Error Timed out waiting for XPC response

Dear Ian,

Sincere apologies if you feel we have been giving you the run-around, the issue you were experiencing was and has been extremely difficult to get to the bottom off. We believe we have just resolved the XPC issue you had which was being caused by the way the AudioFileHandler class was being used. We are testing a build now.

I am not sure this has been explained to you before, so forgive me if I go over old ground, we have had to move to AV-foundation instead of using the QT tool kit, as a direct request from Apple.

At this point we introduced the version 3 code which uses AV-foundation, the older 2.5 code uses QT tool kit.

There are essentially two main issues with this change, the first is that QT tool kit appears to be more lenient of certain files whereas AV-foundation is quite particular about what it feels is and is not valid. i.e. QT will allow a chan atom in the media but AV-foundation will not allow it. The second is that in using the AV-foundation we have discovered (the customer base, as we were unfortunately not able to pick it up in testing) a few separate ways of generating XPC errors, as mentioned earlier we believe we have resolved all of these that we are currently aware of with the version currently in testing.

The app store will only allow us to have one version of the code available, and as such this has to be the version 3 code that includes AV-foundation. We have made 2.5 available to users who have reported issues if it looked like 2.5 would resolve the issue, but it has to be said this is only a temporary workaround. We have, and are looking at somehow allowing AV-foundation and QT tool kit to be used in the same code, but this is extremely complicated to achieve. I can only apologise we didn't make 2.5 available to you earlier.

Yours Sincerely

James

Ok, final word on the subject now I have had a chance to reflect on it. All of this wasted time and anguish could have been avoided if either version 2.5 was the official release version, or it was bundled with 3, which seems to be still a beta. Or, had it been offered straightaway here, instead of at the end of a tortuous process with endless error reports and trials, a week of pointless runarounds would have been avoided. I am happy that I finally have a working version, but not impressed at the time it took to get there, or that the official version on the app store appears to be a work in progress. I am only saying this in the hope that people who have problems with 3 are offered, or should request, 2.5 straightaway, and not be the testers for version 3.

Thanks for the info. Maybe I missed it, but I didn't see any guide to where the clips with errors were in the timeline. Also, not being an editor I wouldn't really know how to reverse engineer a compound clip, even if i could find it.

However, glad you are finding what some of the problems may be.

But the very good news is that 2.5 has in fact worked. Which is remarkable, after all the futzing around I have had to do this week - just too late to do the mix in time! But hopefully good for the next time.

Thanks for sticking with it, and I hope you get the problems in 3 sorted out.

Ian,

X2Pro does support retimed single clips (it ignores the retiming effect), but it doesn't support retimed compound clips. At present there is no option to ignore retimed compound clips, but I can see how that might help in this situation.

In the latest beta version of X2Pro (3.0.10) it will tell you the location on the time line of all the retimed compound clips, so you don't have to hunt for them one at a time.

Apart from the issue with retimed compound clips, I have managed to reproduce at least one of the other issues that you are seeing (I think they all have the same root cause) here on our systems, so we have something to look into now. A screen shot of the Activity monitor window that Jeremy asked for in his last post would have made it much quicker and easier for us to reproduce the issue here.

I believe you have the 2.5 version now. Is that enabling you to convert your project?

Yes, it is the same xml.

I don't even know what retiming is. The editor has handed me the project. I am not an editor. However, I looked it up, and found the clip and took off the retiming. Then it generated the error message for Madness EC Cam 1 file. I don't think it is retimed.

But surely you can program your software to ignore retimed clips. Otherwise you expect us to search hundreds of clips to find some that have it? There will be no useful audio in those clips anyway, but the editor might have left audio attached.

The error in the Madness clip was failed to read samples, so I haven't been able to recreate a failed to create QT movie error.

I looked at the activity monitor, and there is plenty of cpu and memory available when x2pro is working.

Do all of the errors you reported in the Email happen with the same project XML that you uploaded?

Just a couple of things after looking at the files.
1. We want to see if the retiming applied to the clip A007C025_151021YF_CANON at 00:22:30:02 in your project is causing the problem.
Would you be able to remove that retiming and re-export your project and test again for us, please?

2. When it comes to to the other errors, when you get the errors "Error Timed out waiting for XPC response" and "Failed to create QT movie"; would you open the Mac Activity Monitor and look for a process called "QTKitXPC" and take a screenshot of the Activity Monitor window.

This will enable us to know if the system memory is being used up during the process, or what else may be going on.
Many thanks and let us know how you get along

Ok, I have uploaded some with the xml. I haven't uploaded one which is 20 GB.

Let me know if you make any progress, and when it will be possible to use x2pro.

Ian,

Thank you for your note, I have sent you an email with the details for uploading the files to us.
We would much appreciate if you could get those files to us to investigate your problems.

Sure, you can see them. I don't know how, some of them are very large (bear in mind that they are video files, so some long ones are Gb or more). Of course I had a look at some of the files it was objecting to, but I couldn't see anything untoward about them, or any difference to files it was ok with. Then after trying a few times, it seemed to be objecting to a different file every time, so I gave up as it would take forever to troubleshoot this, and seems to be random errors on random files.

Ian,

Can are you able to let us take a look at some of the files that X2Pro is complaining about (e.g. "Madness EC CAM1" and "AF380001")?

OK, after wasting most of the day futzing around with this, I give up. Most of the options just generated error messages. The only difference is that this time they weren't xpc errors but missing samples messages like this:

Writing AAF file
Adding assets to AAF file
Adding essence for asset [Madness EC CAM1] to AAF file
Adding essence data to AAF file for portion 0 of asset [Madness EC CAM1]
Reading audio data from audio extractor : 824704 samples
Failed to read 824704 samples
Error Extracting audio data (read 1577984 bytes of 1649408 required) (Status number 1)

or this:
Writing AAF file
Adding assets to AAF file
Adding essence for asset [AF380001] to AAF file
Opening audio extractor for portion 0 of asset [AF380001]
Failed to initialise audio extractor with default bit depth of 16
Failed to create QT movie

Mostly different files each time. The one success I had was by pressing the shift key which did actually generate an aaf file. However on loading into Logic or Pro tools, there were loads of missing audio files, which couldn't be relinked (I assume they were still wrapped in the mov files). Pro Tools put all the clips in right place, just that half of them were empty. I know the audio is there, in the fcp project because I can play it, hear it, and see the audio clips in the timeline. But it doesn't get extracted by X2Pro.

So it seems there is no way to get audio out of a complex fcpx project, which is ridiculous, but there you go.

Ok, James, I have it now at the gmail address. I will run it and let you know - it will take a while as it is a large project,
Thanks.

Hi Ian, sent one to the third mail you gave us, and yes I am also perplexed why the previous two are being bounced back to us, hopefully you will get the third attempt if not we will try something else.

I have sent you 3 email addresses, all of which work fine. I don't know why it is so difficult to use them for you.

Dear Ian,

Yes just got an undeliverable on the email address we have for you.