Finalcut Studio Crashing over and over

Question

I have been having this problem for several edit sessions.
The finalcut Pro freezes several time per day. It only happens when I am working in the time line. It happens most often when I put the cursor in the timeline to jump and play from a little earlier in the edit to preview a change I had just made. The result is a spinning beach ball and an "application not responding". Sometimes it crashes, I get the spinning beachball and it quits itself, sometimes I get the spinning beach ball for a very long time and have to force quit. This is the 5th time today in two hours of editing.
I have used used "FCP Rescue 6" 3 times, I have repaired permissions and also used cocktail to do house cleaning.
I was having problems with the Smoothcam filter not showing up in the video filters menu after migrating my system from my Dual G5 to this new MacPro 8 core. So I reinstalled FCS and updated the software. Smoothcam came back. Then, a few days later, this problem started happening.
I am editing a 45 minute, 9 camera multicam show with no major effects outside of smothcam. smoothcam has completed it's processes and is not running when the crash occurs. I am using three video tracks
My configuration is as follows:
Hardware Overview:
Model Name: Mac Pro
Model Identifier: MacPro3,1
Processor Name: Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed: 3.2 GHz
Number Of Processors: 2 Total Number Of Cores: 8
L2 Cache (per processor): 12 MB
Memory: 6 GB
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT
Running the Latest Leopard and Latest FCS
The media is on an internal SATA raid there is plenty of headroom on both the system drive and the Media drives
There is no other software running
There are no plug ins installed
Any suggestions?
Thanks,
Lydia
Message was edited by: Lydilove

Answer 1

Lydilove wrote:
There are all kinds of apps installed, it is a system in use for a variety of functions; I wear a lot of hats, the list is L O N G
This isn't a good sign. The more stuff you have installed on your editing system, the more possibilities there are that something will go wrong. It's kind of a superstition, but it's based in fact: You'll have fewer problems with your editing system overall if you keep it lean and mean, running only the programs that are absolutely necessary.
Consider buying another internal hard disk — you've got room for four of them in total — and installing Mac OS X and Final Cut Studio on it. Boot from that system disk when you're editing. On another system disk you can install Microsoft Word, or Maya, or World of Warcraft, or whatever else you need for doing stuff other than editing.
When you do this, +do not migrate anything, period.+ If you need project files or whatever, copy them over by hand. Do not try to migrate your preferences or any of that stuff, because in part that's precisely what we're suggesting you get rid of.
(Side bonus: This will almost certainly solve your Final Cut problems along the way. Unless you're dealing with a hardware fault, like bad RAM or something.)