iMac shutting itself off when using movie editor

[Jimminybob]

Hi all, I was hoping someone might be able to help me with an issue I've had a lot lately.

I've been using iMovie, and more recently the trial for Final Cut Pro, to edit some movies. However while using either of these applications for a bit I can hear the iMac disk drive (I think) getting louder, then eventually it shuts itself off. In order to then turn it back on I have to disconnect the power cable for a bit then put it back in.

I did a bit of research into it when it first started happening and it suggested that low disk space could be the reason. However this is still happening when I have over 300GB free on the disk. I don't know what else I can try, and at times I can only get about 5 minutes worth of editing done before it does it again.

Can someone help point me in the right direction?

 

[Spawn_Dooley]

need your mac model & mac os x version pls

 

[Jimminybob]

Sorry, Its a 2012 27" iMac running OS X El Capitan

 

[Jimminybob]

Just a bit more info:

It seems to be happening more frequently today, even when i'm not using the movie editors that previously caused the problem. People on the web suggested looking at the console to find the shutdown cause. This is always returning a code of 0, which some people have said means a power issue. However, i'm not sure if this is actually when the iMac stops working, or when I have to remove the power cable in order to turn it back on.

After this, i'm not sure if the iMac is actually shutting down when the screen goes black, or if it's just crashing in some way.

 

[Spawn_Dooley]

next time it happens tell us exactly what you were doing at the time & what the console says was happening just prior to the issue.

Also before you hard reboot try pressing Shift Command Q … also are you hard shutting the iMac down (pressing the power button until the iMac shuts down) or are you removing the power cable (because you don't really know if the iMac is running or not)?

 

[Jimminybob]

next time it happens tell us exactly what you were doing at the time & what the console says was happening just prior to the issue.

Also before you hard reboot try pressing Shift Command Q … also are you hard shutting the iMac down (pressing the power button until the iMac shuts down) or are you removing the power cable (because you don't really know if the iMac is running or not)?

I've just had the console open while using it and a couple of possible causes showed up, the messages in question were:

- Final Cut Pro Trial: AVF error: Perf capability check failed: 0xe0002be
- kernal: process FInal Cut Pro TR[918] caught causing excessive wakeups. Observed wakeups rate (per sec): 6152 [and so on]...

It's just caused a "shutdown" on me just now, tried pressing the key combination but nothing seems to be happening. I've been removing the power cable as nothing else gets a response