IMac Pro shutting down while exporting in Final Cut Pro X

That is absolutely NOT normal.

I suspect that there might be a thermal problem with your iMac Pro.

Maybe the fans are not spinning up appropriately, the mac heats up and shuts down to prevent damage. Maybe there is a lack of thermal paste in the heat sink or something.

The workflow you described is perfectly reasonable - the "guys at Apple" that told you otherwise are wrong.

I suggest a little test: instead of several small projects, make a long project (e.g., copy and paste lots of those small ones into a long timeline) and see how that goes.

I am suspecting it may shut down also.

You should probably take your mac in to be looked at.

If the computer is kernel panicking you should take it to an Apple Store or service technician and reproduce the problem. Applications are sandboxed from the system. They may go into the spinner and become non-responsive or crash themselves. If they’re taking down the system there is almost always a hardware problem.

I have had similar issues with an MBPro.

Culprit was CPU getting too hot coupled with graphics card issue.

I have no hands on experience with the iMac Pro but do know it users the New T2 chip to handle fans, heat control, memory encryption etc.

This may or may not be related, but I'd suggest taking it to your local Apple Service Centre for a professional assessment.

Al

You might try updating to 10.4.3.

Same answer. You need an Apple service technician to go over the machine.

I mean one minute it's chugging along processing the film, then the whole computer just shuts off. Sometimes there are crash reports that I send in. The last one did not have a report.

No fan speedup, CPU meters show about 1/3 usage on every other core, the rest of the cores just idling along. I've pushed it much harder running transcodes in HandBrake with no issue. Stress tested the machine with no issues as well.The only time this happens is in FCPX when exporting.

Having the same issue with an iMac Pro 18-core. Sometimes it exports fine, sometimes it just shuts down hard. I was exporting a very simple project. One long (54min) clip and two audio files of the same length. Very little actual editing done.

18-core, 128GB , 2TB drive

“called the guys at Apple and they told me this is not the workflow meant for FC. I should export the projects one by one, waiting for each one to end before exporting another one.”

That’s BS and obviously you know it. It doesn’t matter how many you stack up, they’re processed sequentially.

P.S. Do you too own an iMac Pro?

Sadly, no 😉

What’s “shutting down hard?” The application closing? Is there a crash report? Is there a kernel panic?