Render Manager

I was trying to help an acquaintance with his system recently. He was complaining that just opening a clip up from the browser to the viewer brought up the 'out of memory' warning. He shoots primarily using footage from the Red 1, Canon 5D and the IMAX cams. I discovered that he had over 52 gigs of render files that he no longer needed and a trash that was also full. Used the Render Manager to delete the files.....except there were 3.1 gigs of render files that simply would not delete and I have no idea why they wouldn't. I did try several times.

He has a ton of externals all connected in and I tried to repair them using Disk Utility and, for most, they were repaired. Some would not.
I also discovered that he did not do a clean install of FC Studio on his Quad Core Mac Pro when upgrading to Snow Leopard.

It seemed that the problem of the out of memory warning was gone when I left, but in phone calls since, he is getting them back now. I then guided him through trashing his prefs.

I have counseled him to do a clean install of FC Studio( he did not want to hear that) and to eject every one of his drives and then one by one find the one that could be contributing to his problems.

My question is 1) Why would the render manager not delete those 3.1 gigs of render files?
2) Is there anything I have not advised him to do that you might suggest?

Thanks for your input.
Steve

steve-sharksdelight

I'd find it hard to believe that 3.1GB of render files would cause these problems. I think it's more likely that they're a harmless coincidence. As for why they can't be deleted, there are plenty of possibilities -- if it were up to me, I'd just look at which project they came from and delete them manually within OS.

You didn't say how much storage he had left on his drives. FCP frequently expresses "out of storage space" as "out of memory". The fact that the problem went away briefly but then came back also leads me to suspect this first -- he created/imported more clips or generated more render files, and now he's out of storage again.

I find your troubleshooting method a bit flawed, though. Why would you leave his "ton of external drives" all hooked up when doing diagnostics? In my view, if you're trying to locate the problem, you should be attacking those drives one by one. Any one of them can be filled to the brim and cause the problems, and a chain of them only exacerbates the issue. His drives are twice as likely to fill up too full if, for example, he were setting all of them as active Scratch Disks in his FCP System Preferences and he didn't know to check on them from time to time. This is why I always set only one Scratch Disk at a time. It forces you to pay attention.


www.derekmok.com

Completely agree with you Derek, remember that initially I found that he had over 52 gigs of render files. I walked into his editing bay, the size of a small country, and just did basic maintenance first with the drives. It wasn't until after some would not repair that I did tell him to eject the drives and install one by one. It did not occur to me that they might be full. The obvious is often the most overlooked and I will check with him on this. I did reset his scratch discs which were spread around but didn't think about the full drive possibility and will get to him on that as well.
Steve

steve-sharksdelight

Those files probably didn't delete because of a permissions issue. Just delete them manually.

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...