hi all- new to the forum but longtime fcp person-glad to see in reading posts that the "regulars" are brilliant-- maybe you can help me. i have a G5 dual, OSX, FCP 4.5. and 15 external drives (13-120G and 2-250G), that are daisy chained in twos going to several hubs. i have a massive project that i have been working on for some time. recently when a drive was acting "buggy", i figured it could go down so i moved the media to another drive. (i ran disk warrior too ) the drive did act weird and even though i emptied it, it still showed that it was full and would disappear off my desktop. then the drive with the moved media started not reading. i figured it was a corrupt media file. both drives were sent in and only the second one needed repair-now, i had the problem of batch capturing, which i know should be fairly simple. but, i had to do one clip at a time-repeatedly. (i also had some timecode issues that were my own fault when shooting). the problem now is an error message in a dialogue box that comes up whenever i want to view a clip-it says error-out of memory. the only click option is ok-which brings up the box again and again. then the viewer window goes down or the whole project quits. i have memory up the ass and my scratch discs are set. i trashed my preferences and repaired permissions. help me please! thanx in advance



Post Edited (06-21-05 22:38)

Bloody hell - 15 daisy chained firewire drives! That's amazing. There are people here who can barely get one firewire drive to work well - I've been one of them.

Are all your drives, including your system drive, less than 90% full?

Is there any way you could consolidate parts of the project into a locked off state so that you could media manage and reduce the load a bit? I mean, you sound like you know what you're doing just to get that puppy to work at all, but it's got to be getting close to critical mass.

You should check the recommended procedure for installing RAM on the G5. I'm almost certain it's not supposed to be installed in bodily orifices

Do the clips that fail to play in FCP, play in the QT player? Does the error pop up regardless of which FW drive it plays off? Disregarding the timecode issues, did you get any error messages when batching, or did it simply stop after the first selected off-line clip? Just trying to eliminate some posibilities. You are standing on the edge of tried and tested technology here, I suspect. If Jude's advise doesn't work out for you, we might need to fold our sleeves up.

Oh, one more thing. If you haven't allready, take a clip that has resulted in the viewing error, move it to an internal drive, relink it in FCP and then try to view it.

Geir

Firstly, you should really consider getting a SATA RAID array. Though I agree with Jude on the "how'd you daisy-chain so many" issue, the problems you're having could be the price you pay for a gargantuan 15-drive chain. It's asking for trouble. At the very least, replace those 120GB drives with 240GBs and you can whittle the chain down to 7 or 8 drives. Even better, use 1TB arrays -- two or three of those will replace your entire chain, and cost you less in the long run. (Don't use Lacie BigDisks if possible, though -- they're erratic)

> problem of batch capturing, which i know should be fairly simple. but, i had to
> do one clip at a time-repeatedly. (i also had some timecode issues that were
> my own fault when shooting).

FCP is super-sensitive when it comes to timecode -- even half a dropped frame will cause batch capture to fail. I need more information -- is your timecode breaking on every clip, whenever you turn the camera off? (Free-run timecode will do that) Or do you mean the application crashes after every capture?

> the problem now is an error message in a dialogue box that comes up
> whenever i want to view a clip-it says error-out of memory.

Given that you're using 15 drives for clips, your project file is probably massive as well, with logs and cuts. I wouldn't be surprised if you had a 200MB project. People have been reporting "Out of Memory" errors on project files over 130MB in size. Time to do housecleaning -- reduce the size of your project file by storing your logs in separate project files from the one where you do your editing (you can always have them open at the same time), and get rid of those old obsolete cuts if you have any. Try to "consolidate" your media files -- each of your drives should have one folder where your clips go. The more disparate your media is, the worse your drives will function.

As for Jude's suggestion to media-manage your project: With this amount of media and time invested into the project, Media Manager could send your files into a tailspin, so I'd be very careful about using it. If anything goes wrong, it's gonna be a two-week repair job, maybe more.

I'm with them. There is an upper limit. You can't daisy-chain 52 drives and cut an 8-hour long movie. You reach a point where addressing and managing the hard drives excedes the data stream.

<<<going to several hubs.>>>

That, too can be problematic. That piles the hub data management on top of everything else.

I know somebody else who tried to do a massive project like this and she, too, showed up here wondering why her project files became erratic and inpredictable.

She only had 8 chained drives.

Koz

That error comes up when you have a still picture in there that is not in RGB mode. That possible?



Michael Horton
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How much RAM do you have in your G5? I had a similar problem and discovered that if you have more than 4G of RAM, it will cause out of memory errors with FCP 4.5. I had to remove some RAM to get myself down to 4G -- and then everything was smooth sailing.

Deremok suggestions are right...

error "Out of Memory" happened to me recently when project file size was a bit over 130MB.
I tought were a corrupted file, so i started moving every clip and sequence in a new project checking every time if everything was right, so on...until the end.
At the last few items "Out of Memory" came out suddenly, while exceeding 130MB.


eri

hi-thanx for your reply. all of my drives are about 70% full. i don't have them all on at once, just 4 or 5 per project. the project with the problem is only 38mb in size. any ideas? nasty

hi Geir-the clips play fine in QT.there is no particular clip with the problem-anything in my browser will get me the error mess.when batch capturing, i repeatedly had unable to find timecode error-i believe. i'm going crazy here! thanx

Can you open a fresh project and see if you can batch capture the wonky tape without the error? If no, can you capture anything in a fresh project without error?