Final Cut Pro Render/ export crashes

Question

hello everyone,
i've been working on a very lengthy project which i am trying to finish up on final cut pro 5 but the problem is final cut is being extremely difficult and will not get through rendering or exporting a single thing without crashing. i don't know if it's ridiculously poor programming or the lack of a plugin that might be the problem. the details are that i recorded myself drawing on photoshop using snapzpro with apple's animation codec and set everything up in pro so that my drawing is time-lapsed and all i have to do now is render and export. i rendered the project once before and it went fine overnight, but it failed to render the cropping i had put in so when i came to render it again and it does nothing but crash, sometimes at 2%, sometimes at 0%. That colour wheel starts turning and never stops (even 9 hours after leaving my macbook) and this even happens when i try to render 2 seconds worth of footage (force quit also says final cut is not responding). truth be told i am extremely frustrated with final cut right now and would appreciate any support i could get on how to get this god awful thing to just work.
i tried using fcp rescue and closing all unnecessary programs but nothing worked. i just don't get why it rendered the first time through and now decides to crash all the time.
plz help, and thx.

Answer 1

You have two problems.
1. As David noted, you are running a non compatible version (PPC) of Final Cut Pro on your intel machine. This is not supported and will cause all sorts of quirky behavior. The only way to solve this issue is to upgrade to a universal binary version.
2. The animation codec is intended as a means to transfer files between programs in a lossless manner. It is not intended to be edited on low power machines and CERTAINLY not on the system drive. Things may work better with an edit friendly codec.
As far as the general crashing, there is no telling at this point whether your files are simply corrupted, the preferences are corrupted, the non-intel nature of the program is causing the crashes as you stress the process during renders or what.
If it is a corrupted file - pay attention to where the render fails. THe files around that point are suspect.
If it is a corrupted pref file, use a program like FCP Rescue 5 to delete the FCP preference files.
Good luck.
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