Monday, May 18, 2015

Apple Updates Final Cut 10.2.1 for Yosemite 10.10.3

There were multiple black screen crashes with Final Cut 10.2 for a specific video.  Apparently unplugging peripherals did have some effect on that as it was stable for a while after the initial crashes under Yosemite 10.10.3.

Apple released the update Final Cut 10.2.1 ostensibly to fix crashes at start-up.  Pro tip:  it doesn't.

On the first entry into Final Cut 10.2.1, it crashed to a black screen instantly.  However, Final Cut started up automatically on restart as the system is set to re-open windows.  That time it opened just fine.  There doesn't seem to be any predicting what crashes this thing.

The system has been under observation since the last crash as there has to be some kind of common thread to all this.  It did not crash in all that time despite crashing multiple times today prior to that.

The same problem has been consistent since the installation of Yosemite 10.10.3.  Regardless of which peripherals are connected, the system goes into a kernel panic with an immediate dive to a black screen that only be recovered by pulling power for long enough for the SMC to reset (2013 iMac).


It looks like two viable options:  wait for Yosemite 10.10.4 and hope it actually fixes something or cut the losses and bail.  Apple support doesn't seem to have any idea.  Lots of radio noise on the net but nothing that panned into anything fruitful.  It crashes and it continues to crash.  There is no way to go back as it is not possible to restore the video files to the pre-10.10.2 state.

As of this writing,

Playing any live gigs is out as there's no predicting whether the computer will stay up long enough to do one.

Any kind of video editing is out for the same reason.

Call this whining and I'll punch you in the face.  It's a status report and the above is why you see no production.  It's not a whine but an apology and I'm busting my ass trying to fix.  Twelve hours into it today that didn't produce too much but Edison tells us that showed us another way that doesn't fix it so do it again and maybe next time makes a lightbulb ... that doesn't explode.

If anyone has any positive suggestions on any way to resolve it, please do speak up as this is hand-to-hand combat to save the jams.  It's not working and I think I'm staying pretty fucking cool about it.  I'm sorry this stuff is all jacked but I didn't do it.  All I can do is try to fix it and get it going again.  There's no substantive help from anywhere but that's often the nature of systems programming because there isn't anyone else who can fix it.  Survive or die.  It's brutal but it is exciting.

This, however, is not exciting and I apologize for all the downtime.  The thing that bites my ass the most about it is any time I turned in a system response to a problem like this, I would have been fired before the sun went down.  I know how it works in the real world and this is not it.  There's a whole different standard in-play.

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