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FCP 5 or Blackmagic Timecode/Capture Problem
Hi!
Two of the computers in our office seem to have fallen victim to the same problem… Both are G5s with DeckLink Pro cards, and both are running FCP 5.0.4 plus the latest Blackmagic drivers. Recently, they started having problems capturing: less than a minute into any capture, the picture would freeze for a few seconds, then it would speed to get caught up. Ultimately, it won’t let us capture anything longer than a minute, claiming that there is a timecode break, but we know that can’t be the case because we are able to capture these clips on other systems.
It’s frustrating because I can’t even figure out how to pinpoint the problem. No updates were made to software or drivers prior to this problem starting, and I can’t find any similar queries in any forums. Has anybody ever dealt with this or can somebody point me in the right direction?
Thanks!!
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5 Replies
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Hello Sara,
We’ve been experiencing a very similar problem in one of our FCP 5 suites. Some of the media from the Betacam tapes will not capture beyond the 15 second mark. The picture freezes on the desktop and the message about dropped frames or missing timecode pops up on the screen.
This happens with some, but not all, of our Betacam Digital or SP tapes. We’ve been unable so far to determine what is the main reason behind these aborted captures. As far as we can tell the FCP settings should allow to capture the entire clip and generate the warning mesage after the digitizing has completed. So perhaps the dropped frames/missing timecode messages are somewhat misleading as the FCP cannot really determine the nature of the problem. Especially if the FCP is consistently aborting the capture right around the same time mark, give or take a couple of seconds. Dropped frames or missing timecode would be happening more randomly at varying time spots.
We’re running dual 2.5GHz G5 with 2GB RAM, Tiger 10.4.3, FCP 5.0.3, QT 7.0.3, Decklink HD Pro Dual Link with 5.1.2 driver. We work mainly with NTSC SD uncompressed video using either Digital Betacam or Betacam SX machines for capture. All media is captured to the Apple RAID with lots of free space and write rates of around 100 Mb/s as reported by the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test.
I believe this problem surfaced up shortly after we’ve upgraded the Mac OS, FCP and the Decklink driver from the previous versions. However, we can successfully capture digital uncompressed media in our other FCP suites running the same configuration. I’m considering either rolling back the Decklink driver to 5.1 version or updating it to 5.2 as a start.
Can you provide some more details of your hardware/software configuration?Stan D
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H, Stan!
After weeks of struggling with this problem, we’ve come to a sort of half-conclusion… The problem seems to be in the XServe RAID! We are running set-ups that are almost completely identical to what you’ve got (we’re running OS X 10.4.4), and we’ve got Xserve RAIDs with 250 GB drives in them. We’ve got an XServe RAID that has 180GB drives & another with 450GB drives in them, and those work fine. We also tried to downgrade the Blackmagic drivers, and that never yielded any positive results. Which RAID are you using?
Also, we’ve been talking to our neighborhood Apple repair/sales shop, and they say that they have come across this problem, and it’s always related to the XServes. The guy we talked to says that he’s been in discussion with the people at Decklink to see if they can try dealing with this problem on their end. I’ll keep you posted!!
-SARA
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This is our setup:
xServe RAID with 7x 250GB drives. One just recently failed…as in.. the past 24-36 hours. (although Im’ sure it was on it’s way out for the past few weeks)
We are connected to the RAID with one Fibre Channel cable, Up to date FCP, BlackMagic, and RAID firmware.
Computer has only 1GB of ram (yeah.. i know…we are getting more asap) and it’s a Dual 2ghz G5We have a SECOND suite using the other side of the RAID (filled with 500GB modules), and it’s working fine. It’s a Dual 2.7Ghz, with 4GB of RAM.
Any help will be… heh.. helpful. If I can give more info, let me know
Thanks
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I am having the same problem that you are having. I want to digitize beta footage 8 bit uncompressed into fcp. Every time I try it tells me that it droped a frame. I can use the dv sequence setting and it works fine. But when I use the cumstom setting with uncompressed video it won’t capture. I have read that it could be that one firewire bus can not handle that kind of uncompressed video. They suggested that I should buy another firewire pci card. Does this make sense to anyone?
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Sara,
We use the XServe RAID with 400GB drives in this suite but we also have Xserve RAID’s in other suites with 250GB and 180GB drives. I was able to test the suite in question with a 250GB drive RAID with no noticeable improvement. I connected the 400GB RAID to another edit suite where we managed to capture a handfull of clips with no timecode breaks and no dropped frames.
I also replaced the Apple fibre channel PCI-X card, the Decklink Pro HD card and all 4 RAM modules to eliminate all potential suspects. This made no difference on this system.
Our local Apple support suggested a possible issue with the Spotlight app and a possibility of indexing of the media files interrupting the capturing process. We dragged the entire RAID voulume into the Privacy window in the Spotlight preferences and this solved the problem. We got through about a dozen of captures on a first take without any aborts or interruptions.
I can’t guarantee this will work for everyone but go ahead and try it as it only takes a few seconds to complete. I initially suspected the RAID but we were able to verify it in our case. Try capturing a short clip to a second internal drive (not the main system drive) if you have one, or an external firewire drive to either eliminate or narrow down the suspected hardware. Let me know whether this worked for you or not.Bryan,
Can you provide more details of your RAID failure – a dead drive, blown power supply, unable to capture, unable to playback or edit to tape, etc.?
Are your 7 drives striped with RAID 0 or RAID 5? Do you have a spare 250GB drive?Brent,
What do you capture your media to? An Apple XServe RAID, firewire drive, external SCSI drives?
If you can successfully capture using compression but your system drops frames when using uncompressed settings your drive(s) may not be able to handle the uncompressed stream. Is this your first try with the 8 bit uncompressed settings or have you been able to capture with this setting before?
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