woes with 10.6.4.....

Okay, it's been a while since i last needed to post here as things have been running smoothly.......

i have previously been editing on an older quad mac pro running 10.5.8 with fcp 6.0.6, due to projects getting graphically more intricate and video card needy we upgraded to one of the newer quad core intel xeons, (2 x 2.4) with 12 gig ram (a bit excessive i know!) with an ATI Radeon HD 5870 1gig card.

We transferred the Kona LHi card over to it along with the e-sata card.

Drivers and software installed as before relevant to 10.6.4, permissions all set repaired......

Now the problems:

Project files, regardless of size can take up to 20 minutes to open, i have waited for 20 minutes then force quit the program. This happens with files that are 12mb in size!

Audio goes out of sync on the broadcast monitor from time to time, fcp will quit when audio is imported, it will hang when copying and pasting. I have had the canvas showing a still of video from a sequence i have shutdown but wont show me the video on the timeline i am playing......
We also had some red footage to edit but the plug in from red for the log and transfer in fcp failed to transcode the clips properly. Meaning that we had to do it on the leopard machines.......

I only work in apple Pro Res 422 most of the time and 50 % of the time with this machine i can work in fcp, use compressor and other software without the slightest drag in performance.

Am i right in assuming that the 64 bit nature of snow leopard is the culprit and that fcp 6.0.6 and associated kona software/hardware is conflicting/struggling in some way?

Any insight is much appreciated......

The new Mac Pros boot into 64-bit mode by default. If you boot into 32-bit mode by holding down the 3 and 2 keys together while booting, does Final Cut Pro work properly?

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...

Ooh. That's a handy tip.. nice.

Brill i will try that, might help firefox work a bit more happily too.....

Oddly enough, and i though this might happen. All is better today.
I shut the machine machine down after work and went home, came back to work this morning and i have had none of the issues that i described yesterday. Very odd indeed.

Also i see that they have released a prokit update, so i will wait or a week or so then think about installing it.

Thanks for the reply Jon!

I'm not sure if it's wise to install new ProKit updates for old versions of Final Cut Pro. Might cause more issues than it solves.

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...

Do you have any external drives connected? If one of these is too full or too hot or just on the way to electronic heaven, it can cause dramatic slow-downs on your system.