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Files won’t play on one machine
The plot thickens.
This goes back to the inability of one machine on the network to render proxies. Well, it’s deeper than that. It won’t play back any files imported over the last ten days or so. It does play back items in older catalogs. Not only that, if one clicks on the “Movie” tab, even the highlighted text “movie” goes blank. Very odd, really.This is one machine only. The other machines read and play back, the footage just fine. They will also render proxies. Note that the files were imported using the problematic machine. There have been no changes to Quicktime over this time period. Both the last version of QT 7 and QT X are installed. This is a FCP workstation that’s otherwise functionally normally. The files themselves are everything from motion Jped, to ProRes and MP4 and all sorts of things that I’ve been bringing into the system. I deleted v9.0.6 and put in 9.0.5 with no difference. Back to 9.0.6 and again, no difference.
Ideas please, ladies and gentlemen. It’s making this machine rather useless. A difficult situation since it’s one of my primary machines.
Thanks,
RobbNon-linear: all the time and nothing but.
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12 Replies
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Can I offer a test idea?
Clone the working box and temporarily boot the “broken” box to the clone. If things go away, you can start from there, or simply migrate the data and re-license the software and go forward.
I refuse to chase this stuff these days if I have a “working” version. There’s simply too many variables and too many things that some crazy editor may have loaded, updated or changed.
If it works off of the clone, go forward from there.
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
hidefcowboy.com
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I supposed. I’ll have to dig up a large drive since this is a big system, an 8 core MacPro. There have been no hardware changes at all. Which would lead me to believe that it’s a software issue. Cloning is going to tend transfer a software issue. I’ll see if I can get it to work off the Timemachine backup.
Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.
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[Robb Harriss] ” Cloning is going to tend transfer a software issue.”
It’s also going to tend to transfer a software solution, if it comes from a good source. 😉
Also, if you use CCC, you can just clone the OS and leave most of the user files so it should be pretty small.
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
hidefcowboy.com
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Oh, you meant a clone from a different machine. I thought you meant the same machine, which is why it didn’t make sense to me. I’m out of spare external drives right now. My one bootable clone, a SuperDuper backup, is off the laptop running Lion—CatDV is running fine there. The big machines remain on Snow Leopard and they’re as close to clones of each other as one can get. But I’ll give it a try. Right now I’d making a major part of my system inoperative since I no one can use the machine to log or view footage.
Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.
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I booted the Mac Pro from the SuperDuper clone of the laptop. Using the CatDV installed on the clone everything was fine. It could read the master files on the server, and then generate and playback proxies.
So what do you think? Apparently a software problem installed on this particular Mac Pro. Note that it did work correctly a couple of weeks ago. The only thing I know I changed was updating the copies of CatDV. Note, too that CatDV is working fine on all the other machines.
RobbNon-linear: all the time and nothing but.
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Perhaps the CatDV settings are different on that machine (If you’re using local settings, rather than settings loaded from the server each time when you log on)?
What happens if you try to play clips on the affected machine? Use the toolbar play button. That’s useful for diagnosing problems as it tries really hard to play the file and displays a message if it can’t.
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as far as I know the settings are the same. As I mentioned it worked and then suddenly stopped. I can neither create proxies, nor play any made from the other machine. Nor can I play full rez originals. And when I say “can’t play,” I mean the panel won’t even come up. I click on the Movie or Proxy tab and it goes dark. It acts like nothing exists. It isn’t a matter of the player coming up and then not being able to play the video. Initially the Movie and Proxy tabs have the highlighted (white) text indicating that the video is available. But click on the tab and it goes dark and there’s nothing there.
Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.
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The Movie and Proxy tabs will be greyed out if it can’t find the file (perhaps the media search path is wrong or a volume isn’t mounted) or it got an error when it tried to play it. If you hit the toolbar Play button it will try again though, and display an error message if there is an error. Also, the log file (accessible from the Help menu) may provide further information.
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I’ll take a look again tomorrow—especially at the log file.
Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.
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Well, then. Perhaps it self-healed, but I rather doubt that. After all this time messing with this issue-suddenly- I can now play and render files. I can play the masters and proxies that were not working previously. I just successfully render a series of proxies and they’re fully playable from the proxy drive across the network. No longer are the Movie and Proxy tabs graying out. Hmmm. It may have to do with exporting the settings from the one machine and importing them into this one. I’d already checked to make sure they were identical, by hand. I was set to pull setting from the server. But I thought I’d try this anyway. Apparently the secret lay somewhere deep in the settings and the export/import helped. This was prompted by the posting above about moving settings from machine to machine. And you know, I’d used that months ago with little success. Maybe something’s changed in .06?
Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.
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