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SD cards started taking forever to upload
We’ve been using FCPX now for over a year. We’ve always used the same SD cards (SanDisk, 32GB, 95MB/s, 10) and over the last couple of months they have become progressively slower to upload…
It’s gone from around 30-40 minutes to upload 2-3 hours of footage (AVCHD, 1080i) to at least 1.5 – 2 hours. Nothing has changed on the camera settings. We rotate 8 SD cards and all are the same. All footage is imported directly into iMacs (i7, 3.4GHz) and the issue has been noticed on 3 different machines.
Could it be anything to do with FCPX updates? Has anyone else noticed a difference??
Thanks for any suggestions.
Phil
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6 Replies
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hard to say without sitting at and going through your system. When you say “upload” do you mean “import”? Whenever something takes longer than it should to transfer, I always check the connection first.
How are you connecting the SD cards to the iMac? Is there a direct SD slot on the computer or do you have an SD to USB adapter? Have you tried injesting to different systems in case it’s a bus issue on the computer?
Andy
https://www.timesavertutorials.com
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Just a thought here, but have you tried reformatting the cards instead of simply overwriting them? I always remove and recreate the partition around every 3rd overwrite.
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.productionbackup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
I always copy them first to the raid, then import them from there. But what is taking time to import? Copying the card to the hard drive, or importing from the HD/Card within x?
Perhaps on an update the settings got reset and you’re now copying/transcoding/analyzing where before you were just copying or even just linking?
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Thanks for the reply Andy. Yes I did mean import and it’s directly into the card slot on the Mac. It’s not the computer because it’s happening on 3 different machines.
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Thanks Bret. I double checked FC preferences because it’s happened before after an update where it sets itself to create proxy/optimized media. Not that…
We import directly via FCPX. Are you saying you import another way? No video files show up on the SD cards unless you open via FC.
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No, I’d use FCP X to import. Just not directly off the cards. Simply drag the card to your hard drive to copy it, and then import. It works just the same as off the card. It should be much faster too. I thought this was standard practice. We don’t usually even have the cards after a shoot. The camera op does. He finishes a card, and we immediately begin copying the card to both a laptop hard drive, and then to a second external hard drive. When we get back to the office (ok it’s a basement) we copy the files again to the raid. Then we import to X and depending on the format, it forces the file to copy to the event or not. And as well, depending on the format, we might transcode. So by the time we start editing, there are 3 copies (all on different drives/systems) of the camera originals with the card structure in tact. And then possibly two more copies of the media being managed by fcpx.
When all is done, I keep a copy of the camera originals on a drive on a shelf (like tapes) and I keep a backup of the project AND the camera originals again on a mirrored raid where I keep projects and masters until I deem them too pointless to keep.
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