AVAGetRendererInfo – Final Cut Pro Crash
I work day in day out with Apple Final Cut Pro. It is what I earn a living off. And it’s great. But sometimes it makes me angry.
Take these last few weeks for example. We shoot primarily on Sony EX1 cameras, so almost all our footage is XDCAM EX 35Mbps VBR. Regardless of what project I was working on, big or small, long or short, old or new, I was getting 5 to 6 crashes a day from Final Cut. It typically happened when I was scrubbing through footage. I deleted my preferences, I checked my RAID speeds (200MB/s read and write, which is more than enough!), I tired different RT settings, I even started to trawl through the console logs that FCP would generate to see what thread had crashed. The thread the seemed to crash most commonly was AVAGetRendererInfo . After much googling people had recommended that grabbing the com.apple.AppleVADriver bundle from a fresh install of Snow Leopard could fix the problem, that had supposedly been created with an update. I did this, and lo and behold, my crashes stopped… for about 4 hours. I think it was more likely the fact that I had restarted my computer more than anything else.
So I was left with a constantly crashing Final Cut Pro, and no idea on how to fix it.
Thread 226 Crashed:
0 com.apple.AppleVADriver 0x62f20f93 AVAGetRendererInfo + 129635
1 com.apple.AppleVADriver 0x62f35719 AVAGetRendererInfo + 213481
2 com.apple.AppleVADriver 0x62f05de5 AVAGetRendererInfo + 18613
3 com.apple.AppleVADriver 0x62f027e6 AVAGetRendererInfo + 4790
4 com.apple.AppleVADriver 0x62f08bb5 AVAGetRendererInfo + 30341
5 libSystem.B.dylib 0x94d7a85d _pthread_start + 345
6 libSystem.B.dylib 0x94d7a6e2 thread_start + 34
Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGBUS)
Exception Codes: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE at 0×0000000000000000
Crashed Thread: 226
Fast forward two weeks, and I’m assembling and editing over 35 hours of footage from a 10 day bike ride that we film each year. And I’m crashing every 20 minutes. I’m moving through the footage pretty quickly on the timeline, so even my 5 minute auto saves weren’t enough. After bashing my head on the wall a few times, I finally remembered reading in one of the apple support discussions that the crashing thread in question was used to generate thumbnails. So I thought I would try then turning off thumbnails in my timeline (Sequence Settings -> Timeline Options). This was at 11:02am. By 5:32pm that afternoon, it hadn’t crashed a single time. Not once!
Well actually, I did crash once, when I switched back to an earlier sequence that still had thumbnails enabled and started scrubbing, instant crash. So hopefully my SEO skills are good enough that people who google Final Cut Pro AVAGetRendererInfo crash will be able to find this blog post, and that it might help in their situation.
December 17th, 2010 at 1:40 pm
i had exactly same error with the AVAGetRenderInfo… was making new projects, reinstalling, searching the internet for solutions, even transferred all 1tb of footage to a faster drive— still crashed!
i turned off thumbnails and so far all good
thanks for your helpful tip! it has made my day.
December 27th, 2010 at 8:50 am
Awesome, glad it helped Nathan! I’ve still been getting a few crashes from the same thread, but about 20x less frequently than before turning off thumbnails!
February 17th, 2011 at 5:10 am
This is great help. I’m having the same problems and was wondering if you tried going 64bit and if that made any difference? Thanks!
March 26th, 2011 at 1:00 am
i had exactly same error with the AVAGetRenderInfo… was making new projects, reinstalling, searching the internet for solutions, even transferred all 1tb of footage to a faster drive— still crashed!
+1
February 23rd, 2012 at 10:35 am
You Jacob are a life saver! Been suffering with this across FCP5 and FCP7, multiple machines from Sept ’11 to Feb ’12. Been wasting huge amounts of time with Apple support, spent a fortune on phone calls, ram replacement etc etc etc on good advice from “experts”. Finding this appears to have solved my nightmare of crashing and almost on the point of trading in my machine and getting a new one as this must be broken (experts again). 5 hrs and no crashes, havent had this much un-interrupted editing for months. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Long may this work flow continue flowing and may the gods of editing smile upon you!