too large project?

Does FCP7 spazz when a project becomes too large or complex?

Today the editor here found her last few hours of frame-by-frame work gone. The project files in the Autosave Vault showed an abrupt shrinkage from 16.1 MB to 15.7 MB. Her work was salvageable, but why did it disappear?

There were no crashes or warnings. The project is all 25p ProRes. The Browser lists about 1200 media files. There are 3 trial sequences each about 90 minutes long, and some smaller ones. There are only about 100 render files.

A 16 MB total project file is not large. We've had 80 MB project files work fine on the same system.
The 1200 media files is double what we've had before.
The 90 minute sequences are a bit longer than we've had before, but their real measure can't be in length but in the number of tracks, cuts, and effects with their parameters, which I can't estimate.

If this FCP7 project is too large or complex, what reduction would make FCP7 happy?
Reducing the list of brower files by about 200 is possible, but further reduction would be a hardship for the editor.
Cutting the sequences into shorter portions would be easy.
Exporting and reimporting some frame-by-frame editing work is possible.

What has worked for others?

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany

"Does FCP7 spazz when a project becomes too large or complex?"

yes.
it takes forever to open, and crashes frequently

however...

that is a pretty small project.
it's size is not the problem.

> Does FCP7 spazz when a project becomes too large or complex?

Yes.

> Today the editor here found her last few hours of frame-by-frame work gone.

That is not the only possible cause of this issue, though. A huge number of factors could result in a project file not saving -- permissions issues, software corruption, file corruption, flawed save habits...

I think I've only ever had this issue happen to me once in 14 years or so, so I can't nail down what caused it that one time. Another editor I was assisting for 10 years ago said it happened to him often, but it never happened to me while I was working on the same system as he.

> A 16 MB total project file is not large.

No, that's not large at all. Most of my projects are at least 30MB, going all the way up to above 100MB. I'd only start suspecting an overlarge project file around the 150MB mark or so. The small size of your colleague's project file would lead me to suspect something else first. Are the drives properly formatted? What format is the media, and what is the location of the media?

> If this FCP7 project is too large or complex, what reduction would make FCP7 happy?

The best way is to segregate older cuts (Sequences). From what I've encountered, what bloats file sizes the most are filters and effects settings. Raw media files imported into the Browser only increase size moderately, and there's only so much separation you can do at that level before the project becomes a pain in the neck. Sequences bloat project-file sizes far faster than master clips.

However, when you say "frame-by-frame" editing...are you trying to import, say, Image Sequences into the timeline? That would be very, very taxing on the system. Legacy FCP simply wasn't designed to play and edit with, say, 300 still images into 10 seconds. Those should be put into .mov wrappers before being imported.


www.derekmok.com

Thanks Nick. The project opens fast enough and there have been no crashes. The only symptom is the disappearance of some editing work, as if FCP decided on its own to do a giant UNDO.

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany

Thanks Derek. The drives look OK -- permissions checked, Disk Warrior checked, SMART Utility checked -- but we did have corruption problems at the beginning of the project five months ago that required substantial rebuilding.
The frame-by-frame editing wasn't on an Image Sequence. Ordinary ProRes clips were chopped down to their frames, and these filtered individually. So no more taxing than an equal amount of clip-by-clip editing. But this happened to be what got lost.
Maybe a bird sat on Cmd + Y (on this German keyboard). Fine if it happens next in 14 years or so.

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany

If it happens again, copy everything and resave to a new project file. See if it gets rid of the problem. If not, then there's a good chance it is related to the media.

> Ordinary ProRes clips were chopped down to their frames, and these filtered individually.

If you have enough tiny little clips in a short time that weren't originally single frames themselves, that would cause problems. Every FCP class I've ever taught had at least one student that tried to do a freeze-frame by copying one frame of a clip and pasting it 60 times back to back. That causes considerable problems. Using FCP's Freeze Frame is the way to go in these cases, but the fact is, FCP was never intended to perform such complicated effects that would require pasting 30 affiliate clips in one second, for example.


www.derekmok.com

Derek, these are successive frames of an action and the frame-by-frame filtering is in the Motion tab. We'll export lengths of it as wee QT files and reimport.

thanks,
Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany

> the frame-by-frame filtering is in the Motion tab

Well, then it's not filtering! Motion adjustments should be fine. Also, keyframes are okay. What to avoid is pasting many very short clips within a limited amount of time.


www.derekmok.com

True, these were single frame through-edits, not a string of single frame clips. And these were Motion tab effects, not filterings proper. But they were what disappeared from the project file.

I take your original point that:

> A huge number of factors could result in a project file not saving --

What's fishy here is that the 15.7 MB Autosave occurred on schedule 30 minutes after the 16.1 MB Autosave, so FCP7 wasn't closed between but had flushed out 0.4 MB worth of editing. It did save the lost stuff and then didn't save it.

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany

> What's fishy here is that the 15.7 MB Autosave occurred on schedule 30 minutes after the 16.1 MB Autosave, so FCP7 wasn't closed between but had
> flushed out 0.4 MB worth of editing. It did save the lost stuff and then didn't save it.

Normally the number-one culprit here is user error. For example, if somebody had two project files open and done the work on a blank project file, saved the one s/he thought the Sequence was from and then quit out. It's very hard to nail it down without, say, screen-capturing that section of the editor's operations. All I can say is that this really does not happen often, and in all cases I've seen, user error has not been ruled out.


www.derekmok.com

User error is possible, and not an unwelcome diagnosis (since an editor can learn FCP7 better but no one's going to debug FCP7).

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany