FCPX freezes iMac Pro. Requires cold boot

Question

FCPX freezes iMac Pro. Requires cold boot

I have FCPX. Brand new install. Completely up to date fully loaded iMac Pro. 14 cores, 64G RAM, lots of hard drive space, etc. No FCPX plugins. When I'm working on a large video (90 minutes, 4K, 60fps) it regularly freezes the computer. Mouse works, but nothing else does. Can't select windows, can't force quit, can't do anything except cold reboot. Driving me nuts. It's happened repeatedly.... CPU isn't taxed, memory isn't taxed, disk isn't taxed. It just nukes the machine and it is time to reboot and curse. Any suggestions?

Posted on Aug 8, 2019 10:17 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Aug 10, 2019 1:23 AM in response to michael_yarrow

Did you migrate stuff from an older mac?

If not, then what Tom said.

If you did migrate, Please run Etrecheck and post its full report here.

Use the “additional text” button and paste the report into the text box.

Reply

Answer 2

Aug 11, 2019 9:25 AM in response to michael_yarrow

No obvious bad actors in the report.

Don't forget to always delete FCP X preferences whenever there is a crash or the application behaves unexpectedlty.

To delete preferences, hold down command and option while starting FCP X and click Delete Preferences.

Then reopen your library and see if things work ok.

Reply

Answer 3

sydistic

Level 1

11 points

Aug 11, 2019 1:17 PM in response to michael_yarrow

Seeing this as well. Have not used FCP since the last update, but this project has 4k video with proxies, MP4 videos optimized, and 3rd party Text elements for title cards. With Activity Monitor open, I open FCP, my project opens (auto-render is disabled). I then render unrendered items and Memory allocation increases to 6, then 8, then 12, then 18GB with each render. When render is finished, the memory allocation does not go back down. I quit FCP and reopen, it starts over. I have seen it go up to 53GB and hose my computer. This looks like a serious memory leak. I have rebooted with Safe mode to dump the caches, deleted prefs, etc. Looking at the components of the project compared to be backup prior to dropping in the MP4s, but this should not be the cause.

Reply

Answer 4

sydistic

Level 1

11 points

Aug 11, 2019 3:34 PM in response to Tom Wolsky

Sounds a bit extreme without more info. I was responding to this as a Software issue. Specifically, Final Cut, and perhaps only the latest release. I know it's not a hardware issue for me. My setup is rock solid for all other apps. I did more investigating, and there were some MP4s which which kept showing that they needed to be rendered. I converted them all to MOV and the problem is gone. I would expect FCP optimized files to cover for any issues of this type, so I still consider this a bug.

Reply

Answer 5

Tom Wolsky

Level 10

151,064 points

Aug 11, 2019 3:38 PM in response to sydistic

Good you got this working, but to follow up, would it be possible to get complete specs on the media beyond MPEG-4 and where it came from and how it's being stored? With what you've given the issue is not reproducible.

Reply

Answer 6

Aug 11, 2019 11:29 PM in response to sydistic

This seems consistent with what I see. I'm running the machine (and have for a long time) with a lot of very heavy processing... billions of operations... no trouble. FCPX though nukes it. I suspect a nasty memory leak from rendering, but it could just as easily be in their scrubbing... i'm almost all MOV, 1 m4v from an iPhone.

Reply

Answer 7

Aug 11, 2019 11:31 PM in response to Tom Wolsky

For me: I have c. 30G of MOV videos files and 6G of an M4V. M4V is from iPhone. MOV are from Nikon D850. Load all of them into a project, scrub, start to add titles (been trying to use some of the 3D bottom thirds and the world one)

Previously: Render to YouTube... bye bye machine, about half way through

After that, render locally and then scrub: bye bye

It might not even need the render step...

Reply