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FCPX crashes system by background rendering

I upgraded to FCPX 10.3.3 today it wanted to do a bunch of back ground rendering on the library. That's fine, except it used more and more memory 40GB+ and then also started created more and more swap. Eventually I run out of disk space and the system just crash.


Any ideas how to stop or fix this?


I'm running latest version of macOS.

Posted on May 14, 2017 1:21 PM

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10 replies

May 15, 2017 5:55 AM in response to aapl.crox

Turn off background render, in Final Cut Pro->Preferences->Playback.


Select your library, and do File->Delete Generated Library Files... and select to delete all render files.


If you have set the options to create optimized media and/or proxy media on import, revisit that.

Chances are you don't need that, and optimized media in particular usually takes up several times the size of the originals.

May 15, 2017 9:30 AM in response to Luis Sequeira1

Luis Sequeira1 wrote:


Turn off background render, in Final Cut Pro->Preferences->Playback.


Select your library, and do File->Delete Generated Library Files... and select to delete all render files.


If you have set the options to create optimized media and/or proxy media on import, revisit that.

Chances are you don't need that, and optimized media in particular usually takes up several times the size of the originals.

Well all that does is you have told me how to stop rendering. Which is ok, but later on when I actually need to render it will crash the system again. That's not really a solution?


And besides why does the app behave like that? No app should request so much memory that it would kill the system, it looks like it's leaking memory. Why wouldn't it just render one thing and then release the memory and start again?

May 15, 2017 9:58 AM in response to aapl.crox

After any crash one should always delete preferences. Corrupted preferences are known to cause all sorts of problems.

In this case I suspect there may be some bad media involved. Another significant possibility is that there may be some plugin that is not working correctly in the current version and needs to be updated.

FWIW this is the first report I've seen of rendering until forever and exhausting available Ram; therefore it is unlikely to be an outright bug. It could be a bug triggered by an uncommon set of circumstances or more likely bad media, a plugin or some interaction with other software.

May 15, 2017 11:17 AM in response to Luis Sequeira1

Ok in that case, what are the steps I should take? How do I delete all the preferences and also all the plugins?


Also, I remember the upgrade failing as well. When I moved from 10.2 to 10.3. I manually deleted some plist file to do the upgrade of the library, maybe that caused it?


Should I revert back to the my old library for 10.2? I got that library in a time machine. Should I try to upgrade again?

May 15, 2017 2:23 PM in response to Luis Sequeira1

So here's what I will do, let me know if this is a good plan.


Rollback the FCP version to 10.2 and my old library from Time Machine.


Then launch 10.2 and begin deleteing all preferences and rendered files.


Then once everything is clean, try updating to 10.3 again. Assuming the update is successful, I will turn on background render and test again.


How do I delete all the plugins?

May 16, 2017 2:41 AM in response to aapl.crox

I strongly suspect bad media.

I would suggest you create a new library, add a few clips, make a small test project.

I suspect you will not see the memory problem.

If you still see the problem immediately or soon after, in a new library, then I recommend you run Etrecheck, an utility by a respected member of this community, and post its report here. This will let us have an idea of what software you are running, and hopefully suggest a possible cause.

FCPX crashes system by background rendering

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