derekmok.com

One internal raid has 600gb available of 2.25tb, the other has 3+TB of 4.5TB available. All computer have an OSX partition that has at least 25% available of disk size.

If it is a corrupt piece of media, or folder and such, it would at least be fairly consistent in certain acts/scenes and so on. Which is definitely is not. All video is prores proxy. All audio is .AIF, 48k. Cleaned all the renders out, and even created QT mixdowns for heavy effects sequences, and stripped out the effects.

I have already uninstalled the BM drivers on my system, and just regular performance is greatly increased in terms of scrubbing and bouncing around.

This will take some exploration... of course the pilot is due to network tuesday, so it may never get solved.

You should never have a kernel panic. A kernel panic isn't like an application crash. Applications have bugs; crashes happen sometimes. But a kernel panic indicates a hardware problem. You either have bad hardware or a bad kernel extension (that is to say, driver most likely).

So we are thinking the kernel panic thing we've sort of narrowed to either the Euphonix or the Wacom. Likely something in the Wacom, as he is constantly losing settings. Time for an uninstall/reinstall of those drivers.

Good news is my system has been rock solid since the BM removal. That's about 6 hours of hard core action. So maybe Im onto something with the BM removal?

Last time I had multiple Kernal Panics was over 6 years ago when my Digital Voodoo card took a dump. I pulled it = no more problem.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

10.6.3 hasn't been out for very long. You should get in contact with Blackmagic and verify that the latest drivers are compatible.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

Following Jon's suggestion, I checked BMD's website and there is a 3.6 update for the Intensity (Pro) cards.

A couple of the Mac SW update sites don't show this version (macupdate and versiontracker show 3.5.2).

I would also suggest using something like Onyx to delete system cache files. If you've been having many crashes a day, your system is likely "damaged" beyond anything that may be causing the problem.

Your FCP project files, or the FCP application itself, may be corrupt, render files corrupt, etc., in addition to a hardware problem. You should also delete any cache or preference files related to your Intensity Pro cards.

FYI, I have Intensity Pro cards in two of my Mac Pros... no problems to report... (I haven't upgraded beyond the 3.5.2 driver yet)... And, only one of my Mac Pro with these cards is running Snow Leopard (my test machine)... the other (my primary work machine) is still running Leopard...

Not to drone on, but you should always proceed carefully when updating your work systems (not right after updates are issued), and never while they are in use or need to be used at any time soon... A notebook or text file is useful for keeping track of SW updates and any problems (so that you can see when a problem began and link it to recent changes you made to your setup, etc.)...

Hope this helps.


-Dave