Constant crashing with FCP, even when it starts up

I am experiencing a recurring issue with FCP that has been getting worse and worse with time. I will be working and either I try to do something with the timeline and when I PLAY it will only play a few frames before freezing (audio keeps playing though) or I drag an effect on a clip and it gives me a warning about how it can't be done, no more info is available... even standard built-in Apple effects like Gaussian Blur. I quit FCP because it won't work until I restart it. Sometimes it will crash... just completely disappear. Every time I try to start it it will appear for a second or two and then disappear again. This will happen multiple times a day as I'm editing.

Mac Studio M1 Ultra 64GB o' RAM

Library running on WD_BLACK SN850X 4TB NVMe SSD inside Acasis enclosure via Thunderbolt 4

FCP 11, though this affected 10.8.x as well

Mac OS 15.1.1, though this affected me in Mac OS 14 as well.

Here's what I have tried:

-DELETING PREFERENCES - This works. For a while. Maybe 45 minutes if I'm lucky.

-RESTORING PREFERENCES with PREFERENCE MANAGER - This does not work. I restore them and FCP will still crash right away, even though the preferences that were saved with Preference Manager were super clean after I had just set them up, before I used FCP in any way. If I delete the "settings" by holding OPTION at startup, go through the song and dance of dismissing the iPad FCP thing (why is that there?) and dismissing the plug-ins that don't work (that I have zero clue how to remove), I can then quit FCP, restore the preferences with Preference Manager and it works. Again for about 45 minutes of editing if I'm lucky.

-ETRE CHECK - No major issues found other than a few unsigned things like my Logitech mouse software (reinstalled that anyway). Also I have automatic security updates off and it didn't like that. There was other nonsense like "No time machine backup" which would have zero influence on FCP crashing.

-MALWAREBYTES - Scanned with the latest version. All clean.

-REINSTALLING FCP FROM THE APP STORE - Makes no difference.

-Don't have CHROME.

Obviously it has something to do with the preferences, but something outside of what Preference Manager saves and restores. Only fully deleting the preferences with the built-in method will fix it for a while. I could have some bad plugins maybe. I'd like to go through one by one to remove some of them but again I don't know where they are and I don't have uninstallers for them all. So I guess my first question would be is... what does resetting FCP do besides delete the preferences that Preference Manager backs up? Whatever that is, is my issue.

Mac Studio

Posted on Nov 24, 2024 9:53 PM

Top-ranking reply

joema

Level 4

1,143 points

Posted on Nov 26, 2024 10:08 AM

I studied closely the crash at 2024-11-24 02:24:31.7253 -0700, but they are all similar.

Thread 44 crashed in OZFxPlug_GetFlexoInputNode due to dereferencing a null pointer. OZ=Ozone, the FCP private framework that implements the Motion runtime engine and effects processing.

This crash appears to be a complex interaction between FCP's effect system, background processing, and resource management. The root cause may be a synchronization loophole (e.g, race condition) between effect processing and thumbnail generation.

However if we look earlier in the stack trace (around frame 77) we see an an exception occurred in the background task. Instead of properly handling it, the code continued execution, apparently without cleanup or (maybe) not even logging it.

This led to corrupted state that caused the scheduling system to enter an infinite recursion.

Finally, after corrupting the stack, it attempted to access an invalid pointer and crashed.

The effects thumbnail generation logic is complex. There is a background task queue ("effectLibraryThumbnailGenerator") for processing. It has both a memory cache (FFObjectCache) and disk cache (FFSegmentStoreRef).

An obvious question is why now, and why only on your machine? Unknown. Because of the track record of CoreMelt causing problems, and the failure of their uninstall tool to fully work, I suggest you manually remove all traces of that (as a temporary test). They have a support page with the procedure: https://support.coremelt.com/hc/en-gb/articles/360013189594-Where-are-files-from-CoreMelt-installed-How-to-manually-uninstall

If you have any other third-party Fx, especially those from Pixel Film Studios, please list those.

If that doesn't help, the next time the crash happens run the following terminal command which gathers FCP-specific logging info, then upload that so I can examine it.

log show --info --debug --predicate 'processImagePath CONTAINS "Final Cut Pro"' --last 1h > ~/Documents/Redifer_FCP_Log.txt

View in context

Constant crashing with FCP, even when it starts up

Similar questions