Re: Six Beeps and Disk Warrior

Hello Michael:

It's a lot of common-sense stuff, but basically there are a number of things in FCP which could cause a render to crash, consequently causing the array to 6-beep. Here's a couple of things/clues:

1. Look at the size of the project (The project file itself -- not the media or render files): If the project file is over 40MB, then something is really really wrong. 40MB would be the size of a project which is a music video the length of a feature film (i.e. 2 hours of 4-5 frame clips).

2. gaps in the video portion of the timeline don't seem to matter at the beginning or end, but if there are gaps in the sequence which are 1-2 frames in length, where there is no video on any other track, the sequence may crash during a render. These are really hard to spot without zooming in and scrolling across the sequence.

3. Down-converting HD to standard def, using QuickTime to translate can crash the system. This is a known bug, and I think Apple may have fixed it already -- the bug is in QuickTime, and not directly in Final Cut Pro.

4. Audio gaps won't stop a rendering, but will cause speaker popping if rendered.

5. Down-converting stills which are larger than 4096x4096 resolution will crash rendering.

6. Telling FCP to do a time change on a 1-frame clip can sometimes crash rendering.

There are others, but these are ones I've seen submitted by customers. Here is a story about one of them: We had a customer who placed 10 video clips (no audio) into the timeline, with no effects. When he would render, it would crash. He sent me the project, and it crashed here too (eliminating all hardware and OS/software). I decided this was rediculous, and recreated the sequence on another computer, using the exact times for each clip that he used. It rendered - no problem. I went back to his sequence and rendered each clip one-at-a-time, and noticed that the rendering would crash on clip 7 and clip 9. I looked at my newly-created sequence, and noticed that there was a 4-frame discrepancy in the length of the sequence - mine was 4 frames shorter than his. I rechecked the lengths of the clips, and when I zoomed in all the way, I noticed there were two black lines in the "green stripe" area above the timeline. I went to these lines, and found two 2-frame gaps -- coincidentally (not), one before clip 7, and one before clip 9. I manually moved clips 7 thru 10, to remove the gaps (I think I could have slug-filled them as well, or done an auto-remove gaps), and his sequence rendered fine without 6-beeping on the array.

Since then, two other customers sent in sequences, where finding and removing gaps fixed the render crashing. But something changed, as follows, as of Final Cut Pro 4.5: In Final Cut Pro 4.0 or previous, when you had a gap in the video portion of the sequence, it was really really obvious -- the top of the timeline (render bar) would have a gap in it -- the gap being the color of the background of the bar. Since FCP 4.5, they changed this, and the gap appears black. However, you can only see the gap if you zoom in to a point where the size of the gap is visible.

You don't want the gaps for another reason: If the computer somehow did render them, it will be filling them with superblack instead of black. One person I know said he thought superblack was cool since it was so much darker than black, however it rendered his video quite unbroadcastable...



Lance Gropper
Ciprico/HUGE Systems