FCP Crashing on iMac using HDV > AIC codec

I notice that you’re using the AIC codec to work with HDV material, this is no longer a necessary step to take as FCP 6.0 and the newer generation of iMac, Macbook pro and MacPros are capable of handling HDV editing much better. The AIC codec will create much larger files which will put a lot more stress on your system as each stream of video is 12 MB/s as opposed to 3.5MB/s in native HDV. Especially if you’re editing from the internal drive or the small external LaCie you purchased from us.

Your previous work in SD 720x576 is a completely different world regarding the processing and graphics power required to do this, you must consider that you’re working with twice as much resolution, twice as much compression and 4 times as much data throughput.

There’s also a few components involved here that we didn’t provide, including Final Cut Pro itself, which makes it harder for us to determine where the problem lies as we cannot guarantee the quality of these items, unless they came through a third party in which case can you let me know the account name/number.



I would suggest trying a native HDV workflow using the FW800 on your LaCie drive without the audio interface connected and see if you get the same errors. Also, if your OSX hard disk is over 85% I would suggest removing or transferring some non-critical data as this will improve the speed and efficiency of your machine, this also applies to any drive you’re editing from. You could also do some basic housekeeping on the system by repairing disk permissions (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1452) and trashing your FCP preferences (http://support.apple.com/kb/TA27510?viewlocale=en_US Relates to FCP4 but is the same in all versions), these two practices will often help irritating issues like this.