Troubleshooting TipsEditing is stressful enough, without having to worry about troubleshooting software. Sadly, though, Final Cut is not perfect, and sometimes problems pop up. This section is designed to give you some tips on how to get things back to normal.Assuming you don't have a hardware failure, there are three principal types of problems:
This section provides remedies for all three. Upgrade ProblemsMore clients get into more problems due to upgrades than any other issue. Here's my basic rule: Wait at least 30 days after a new version of anything is released before upgrading.Why? Because video editing is about the most taxing task you can perform with a personal computer. Unlike word processing or using a database, video editing pushes every system element to the limit: operating system, CPU, RAM, hard disks, data buses, graphics card, monitor, system I/O… everything. If even one part of your system is not running perfectly, you can't edit.Software is software. Apple works really hard to release high-quality tools. However, until those tools get released in the real world, it's impossible to check every possible combination of hardware, software, and peripherals.So, you need to ask yourself: is your role to test software or is your role to edit? If you like being the first one on the block with the latest version of anything, and you can afford to have your edit system down for a while because of incompatibilities, then upgrade as soon as each new version is announced.I had a client do that when OS X 10.3 and FCP 4.0 were announced. The problem was that, although FCP worked under 10.3, the hard disk drivers for the client's RAID did not. Nor did their capture card.So this client was dead in the water for four weeks waiting for other, crucial, third-party vendors to update their software.If, on the other hand, your goal is to edit, then wait a while before upgrading. This is especially true if your system is working fine now. Make sure that every element of your editing system is approved for the latest version of the operating system and Final Cut. When OS 10.3 came out, I made a list of everything that needed to be upgraded in order for Final Cut to work in a professional setting (items marked with an asterisk are not generally needed for DV video):
That's 12 different subsystems of your computer, not all of which are controlled by Apple, that need to work together for you to edit. By the way, this list is in the order you should upgrade your software. If you upgrade out of order, there's a good chance your system will not work properly.So, my advice is once you've got your system operating properly, turn off Software Upgrade so it doesn't keep beeping you when new versions are announced. Be cautious about upgrading. Wait for new versions to prove themselves before you upgrade. That way, when you do add the latest version, everything should go smoothly, and you'll have a minimum of downtime. Solving Operating System ProblemsIf you are seeing the Spinning Beach Ball of Death (SPOD) far more than you'd like, it is generally not a Final Cut problem. More often, it is a problem with the operating system. And the most common problem with the operating system is blown, or corrupted, disk directories.Unix is a wonderful operating system. However, Apple needed to tweak it to improve its performance. And one of those tweaks was to load disk directories into memory.A disk directory is like the card catalog in the library. The books on the shelves represent the files on your hard disk. The easiest way to find a book is to go to the card catalog and look it up. Because the cards are alphabetized, finding exactly the book you want is fast and easy.However, there's a ghost that lives in this library and every so often it sneaks down to the card catalog, pulls out the drawers, and scatters the cards all around the floor. All the cards are still there, but they are no longer in any order. The books are still on the shelf, but with the cards all disorganized, the books are a lot harder to find.Now, when you want to find a book, you need to go through every card, one by one, to see if it is the book you want. You can do it; it just takes longer.This is, essentially, the problem with blown disk directories. The operating system only updates disk directories when you shut down your computer. Prior to that, whenever you create, delete, move, or rename a file, those changes are kept in memory. If your computer crashes, those changes will not be written properly to the disk.Here's a three-step routine that can help fix this problem:
This process is called doing a Safe Boot. Make a habit to do this once a week.When you are booting your computer in Safe Boot, you are actually doing two things: you are repairing a significant majority of disk directory problems, and you are also booting your system with a minimalist version of OS X. This limited OS is perfect for system maintenance, but you cannot run your system this way.If you haven't run this routine, you'll be amazed at the performance benefit you get: your system will boot faster and shut down faster, and you will see the Spinning Beach Ball of Death far less frequently.Now, if your directories are really screwed up, Safe Boot won't fix them. For that you will need a more powerful utility. The best I've found, and recommend highly, is Disk Warrior X by Alsoft (www.alsoft.com). It is excellent. I use it constantly when maintaining my clients' systems, and encourage all of them to buy it.The next big problem you will run into are corrupted file permissions. Every file in Unix has 12 "ownership states" that determine who has permission to read to a file, write to a file, read and write to a file, or who is not allowed to use the file at all.In Unix, the operating system and applications are users, just like you and me. And, sometimes, files get confused as to who they can talk to and who they can't. With well over 100,000 files in OS X, that means there are over 1.2 million permission states that can get confused.To straighten all this out, Apple created Disk Utility. I recommend you run this once a week also. Here's how: 
I've found it easiest to run Safe Boot and Repair Permissions at the same time. That way, all my maintenance gets done together. I run them once a week, or when I upgrade the operating system, or when I upgrade any application, or after a crash. Since I've been running them regularly, my operating system problems have significantly diminished.
Solving Final Cut ProblemsFinal Cut is a wonderful program with an Achilles heel: its preferences files. These preferences are more than the settings you create; they affect the very core of how Final Cut edits and plays media. They exist at the very deepest levels of the application, and sometimes they go south.Once your preferences files are corrupted, for instance after a Final Cut crash, your only alternative is to trash your preferences files and let Final Cut rebuild them automatically when it restarts.Although you should run the Safe Boot and Repair Permissions routines frequently, you should only trash Final Cut preferences when the application is not working.This is because trashing preferences actually removes elements of Final Cut and replaces them with system defaults. The following list is not exhaustive, but here's what gets lost, or reset, when you trash preferences:
Trashing Final Cut preferences does not, repeat not, endanger any of your media files, nor affect any sequences. But it does reset Final Cut back to a known-good default state, which is what you want. However, you then need to take a few minutes after trashing preferences to reconfigure the system preferences so they meet your specific needs.To trash Final Cut preferences: Remember to trash only files, never trash folders. Also, trash all three preference files, not just one or two.Oh, one other thing. Those dropped frame warnings that you get at the most inopportune times are, most often, caused when the hard disk cannot play back video at a fast enough rate.Running these three proceduresSafe Boot, Rebuild Permissions, and Trash Preferencesshould, more often than not, solve that problem. Other Things to CheckHere are some other things to check, from my Web site article, Troubleshooting Your FCP System:
Make sure both the Viewer and Canvas windows are set to Fit to Window. Then, if you are using DV, make sure View > External Video is set to All Frames. If you've imported a still image, but can't see it on the Timeline: Make sure all imported images are RGB. CMYK images (frequently used in graphic design and printing) won't display in Final Cut. If you don't have any audio: Choose View > Audio Playback and set it to Audio Follows Video. Then, choose View > Video Playback and set it to None if you are viewing on your computer monitor, or FireWire if you are viewing on your deck or camera. If audio and video are out of sync: If there are red flags at the start of your clip, Ctrl+click the red flag of your video and choose Move Into Sync from the shortcut menu. If there are no red flags at the start of your clip, choose View > Video Playback and View > Audio Playback and make sure the video and audio playback are both set to the same point. For instance, monitoring video via FireWire and audio via Built-In Audio will automatically be out of sync by around six frames. For the complete troubleshooting article (all 28 pages of it) go to http://www.larryjordan.biz/articles/lj_troubl161. |
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